Alternate titles: Tomatoes Another Day, It Never Happened
Co-makers: J. S. Watson, Jr., Alec Wilder
Original format: 35mm sound film 1.20:1
Courtesy: James Sibley Watson Jr., Nancy Watson Dean

A film designed to show the absurdity of talkies that recorded action in pictures with unnecessary explanations of the action recorded in sound. Film was shown for one night in a Boston theater but not appreciated by the audience. Harold Lloyd, directed by Sennet, might have brought it off. -J. S. Watson Jr.

Watson's avant-garde film is a unique example of Dadaist aesthetics in early sound cinema. A minimalist and virtually expressionless acting style on a claustrophobic set characterizes the melodramatic love triangle. Watson considered the film a failure, though it appears extremely modern today, and suppressed its existence. -Jan-Christopher Horak

Born to wealth, James Sibley [J.S.] Watson, Jr. (1894-1982) was regarded as a Renaissance man in each of his chosen fields: medical doctor and researcher, man of letters, preservationist, philanthropist, and filmmaker. After graduating medical school, Watson bought and published The Dial between 1920-29, a literary journal founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1840. By the mid-1920s, he became fascinated with motion pictures and produced a striking series of films, The Fall of the House of Usher (1927), Tomatos Another Day (1930), and The Eyes of Science (1931) among others. -Jan-Christopher Horak/Bruce Posner

The eclectic composer Alec Wilder (1907-1980) hailed from Rochester and wrote hundreds of compositions of American jazz and popular songs and European classical music. Fans included Frank Sinatra and Rochester's J.S. Watson, Jr. As a gift, he wrote "Tomatos Another Day" (1930), a series of verbal-visual "bad puns," for Watson to film. -Bruce Posner