Moontide

Lux presents Hollywood. The Lux Radio Theater brings you Humphrey Bogart and Virginia Bruce in Moon Side. Ladies and gentlemen, your guest producer, Mr. Mark Hillinger. Greetings from Hollywood, ladies and gentlemen. It is no rare thing in the history of entertainment for an offer to adapt to the story of the stage, or a playwright to accommodate his vermin to the screen.

But rare enough, it is certainly a privilege for a Hollywood producer to present his motion picture on the air. Techniques differ. Changing sight to sound presents new unexpected problems. And when I was making moon tide at the studios of 20th Century Fox, I hardly expected I'd be personally presenting moon tide at this theater.

But that's the way the breaks fall, never quite as you'd expect. I remember some years ago meeting a youthful actor who had just started his career as a tousal head and laughing-eyed comedian on Broadway.

His one ambition was to become the funniest man in America. Years later, he scored his most significant success as the tight-lipped gangster in the Broadway hit the petrified forest. If that tozelhead and laughing-eyed comedian was a hungry booger.

He appears in our play tonight as Bobo, the impetuous wanderer of the West Coast waterfront. Coastard with hungry booger is the blonde and beautiful Virginia Bruce, as the young girl who meets us strangely at the brink of death.

The story is one of love in the shadow of an eerie danger, of suspense and violence in an atmosphere of lonely tide and haunting thought. To bring Humphrey Bogart to our stage tonight and to our hustle, I had to coax him from his sloop down in Balboa and a sailor's life that he still fond of.