Charles W. Goddard

The Perils of Pauline: Centennial Edition Charles W. Goddard 1st edition

In the spring of 1914, American moviegoers were held tightly in the grip of a new film form: the "chapter play," a series of short, interconnected melodramas distinguished by daredevil action and damsels in distress. The most famous of these productions was THE PERILS OF PAULINE, starring vivacious Pearl White. To help promote the serial, newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst published prose versions of each episodic exploit the day before its theatrical engagements, so readers could get an idea of that week's adventure before seeing it on the big screen. PAULINE was an enormous hit that made Pearl the nation's first "serial queen," but in the decades following its release the original film elements deteriorated. The only surviving material ? a heavily edited version intended for European audiences ? includes less than half the total footage, most of which is presented out of sequence and alters the plot considerably. The novel compiled from those newspaper installments thus represents the only complete and accurate representation of PAULINE'S plot as originally presented to American moviegoers. By reading this book, today's fans of movie serials and pulp fiction can experience Pauline's perils as they were seen by a breathless public some one hundred years ago. Charles W. Goddard's narrative is preceded by a 4800-word essay on the serial's production. This behind-the-scenes account has been written by silent-serial scholar Ed Hulse, author of DISTRESSED DAMSELS AND MASKED MARAUDERS.