Brecht was hired in 1930 to adapt his successful play The Threepenny Opera for the screen. The play was first produced in 1928. In the intervening years, Brecht's politicization increased and he rewrote the story totally for the screen, incorporating a clear anticapitalist perspective and a more "epic" storyline. This version, called Die Beule (The Boils), was rejected by the film company and later became the basis for his Threepenny Novel, published in 1934. A famous lawsuit ("The Threepenny Lawsuit") was undertaken by Brecht as a "sociological experiment" to analyze the nature of the cultural industry under capitalism; he settled for damages. All of this notwithstanding, G. W. Pabst's film is an important, and in many ways successful one, retaining many Brechtian elements from the original play (if not in line with Brecht's conceptions for the cinema), and some (not all) of the music and songs of Kurt Weill. Featuring legendary performances by Lotte Lenya and Rudolph Forster, it remains a classic of left-wing cinema of the period, in its ironic commentary on the underworld character of bourgeois social relations (or is it the bourgeois, businesslike character of underworld transactions?), and one which survived the attempts by the Nazis to destroy all copies. German film historian Lotte Eisner describes the atmosphere created by cameraman Fritz Arno-Wagner and art director Andrei Andreiev: "(They) contrived to clothe everything in chiaroscuro and mist, making the brick wall of the Thames-side docks and Soho slums both real and fantastic at the same time."