TLS signed “Aldous,” one page both sides, 8.5 x 11, October 13, 1945. Written from Los Angeles, a letter to famed screenwriter Anita Loos, in part: "Thank you so much for your good letter and the enclosed comments on the book, which I greatly liked. I haven’t heard from Harper’s since its publication; but the advance sales were good for a work of its kind—about twelve thousand. In regard to Brave New World, I have had no very revolutionary ideas, except the notion that it will probably be necessary, for film purposes, to write the scenes of the future in the form of cut-forwards from a contemporary starting point. My feeling is that audiences may be confused and worried, if we plunge straight into the twenty-seventh century A. D., as is done in the book. Also, if we do this, there will have to be a certain amount of retrospective explanation of historical events during the preceding centuries. It is essential, I think, to anchor the brave-new-worldian events very firmly to the present, so as to show that even the most extravagant pieces of satiric phantasy stem inevitably and logically from present-day seeds and are the natural end-product of present-day tendencies. This will give the picture a strong topical interest and will give a specific point to its satire. Something about the atom bomb will of course have to be brought in. But the point of the original story must be kept—namely, that the really revolutionary changes will come about from advances in biology and psychology, not from advances in physics.
The adumbrations of future possibilities are to be seen in the practices of contemporary dictatorships—artificial insemination of women with the semen of racially pure sires, selective breeding, use of scopolamine and other drugs to extract confessions and make people more susceptible to propaganda, special training of future leaders with a view to eliminating all the normal human decencies, and so forth. The nature of the contemporary spring-board will have to be discussed in detail. I had thought vaguely of the possibility of making it revolve around the person of a very clever but physically unattractive scientist, desperately trying to make a gorgeous blonde, who is repelled by his pimples but fascinated by the intelligence of his conversation, as he steers her round his laboratory, showing her artificially impregnated rabbits, newts with tails grafted on to the stumps of legs, dogs that salivate at the sound of a bell, and the other objects of interest usually found in such places. He holds forth about the possibilities of applied biology—babies in bottles etc—and we cut forward to the story, from which, at intervals, we cut back to his contemporary comments, which serve as a kind of Greek Chorus to the drama of the future. In the end, he screws his courage to the sticking point, makes violent passes at the blonde, gets his face slapped and is left disconsolate among the white mice and the rabbit ova—an emblem of personal frustration who is yet the most revolutionary and subversive force in the modern world. One practical point worries me: what will the Hayes Office say about babies in bottles? We must have them, since no other symbol of the triumph of science over nature is anything like as effective as this. But will they allow it? This and other problems will need a lot of discussion later on, when Paulette and Meredith get back, and I hope you will be there too with that dramatist’s-eye view of things, which I don’t have.
Meanwhile, as Donald Hyde has probably told you, I am about to sign up with Disney for the script of an Alice in Wonderland, which is to be a cartoon version of Tenniel’s drawings and Carroll’s story, embedded in a flesh-and-blood episode of the life of the Rev. Charles Dodgson. I think something rather nice might be made out of this—the unutterably odd, repressed and ridiculous Oxford lecturer on logic and mathematics, seeking refuge in the company of little girls and in his own phantasy. There is plenty of comic material in Dodgson’s life and I think it will be legitimate to invent some such absurd climax as a visit of Queen Victoria to Oxford and her insistence on having the author of Alice presented to her, in preference to all the big wigs—the scene dissolving, in Carroll’s fancy, to the end of Alice: ‘They’re nothing but a pack of cards’—and the Queen and her retinue become ridiculous cartoon figures and are scattered to the four winds.” In fine condition.
Huxley and Loos became acquainted with each other when the former initiated a correspondence praising Loos for her hugely successful 1925 comic novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The writers met in person a year later when Huxley and his wife Maria visited New York, and then, in 1937, when the Huxleys moved to Los Angeles, Loos introduced them to her contacts at MGM. Huxley went on to co-write several screenplays throughout the 1940s and 1950s for films like Pride and Prejudice, Madame Curie, and Jane Eyre. In 1945, shortly after the war ended, Huxley was hired to rewrite a script for an animated/live-action production of Alice in Wonderland, but the version was ultimately canceled when Walt Disney felt that Huxley's version was too much of a literal adaptation of Lewis Carroll's book. A content-rich letter between two famous writers.
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