The Lost World

Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous work is the creation of detective Sherlock Holmes, and indeed the first screen adaptation came in 1900.
However, one of the most successful adaptations of  his novels was not a Sherlock Holmes film. The Lost World was a dinosaur story and nobody had figured out how to adapt such a fantastic tale until Willis H. O'Brien came along.

The man had developed a technique that enabled dinosaurs or other extinct beasts to take life in front of your eyes: stop motion animation. Basically, he would photograph puppets one frame at a time and would move them little by little so that the illusion of movement would be created when the film ran at normal speed. The same trick is used for cartoons, only this time, it was with three dimensional objects. And to the untrained eye of the spectators of the time, it might as well have been a real dinosaur up there on the screen.

Willis had experimented that technique since 1915 with short films like Dinosaurs and the Missing Link or R.F.D., 10,000 B.C. where he animated puppets of humans as well so they could interact with the animals, much in the way of The Flinstones. (Check out the latter: I saw several instances where you can accidentally see Willis' elbow for a split millisecond). By 1918, he fleshed out his films with live action segments that provided a more substantial story and characters that the audience could relate to. This gave birth to the short film The Ghost of Slumber Mountain.

Unfortunately, two thirds of the film are now lost and what you see here is an abridged version of a longer film.

With time, Willis progressed and he figured out that if he optically merged live action shots of people with his puppet shots, then the dinosaurs would seem even more realistic, as they would evolve in the real world. Recent research show that he first tried that with his partner Herbert Dawley in the film Along the Moonbeam Trail.

In 1923, a Buster Keaton comedy called Three Ages used stop motion animation in its prehistoric segment to create the illusion that the protagonist was using a giant dinosaur as transportation device. The way was paved for a prestige feature film to used this technique.

Facade of the Paris Cameo theater showing the film

The idea came to adapt Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World, a perfect material for his specific trade. It took a whole year for him to animate the many dinosaur sequences (publicity for the film said "seven years in the making"). To create a surefire success, real live wild beasts were photographed, and movie stars were hired. The star of Three Ages, Wallace Beery, took the part of Professor Challenger, Bessie Love was Paula White, Lewis Stone became Sir John Roxton and teen heartthrob Loyd Hughes played adventurer Ed Malone. Even Arthur Conan Doyle makes an appearance in the prologue.

Although not a secret (some articles of the time make wild guesses), the fact that the animals were animated was, at the time, not explained in the film publicity which preferred to describe the film as if cretaceous species had somehow magically reappeared.

The Lost World was a massive hit throughout the world for several years. It even became the first in-flight film as this French article proves (an experiment that will not be repeated much, the journalist suggests, considering how flammable film is). The deed took place in London in late 1925 and, according to the imdb, was repeated in Germany on February 4, 1926.

However, as most silent films, it was only sporadically re-released and in various edits. For many years, only severely shortened copies of lesser quality circulated. This site gives a complete explanation of this.

Lobster films eventually restored the film to a more acceptable length and quality, but unfortunately, portions of it are still missing. The film is now available in HD.

French magazine ad

The plot of the film inspired countless others: the remote island, the romance amidst catastrophe, the giant beast turn loose in the big city, the iconic monument destroyed are all still used today. Willis O'Brien's next big finished project will be animating his most famous work: King Kong.

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That's all for today folks!