Some of the most outstanding films produced by M-G-M during the late 1920s and 1930s were directed by the colorful W. S. ("Woody") Van Dyke: The Thin Man (and its first sequels), Trader Horn, San Francisco, Rose-Marie, Tarzan, the Ape Man, Marie Antoinette, and White Shadows in the South Seas, among many others.

On White Shadows Van Dyke spent four months in 1927-1928 filming in Tahiti, first in collaboration with the noted documentarian Robert Flaherty and then as the sole director. During this period he kept a journal, which he dispatched on the monthly mail boat to the U.S. The journal has never been published and possibly never seen by anyone except its writer and the recipient in Hollywood until recently, when it was discovered in an old steamer trunk.

White Shadows in the South Seas was a pioneering undertaking for a major studio at that time. Sending a fairly large company to a remote and relatively primitive area to film a fictional film with Hollywood actors interspersed with the local inhabitants was most unusual, if not unique. And there were the risks in having two directors with entirely different approaches at the helm of one film.

This revealing journal is a personalized narrative of what can happen during a long and faraway location junket and is fraught with internal disputes, frictions, fractions, edginess, and the strain of making a film under very trying conditions and circumstances. Finally, there is the portrait of the complex and somewhat paradoxical Van Dyke in his own words telling of the demons afflicting his spirit.