The character of Owen Scudder, played by Lew Cody, may have been inspired by a real life bigamist and murderer James 'Bluebeard' Watson (1870-1939). Watson traveled the United States under several aliases, marrying 19 different women between 1918 and 1920 and murdering several of them for financial gain. He was apprehended in April, 1920, in Los Angeles.
This film offers behind-the-scenes footage of two legendary silent era director/performers at work: Charles Chaplin directing his comedy-drama A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate (1923) and Erich von Stroheim directing Greed (1924).
Many Hollywood "behind the scenes" actions are shown, including Marshall Neilan directing The Eternal Three (1923) and Fred Niblo directing The Famous Mrs. Fair (1923). Both of these movies appear lost, so this may be the only extant footage of them.
Thought to have been a "lost" film, copies began to be found in the 1980s and 1990s in various states of quality. In 2005, MGM partnered with Turner Classic Movies to restore the film and it premiered on TCM on January 24, 2006 with a new score and title cards.
A large number of the credited (in AFI and elsewhere) "celebrities" do not appear in the surviving version shown on Turner Classic Movies. They include: Hugo Ballin, Mabel Ballin, Robert Edeson, Claude Gillingwater, Dagmar Godowsky, Elaine Hammerstein, Alice Lake, Bessie Love, Patsy Ruth Miller, Anna Q. Nilsson, Milton Sills, Anita Stewart, Blanche Sweet, Florence Vidor, King Vidor, Johnnie Walker, and George Walsh.