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The Lost World - 1925
Page 1 - Contents Gallery of Art and Stills Interview With David Shepard Resources
Credits Interview with David Shepard The cover of the Programme from the premiere of The Lost World, 1925 at the Astor Theatre, New York City, New York, United States.
Dinosaurs
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- Apatosaurus
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David Shepard is perhaps the only person in the world with a film projection booth built into a log cabin in the middle of a primeval forest.From this remote location between two rushing streams -- quite suitable indeed to thoughts of a Lost World -- and with the intimate assistance of a cat, a dog, and others whom you'll learn of soon, Shepard has masterminded the reconstruction of more famous silent films than you can shake two sticks at.
The latest, as we hope you've guessed by now, is a restoration of The Lost World, 1925.
Through the mysterious wonders of internet packet switchers, Dinosaur Interplanetary Gazette brings you this exclusive interview with the reclusive Mr. Shepard.
D.I.G. What drew you to reconstruct The Lost World in the first place?
David Shepard: I first enjoyed THE LOST WORLD when I was seventeen, in a tinted Kodascope print. It remained vivid in my memory, and often when I am selecting projects, I think back to films that had personal impact on me. I was very excited when I learned that George Eastman House had reconstructed THE LOST WORLD, and tried hard but unsuccessfully to license their version for home video although honestly, there were elements about their work with which I disagreed. When Eastman House proved uninterested, my friend Serge Bromberg and I decided to proceed on our own and try to do it better. The question was whether or not we could obtain equivalents to the various film elements used by Eastman House; we quickly had those and, I believe, more. Also, we had a source of finance for the project in La Sept ARTE, a French-German cultural television channel, which promised to license the film for broadcast if we could deliver a long version with a score by the Alloy Orchestra.
D.I.G. How long did it take from beginning to end?
DS: About nine months from the time we started acquiring material until we finished editing Roy Pilot's commentary track. However, the image was locked down by the end of the third month.
D.I.G. What were the greatest difficulties in the reconstruction?
DS: The greatest artistic difficulty was in editing and titling the film. We had guides to what the film looked like in 1925: the abridgment of 1929, the 1924 production script (from which many departures were made during filming and editing), several detailed synopses, and the 1925 printed music which is of course definitive as far as scene order goes, but has no clues as to the exact editing of individual scenes. But even with all of these, and of course the novel, no one knows exactly what all the shots or what all the intertitles actually were. We just decided to make a film that closely followed what we knew of the original production, but that would not betray that the work had been reassembled from fragments and was still incomplete.
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