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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 - 2 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
- Allosaurus
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D.I.G. It's clear that some of the running time of the original film was intertitles and that some may be missing and some may be of a different length than the original release, but that aside, what footage is either still missing or left out of the reconstruction deliberately... and why?DS: We chose to soften a racial stereotype which is no longer acceptable. In Conan Doyle's novel, the character Zambo is a Brazilian Negro and one of the heroes of the story; he does not desert the party on the plateau but remains their link with the world. In the movie he inexplicably becomes a shambling Southern darkie who rolls his eyes a lot and whose intertitles are in a Hollywood version of Ebonics. We left out a few shots of Zambo and either took his words from the novel or put his titles into standard English. We had a fragment of a scene in which Paula White cares for a broken leg on Jocko the monkey which would have explained why the animal is so attached to her, but there was not enough of it to use.
It is clear from the script, surviving stills and Willis O'Brien's recollections that a lot of additional live action material was taken so that the producers would have a merchantable film in case O'Brien's animation was a failure. When this material was dropped because the animation was a brilliant success, the narrative acquired some strange gaps -- for example, we never find out from the finished film how Zambo's arm is broken -- but these gaps are evidence, not of missing material in the reconstruction, but of the prerelease cuts in the original production. I took out a couple of unexplained shots of Gomez; he is a major character in the novel and
apparently included in the original photography. But he seems not even introduced in the 1925 release version except for a couple of striking
cutaways which were not necessary to our editing but which strongly suggested
other missing materials.The framing or aspect ratio of 16mm prints is also slightly different than 35mm, so there may be slight differences at the top of certain frames in prints made from other source materials. The DVD is windowboxed, however, so the entire available image is viewable. This means that there is a black border around the whole frame so that on most television sets you can see the entire image.
D.I.G. How many different sources for footage were there?
DS: A 35mm print with Czech titles; four 16mm tinted Kodascope abridgments [all worn, so we wanted to be sure we would have an intact copy of every shot]; two prints of a one-reel version made as a classroom film by Encyclopedia Britannica, which had eight unique shots; a 1925 trailer; a demonstration reel apparently prepared for a 1925 meeting of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers; and a 1927 interview film with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle which I reconstructed in 1974 from the original 35mm negative and outtakes. There was also a reel of animation outtakes which were not integrated into the editing but which are presented as a supplementary video feature.
D.I.G. How and where and to what parts of the film was the digital restoration done?
DS: All of the film except the educational version and the SMPE reel was processed through digital electronic dirt removal. The greatest technical difficulty was reducing printed-in flaws from the Czech print which was our prime source. The picture quality was outstanding but it had been reproduced from an original in poor condition. Our brilliant editor Mathieu Duboscq spent hundreds of hours electronically painting out splice lines, punch marks, blotches and splotches. This element also derived from an export negative so all the shots differed slightly from the corresponding shots in the American prints. We always were having to make choices and then find ways to join two shots which didn't quite match.
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