 Under their threat not to renew the agreement when the copyright reverted to them, the film company paid them each $100,000 () and the right to produce the original play.It was produced in 1991 at the Whitehall Theatre in London, where it ran for six weeks.In the summer of 1938, while on vacation from his job as English teacher at a vocational school, Burnett and his wife Frances traveled to Vienna to help Jewish relatives smuggle money out of the country occupied by the Nazis since March of that year.