"Of Human Bondage" is a 1949 American television play. Adapted from the novel Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham it was an episode of the anthology series Studio One. The adaptation was by Sumner Locke Elliott and the success of the show helped launch Elliott's television career.[1][2][3]
The show had a script but producer Worthington Miner was unhappy with it. He contacted Elliott and asked for a script in two days. Elliott said "I'd never been in a studio in my life, nor seen a TV camera: I really knew nothing; but I took the book — Miner had marked with a slip of paper where the dramatization should start, two hundred pages into Maugham's story — and somehow or other I got that script written for him... and I'd become a television writer."[1]
Miner had mixed feelings about the production. He later said "I had great success with adaptations of novels of Henry James — The Ambassadors, for example. These stories concerned a small number of people in a mass of extraneous material that can be caught by the television camera. So I got carried away and decided to do Bondage. This was a fiasco. I got a pretty good script from Sumner Locke Elliott, all things considered; but it had one fault - it was 27 minutes too long!"[4]
^"Of Human Bondage to be broadcast for the first time". Chicago Tribune. 20 November 1949. p. 9.
^"A business-minded young author". The Daily Telegraph. Vol. XV, no. 93. New South Wales, Australia. 8 July 1950. p. 23. Retrieved 26 September 2024 – via National Library of Australia.
