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FOWLER: Isn’t it a fact, sir, that you have selected and decided upon most of your major themes rather than getting them through a research department?

WALT: No, some of the things we more or less built from scratch, as you'd say. Some of them, we'd find a little idea that acts as a spring board to develop into a full motion picture. Two of our most successful films here were The Absent-Minded Professor and the more or less sequel to it called The Son of Flubber. Both of those were, you might say, wholly created here in the studio but we had a springboard. We had a little idea that – well, one of them I read in the old Liberty Magazine. It was just a little short story about somebody that invented a certain substance that we turned into what we called flubber. From there, we built the whole thing. But in other cases, we have taken some of the classic things, like the Jules Verne stories and built them into very successful pictures.

And one of our most successful here was called The Parent Trap and that sprung off of an idea by a German author by the name of Kastner.

It was about identical twins and their problem of bringing their parents together. We transplanted it over here and built it into an entirely different story, in effect, and it was very successful.
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