Soon

“Joyita” To Be

Filmed

The long-heralded film about the “Joy it a” is to be made in Hawaii.

Shooting is scheduled to commence at the end of this year and is ex pected to take three months on loca tion.

WHETHER it will be the same film that Viscount Maugham was interested in we don’t know, but probably not; that was supposed to be made by an Italian film company, but the present plans seem pure American.

It was stated in a Californian newspaper recently that the shooting script is finished and that an offer is expected to be made to Ray Milland to play Captain Dusty Miller.

Kailia-Kona Bay, on Hawaii, is expected to be filmed as Apia, West ern Samoa, from which Joy it a set out for the destination she never reached in October, 1955. A Samoan village on Oahu will provide the “authentic” Samoan atmosphere for other parts of the film. A vessel said to be identical to the Joyita is believed to have been located right in Honolulu, It appears from this information that Viscount Maugham won’t be writing the script and that the film won’t be propounding his version of what happened. But what does ulti mately come out of it is likely to be just as fanciful—if any situation was made to order for cinema hooey, this is it.

Even the California paper which announced the plans for the movie, weighed in with its two bits worth by digging up a seaman who is al leged to have served with Miller on the Joyita when she was hauling tuna for the Van Camp factory in Pago Pago. Says the seaman: “On two occasions we were followed by a strange vessel without lights. Dusty switched off the lights, took the wheel and steered Joyita into a rain-squall.

The second time we were able to get into Apia Harbour before the mystery ship could overtake us. Dusty was shaken by this repeated trailing, but he never gave an explanation why he thought the craft was following us.”

The strange vessel was no doubt filled with Russian spacemen.

Another theory held by some people at the time when Joyita first was missing and before her discovery

in water-logged state in November, 1955, was that Miller, in order to escape from his pressing financial and other troubles, had engineered a “disappearing act.” If this were so, it was an act that misfired with tragic results for a lot of people.

Joyita had had 24 years of reasonably normal life before she qualified tor the title of hoodoo ship. She was built in 1931 by a Hollywood film director, Roland West, and sold three years later to the late Milton Bacon of Southern California, who used her until she was requisitioned by the Navy in 1941.

When she was sold off as war

surplus after the war, Dr Ellen Katherine Loumala, an anthropolo gist at the University of Hawaii, bought her and in 1952 turned ner over to Captain Thomas Henry (Dusty) Miller, whom she had met on a field trip to the Gilbert Islands.

Miller, an an Se

wls fo use her

? f the R °y al .^ av X’J as “j? h “ for commercial fishing based on Canton Island.

The fishing venture failed and from April, 1955, Dusty and the Joyita were tied up in Apia Harbour, jobless and broke. TTie rest is legend.