Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies".

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's film is the historical drama "The King's Speech", directed by Tom Hooper from a screenplay by David Seidler and released by Paramount Pictures in 2010.

"The King's Speech" stars Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush, with Helena Bonham Carter, Guy Pearce, Timothy Spall, Derek Jacobi, Jennifer Ehle, Michael Gambon, and Claire Bloom.

The movie opens in 1925, when Prince Albert, Duke of York, delivers his speech in Wembley Stadium at the conclusion of the British Empire Exhibition.

Since the Prince is afflicted with a stammer, it is a difficult and humiliating experience for him.

Over the years, a number of speech therapists attempt to help the Prince, but without success.

Finally, his wife, Elizabeth, visits a Harley Street speech therapist, an Australian named Lionel Logue, giving her name as Mrs. Johnson.

Elizabeth persuades the Prince to visit Logue, but he resents Logue's methods and is shocked by Logue's insistence that the Prince address him as Lionel, how Lionel addresses him as Bertie, his family name.

To make a point, Lionel has Bertie read for a recording the "to be or not to be" soliloquy from Shakespeare's "Hamlet" while listening to classical music on a set of earphones.

Bertie, angry and frustrated, ends the session, but Lionel insists he take the recording with him as a souvenir.

After Bertie's father, King George V, reads his 1934 Christmas message on the radio, he tells his son that radio will be an important part of the monarchy in the future, since it allows a king to address his subjects directly in their own homes.

After an attempt to read his father's Christmas message aloud himself is ruined by his stammer, Bertie returns home and listens to the recording Lionel made of his reading of the "Hamlet" soliloquy.

He's astonished to hear himself read it without stammering.

Bertie decides to follow Lionel's instruction and sessions of physical and psychological speech therapy and his speaking begins to improve.

When George V dies, Bertie's older brother, David, takes the throne as Edward VIII, but David's involvement with an American divorcee, Wallis Simpson, creates a constitutional crisis and the possibility that Bertie, against his will and still working to conquer his stammer, may have to replace Edward as King.

The story of how "The King's Speech" came to the screen is itself a moving and engaging tale.

David Seidler, who wrote the screenplay, developed a stammer as a child in London.

He believes the stammer was caused by the twin traumas of living in London during the Second World War and the murder of his grandparents during the Holocaust.

But young David found inspiration and a model with the difficulties the King George the VI had overcome dealing with his own stammer.

As an adult, Seidler resolved to write about the king's struggles and began research, but could find little information about the speech therapist who had help the King, Lionel Logue.

He contacted Logue's son, Valentine, who agreed to discuss his father's work, only if Elizabeth the Queen Mother agreed, but she found the subject to painful and asked the project proceed only after her death.

Seidler put it aside for over 10 years.

After the Queen Mother died in 2002, Seidler returned to the project, spurred on by conversations with an uncle who had been treated by Logue and described some of his therapeutic techniques.

Seidler produced a screenplay that his wife felt was "too seduced by cinematic technique", as she put it, and suggested he write a two-person play featuring just the King and Logue instead.

After writing the play, Seidler circulated it to a few people, including Joan Lane, who was associated with the London Movie Production Company.

She hoped to have Seidler rework the play as a movie script and organized a reading for a group of Australian ex-patriots.

Among them was the mother of director Tom Hooper.

After the reading, she called him and said, "I found your next project."

Joan Lane worked together with producers Simon Egan and Gareth Unwin to turn Seidler's play into a script for a motion picture and soon enlisted the support of a former Chair of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

Unwin later said, "we worked with Ex-Chair of BAFTA, Richard Price, who has started turning this story about two grumpy men sitting in a room into something bigger."

About nine weeks before production of "The King's Speech" was to get underway, the producers learned that Logue's grandson, Mark, and a journalist, Peter Conradi, were about to publish a book about Lionel Logue's work with George VI.

The book, "The King's Speech" "How One Man Saved the British Monarchy", published in 2010, was based in part on a diary, including Lionel Logue's original notes on his work with the King.

A deal was struck and the screenplay was reworked to incorporate material from the book to make the motion picture more historically accurate.

For example, Lionel and Bertie's exchange after the King's climactic speech.

"You still stammered on the W".

"I had to throw in a fuse so they would know it was me."

That was taken directly from Lionel's own notes.

To prepare for his role as Bertie, later King George VI, Colin Firth worked diligently with the film's voice coach, Neil Swain.

He also watched archival footage of the King speaking to gain a sense of the nature and severity of his stammer.

Swain later said in an interview, "it was very interesting while we were working on the film just to think tonally how far we could go, and should go, with the strength of George's stammer."

I think a less courageous director than Tom, and indeed a less courageous actor than Colin, might have felt the need to slightly sanitize the degree and authenticity of that stammer, and I'm really, really pleased that neither of them did.

More than a year after shooting was finished, Firth still had traces of Bertie's stammer.

He told an interviewer in May 2011, "you find yourself doing it and if I start thinking about it, the worse it gets.

If nothing else, it's an insight into what it feels like."

Even when the makers of an historical film strive for as much historical accuracy as possible, there are invariably compromises that must be made in the interest of dramatic cohesion and narrative flow.

For example, in reality Bertie began working with Lionel Logue in October 1926, not long after his 1925 speech at Wembley Stadium.

He was already showing the benefits of Logue's therapy when he gave a speech to open the new Australian Parliament House in Canberra in 1927 and other speeches during the same trip.

Logue's grandson Robert has questioned some of the details of the Duke of York's treatment as presented in the film, especially the informality Logue insists on and the Duke's use of profanity to overcome his stammer.

Other critics agree that these scenes represent the freedom of artistic license.

Historians have also criticized the film for his portrayal of people and events surrounding the brief reign of Edward VIII.

While some feel the movie should have shown David and Wallis Simpson as more sympathetic towards Bertie, others objected that the film failed to include and indict Edward VIII's sympathetic attitudes toward Nazi Germany.

There was also dismay over the way major British politicians, their attitudes and their policies, were portrayed in the film.

Hugo Vickers, an advisor to the film's producers, admitted there were historical inaccuracies, but argued this was necessary because, as he put it, "the average viewer knows who Churchill is.

He doesn't know who Lord Halifax and Sir Samuel Hoare are."

He's right.

I had to look them up.

They were both senior conservative politicians in Neville Chamberlain's cabinet who supported his policy of appeasement in response to the aggression of Nazi Germany.

Other British historians were more willing to judge "The King's Speech" in terms of its own dramatic intentions.

One, Andrew Roberts, wrote that despite the film's occasional historical lapses, it effectively conveyed what he called "George VI's quiet, unassuming heroism."

"The King's Speech" was both a critical and commercial success.

It was nominated for 12 Academy Awards and won Best Screenplay for David Seidler, Best Actor for Colin Firth, Best Director for Tom Cooper, and Best Picture.

It was nominated for 14 BAFTA Awards.

Seidler and Firth won again, Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter won awards for Supporting Actor and Actress, and the movie won both Best Film and Outstanding British Film.

King George VI's daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, received two copies of the film and watched it in a private screening at Sandringham House during Christmas 2010.

A Palace source later said she was touched by a moving portrayal of her father.

David Seidler called this "the highest honor the film could receive."

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight.