The Silent Film Quarterly・!23
When Silents Roared: Dinosaurs Take the Big Screen by Cory Gross Almost 70 years before Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park broke box-office records, The L o s t Wo rl d w a s u n p re c e d e n t e d i n Hollywood, featuring cutting-edge special effects that shocked audiences around the world. In this article Cory Gross (who runs the website Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World) describes the film’s inception and creation, as well as its legacy once the movie was released. ・・・ “You forfeit your right to see the greatest entertainment the brains of man have ever achieved if you miss—The Lost World.” These brash words flickering across silent movie screens in the mid-Twenties heralded the arrival of one of the era’s grandest films. The Lost World was the knockout science fiction, special effects spectacle of 1925. The story of The Lost World on the silver screen begins not with that 1925 silent film produced by First National Pictures, but rather, with an unrealized version first developed by early film magnate William Selig, whose most well-known contributions to film were Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and Los Angeles’s first zoo. All that remains of the version of The Lost World that Selig intended to make is a synopsis, a scenario up to the end of the first reel, a potential cast list, and a handful of storyboards, all of which are housed within the archives of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Selig’s version was never made, as his company liquidated its assets in 1918. Those assets fell into the hands of Watterson R. Rothacker. Their echo can be heard in the version that he ultimately made. It was Selig who first introduced the idea of adding a love interest to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s seminal prehistoric adventure novel set in the exotic Mount
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Roraima region of Venezuela and Brazil. Several cast members on Selig’s proposed list were eventually approached by Rothacker as well, including Lewis Stone as Lord John Roxton and Bull Montana as the Ape Man. Most implausible were the storyboards, which showed scenes of menacing saurian monstrosities, some of which look like they could have been drawn right from the finished film. The expertise to accomplish that feat lay with the discovery of Willis O’Brien. Fresh from his string of stop-motion comedies for Thomas Edison and The Ghost of Slumber Mountain, Rothacker hired O’Brien to do the animation for this ambitious project. In those previous films, O’Brien’s dinosaur models were built largely out of clay and cloth on wooden armatures. When hired to undertake animation work on The Lost World, he realized that what he had been doing up to that point was inadequate for a motion p i c t u r e s p e c t a c u l a r s u c h a s t h i s. Furthermore, the sheer number of models required was too ambitious for him to accomplish alone. The solution to this dilemma came in the person of a young grocery clerk and aspiring sculptor O’Brien met, named Marcel Delgado. For inspiration, Delgado went to the paintings of Charles R. Knight, the father of modern paleontological restoration who worked out of the American Museum of Natural History. By virtue of this relationship with
A still from the lost Ghost of Slumber Mountain
