Editing Harold Lloyd (section)

===Talkies and transition===
In 1929, Lloyd had completed the silent feature ''[[Welcome Danger]]'', but talking pictures had become a sensation. He decided to remake the entire film with sound, using a new, stage-trained supporting cast for the dialogue exchanges. The silent version was made available to theaters that had not yet converted to sound, but the talking version became the standard edition of the film. ''Welcome Danger'' was a huge financial success, with audiences eager to hear Lloyd's voice on film.

Lloyd survived the transition to sound and made several talking comedies, including ''[[Feet First]]'', with a similar scenario to ''Safety Last'', which found him clinging to a skyscraper at the climax; ''[[Movie Crazy]]'' with [[Constance Cummings]]; ''[[The Cat's-Paw]]'', which was a dark political comedy and a big departure for Lloyd; and ''[[The Milky Way (1936 film)|The Milky Way]]'', which was Lloyd's only attempt at the fashionable genre of the [[screwball comedy film]].

[[File:Harold Lloyd in the Milky Way.jpg|thumb|Lloyd in ''[[The Milky Way (1936 film)|The Milky Way]]'' (1936)]]
To this point, the films had been produced by Lloyd's company. However, his go-getting screen character was out of touch with [[Great Depression]] movie audiences of the 1930s. Lloyd's rate of film releases, which had been one or two a year in the 1920s, slowed to about one every two years. As his absences from the screen increased, his popularity declined, as did the fortunes of his production company. His final film of the decade, ''[[Professor Beware]]'' (1938), was made by the Paramount staff, with Lloyd functioning only as actor and partial financier.

In 1931 he co-founded the 400-seat [[Beverly Hills Little Theatre for Professionals]].<ref>{{Cite news |date=8 December 1931 |title=Film Training School (con't from page 1) |url=https://archive.org/details/variety104-1931-12/page/n75/mode/2up?q=%22Beverly+Hills+Little++Theatre%22 |work=Variety |pages=21}}</ref><ref name=":02">{{Cite news |date=30 October 1934 |title=Bronze Monikers: Harold Lloyd No. 1 on Seat Backs of Bevhills Midge |url=https://archive.org/details/variety116-1934-10/page/n289/mode/2up?q=Beverly+Hills+Little++Theatre+for+Professionals |access-date=23 March 2024 |work=Variety |pages=3}}</ref> Gladys Lloyd Cassell (wife of [[Edward G. Robinson]]), [[Sam Hardy (actor)|Sam Hardy]], and Lloyd's mother raised funds for it.

On March 23, 1937, Lloyd sold the land of his studio, Harold Lloyd Motion Picture Company, to [[the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints]].<ref>{{cite book |last1=Pawlak |first1=Debra Ann |title=Bringing Up Oscar |date=January 12, 2012 |publisher=Simon and Schuster |isbn=978-1-60598-216-8 |page=178 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=cBtbBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT178 |language=en}}</ref> The location is now the site of the [[Los Angeles California Temple]].<ref>{{cite web |title=Los Angeles California Temple |publisher=The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints |url=https://churchofjesuschristtemples.org/cgi-bin/pages.cgi?los_angeles |access-date=June 8, 2008 |quote=The land for the Los Angeles California Temple was purchased from Harold Lloyd Motion Picture Company on March 23, 1937.}}</ref>

Lloyd produced a few comedies for [[RKO Radio Pictures]] in the early 1940s, including [[Lucille Ball]]'s ''A Girl, a Guy, and a Gob'' in 1941,<ref name="har">{{cite book |last1=Kalat |first1=David |title=Too Funny for Words: A Contrarian History of American Screen Comedy from Silent Slapstick to Screwball |date=April 11, 2019 |publisher=McFarland |isbn=978-1-4766-3652-8 |page=96 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=FBKSDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA96 |language=en}}</ref> but otherwise retired from the screen until 1947. He returned for an additional starring appearance in ''[[The Sin of Harold Diddlebock]]'',<ref name="har"/> an ill-fated homage to Lloyd's career, directed by [[Preston Sturges]] and financed by [[Howard Hughes]]. This film had the inspired idea of following Harold's [[Jazz Age]], optimistic character from ''The Freshman'' into the [[Great Depression]] years. ''Diddlebock'' opened with footage from ''The Freshman'' (for which Lloyd was paid a royalty of $50,000, matching his actor's fee) and Lloyd was sufficiently youthful-looking to match the older scenes quite well. Lloyd and Sturges had different conceptions of the material and fought frequently during the shoot; Lloyd was particularly concerned that, while Sturges had spent three to four months on the script of the first third of the film, "the last two-thirds of it he wrote in a week or less." The finished film was released briefly in 1947, then shelved by producer Hughes. Hughes issued a recut version of the film in 1951 through RKO under the title ''[[Mad Wednesday]]''.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Dickos |first1=Andrew |title=Intrepid Laughter: Preston Sturges and the Movies |date=April 1, 2013 |publisher=University Press of Kentucky |isbn=978-0-8131-4195-4 |pages=51–52 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=mmY1EAAAQBAJ |language=en}}</ref> Such was Lloyd's disdain that he sued Howard Hughes, the California Corporation, and RKO for damages to his reputation "as an outstanding motion picture star and personality", eventually accepting a $30,000 settlement.{{Citation needed|date=August 2023}}