MAN: "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by Steve Conrad,
"based on a story by James Thurber.
"Walter's apartment, New York City, morning.
"Walter Mitty sits at a small kitchen table balancing his checkbook."
In 1939, James Thurber wrote a short story that was part of the Thurber chronicle
Khan appeared 'm The New Yorker.
It was very well regarded.
It had such an impact because
Thurber created this iconic character, something everybody could connect with.
The idea of somebody who's going through the motions in their life,
but having a whole different life inside of their head.
It spoke to something that had never really been,
I don't think, expressed quite as eloquently as James Thurber expressed it, which is,
our desire to escape the life that we have and yearn for something more,
even when we're not quite clear what that is.
Mitty is a universal character,
because there's always the little man in all of us
that gets stepped on by the world.
James Thurber wrote this in 1939,
but what came out that year was Gone with the Wind, that was, uh...
Was it The Wizard of Oz, '39?
Yeah. So you have all these gigantic, huge, Technicolor fantasies
that engulfed the nation that year.
James Thurber saw what was happening, saw how the public was reacting to it,
probably was also just as swept up as they were with what was happening,
and that's where that story came from.
Mitty!
GOLDWYN: A short while after that,
Sam Goldwyn, my grandfather, put Danny Kaye under contract.
And somebody either reminded him of, or he found this story,
and, I think, rather ingeniously realized that there was an opportunity
to use the dreams,
not as they are necessarily articulated in the Thurber story,
but that it provided a spine
for Danny to perform on film his act.
All right! Now everybody scatter away to the chairs here!
Come on, everybody!
And Thurber hated the movie, apparently,
because it wasn't true to the story.
But what the movie did was, it brought people to the short story.
So there was a discovery of that short story
by people who might otherwise not have read it.
Remakes are really, really tricky.
We had a lot of scripts, a lot of different directors on it,
a lot of different comedians on it,
and it never quite gelled.
GOLDWYN: And it wasn't until Steve Conrad came along,
and Steve wanted to take his story
in a way that was very different from the original version.
Our Walter Mitty is a truly contemporary person,
he's got the same images,
ideas, and Kaleidoscopic set of colors and cultural references
as modern Americans.
He saw Walter as this heroic guy.
Not a hero in any exaggerated way,
but a hero in a kind of modest incremental way.
He wanted, by the end of the movie, for Mitty to be acknowledged as a man,
and that he deserved to be treated with dignity,
and to be treated with respect and to be acknowledged.
Hi.
It's kind of amazing that that little two and a half page story did have such an impact.
I think that's a testament to his talent as a writer.