Began shooting as a silent in August, 1928 at Metropolitan Studios, it would become an agonizingly long and complicated production. It was finally released on October 12, 1929 as a talkie after largely being re-shot with another director (Clyde Bruckman) as a talkie (marking the first time Lloyd worked from a script) and painstakingly edited down from an original 16-reels (some 2 hours and forty-five minutes) to 12-reels. The silent version cost $521,000 and another $281,000 was spent on the sound negative. While the novelty of hearing Lloyd speak made it his largest grossing hit since _Freshman, The (1925)_, those steep production costs resulted in a huge drop in net profits from his earlier features.
Clyde Bruckman's solution for reworking the film as a talkie was to eliminate half the silent version and re-shoot it as a talkie. The remaining half of the picture would be dubbed - - a cumbersome experience that Lloyd found difficult to accomplish. The result was awkward and it's easy to spot the dubbed scenes in the film (most apparent in the scenes Lloyd shares with Noah Young as Officer Clancy). It's readily apparent that Young was especially poor at looping his own voice.
Originally filmed as a silent feature (directed by Malcolm St. Clair) it was largely re-shot for sound release (directed by Clyde Bruckman). When it was previewed, it was over three hours in length, but cut to under two hours before general release.