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The Lost World - 1925
Page 1 - Main Table of Contents Page 2 Resources
Contents - This Page
The George Eastman House / Edward Straatman Restoration, 1996| History of The Restoration thus far |
| The Lost Scenes which were found in 1996 |
| The 1925 Movie Credits |
| Ed Stratmann's Restoration Diary | Announcements |
| Donor List | Progress Report |
Please write to the George Eastman House. Click Here
|| Restoration News and Views by Year || 2000 || 1999|| 1998 || 1997 ||
The Dinosaur Interplanetary Gazette's SAVE THE LOST WORLD NOW! |
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This article originally appeared in 1997. It is maintained here for archival purposes. The fund-raising effort has concluded. Please do not send additional donations. Any inquiries about the George Eastman House restoration should be sent directly to the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. We are unable to get any current information from them about the current status of their print.Please visit the NEW Contents page for THE LOST WORLD which contains information on all of the restorations and more!
SAVE The Lost World NOW!
An ongoing history of one of the several restorations of the 1925 dinosaur classic.
The Lost World opened
on Broadway at New York City's Astor Theater in February, 1925.
Now wait a minute. The Lost World didn't hit theaters until Memorial Day, 1997. What's going on here?
Those of you who are ahead of this article undoubtedly know that Michael
Crichton's
The Lost World owes its title to a famous novel by Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle (of Sherlock Holmes fame) which originally appeared
as a serial in the
Strand Magazine in London, England beginning
in April 1912. It was optioned for a motion picture in 1919 and finally
made it to the screen in 1925.
Responsible for the startling state-of-the-art special effects in this wonderful film was none other than Willis H. O'Brien, the genius who would later bring King Kong to life. O'Brien had produced a number of short stop-motion dinosaur films for Thomas Edison in 1917, and did the effects for 1918's The Ghost of Slumber Mountain which is arguably the first "feature-length" dinosaur movie.
The Lost World of 1925 was measured at 9209 feet -- approximately 10 reels (a reel being 1000 feet) -- of 35mm film. It would have run between 104 and 106 minutes depending upon the projection speed. A musical cue sheet indicates that it was intended to be shown at 23 frames per second which would have worked out to 106 minutes, but Variety reported that the film ran 104 minutes on opening night.
Now the fun begins.
In 1929, Aileen Rothacker who held the remake rights to Conan Doyle's novel made an agreement to have First National (the ancestor of Warner Brothers - First National), withdraw the 1925 film from distribution. The prints and all but one domestic negative were to be junked. Sadly, even this "all but one" negative seems to have disappeared forever.
On July 8, 1929 First National made a sub-license arrangement with Kodascope Libraries, Inc. to make an abridged 16mm version that ran 5 reels (approximately 5300 feet or about 55 minutes). This version was intended for distribution to schools and churches, so all but the most "essential" footage was trimmed. Apparently this was edited from a print made from the camera negative and subsequently preserved in a 35mm dupe negative. This, with the exception of the original trailer which contains five shots that originally appeared in the film and some still photos of the missing scenes, is all that survived of the original The Lost World.
In 1991, a laserdisc (LumiVision, LVD 9109) was released with the best existing version of the 1925 film, some supplementary materials including the trailer, and a still frame supplement that explained the missing material. The disk was mastered from the three remaining reels of 35mm negative, and two 16mm preservation prints that were in the possession of the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York.
There was, in fact, a Cinemascope/color remake of The Lost World in 1960 starring Michael (Klaatu) Rennie. Regretably, it is no match for the original, so we'll just leave it in peace. And, in 1993, a Canadian company made a two part film version of the book called The Lost World and Return to the Lost World. Not widely released, it was actually a fairly faithful adaptation of the original Conan Doyle story, but is irretrievably scarred by a last minute budget cut necessitating laughably cheap papier-mâché dinosaurs that are a total disaster. Other than those events, The Lost World was forgotten.
Then something miraculous happened.
In the Fall of 1991, Scott MacQueen ( a leading film preservationist ) wrote an article about the 1925 The Lost World for American Cinematographer Magazine. Someone named Pierce Rafferty called in great excitement. Rafferty operated a stock footage library in New York City called Petrified Films. They had purchased what had been the Warner Brothers studio stock footage library. In that library was a nitrate fine grain positive of dinosaurs! At 24 frames per second, it ran about 8 minutes. And Rafferty knew from Scott's article exactly what it was from. These 8 minutes turned out to be unused takes from The Lost World with technical flaws: Camera fog, an animator in frame, interrupted takes. Some may have been alternate takes or scenes that were excised before the release of the film. Rafferty gave MacQueen permission to preserve the negative, and money was raised privately to cover lab costs. The resulting copy negative was gifted to the Eastman House.
Then, around 1992, Jan-Christopher Horak, formerly of George Eastman House somehow located a nearly full-length print of the 1925 film through friends in Prague, Czechoslovakia at the Filmovy Archiv.
In addition, there were two "excerpts" of approximately 325 feet in 35mm at the Library of Congress and additional material found in the hands of two private collectors.
Using all of these materials, Ed
Stratmann of the George Eastman House, began the job of "reconstructing"
The
Lost World with a team of interns.
It was estimated that with all of the material available to the restoration team, between 8,000 and 8,500 feet of the original 9,209 will be reconstituted. For the first time in 72 years, the full narrative is there. What is missing seems actually to be minor snippets: Broken or spliced shots, shattered reel ends, etc. There is enough now of the original opening to know that the story started with the reporter, Edward Malone, promising his girlfriend Gladys that he will do something to make a name for himself so that she will marry him.
The actual lab work is being done by Haghefilm in the Netherlands. The resulting 35mm negative will be black and white, but release prints will be tinted using the Kodascope version and historical knowledge of tinting as a guide.
The map for this reconstruction is a combination of the script in the Academy Film Archive and a script available in the Classic Images series, plus a mass of research information collected by the Eastman House over many years.
The estimated cost for all this exceeded $80,000 US. A number of generous individuals did stepped in and have donated the money needed.
And Y O U the readers of this story, helped!
The Dinosaur Interplanetary Gazette, the ultimate dinosaur magazine on the World Wide Web (http://www.dinosaur.org) spearheaded an effort to raise these funds. The Dinosaur Interplanetary Gazette estimates that over 9000 readers visited this site and helped to raise the money.
If you donated
some money and have any questions, please write to:
The George Eastman House premiered an early version of the real, true, original The Lost World in this the year that the new Spielberg/Crichton version appears. It's been 72 years since this film was seen, and it's about time we all get a look!
The preliminary preview premiere was held on August 8, 1997 in Rochester, New York at The George Eastman House, but the work is still not finished. Thanks to your help, the preservation is nearly complete.
Stay tuned for further developments...
24 September 1997, Rochester, New York,
USA
Work still continues on fixing problems in the
"first answer print." See Ed Straatman's Restoration
Diary for Details.
8 August 1997 Rochester, New York, USA
The restored 1925
The Lost World premiered at 8:00 pm in
the Dryden Theatre at the George Eastman House. The film ran approximately
100 minutes at 20 frames per second and was accompanied on the piano with
an original score by Philip Carli. D.I.G. will bring you further coverage
and photographs of the event in future issues!
A SPECIAL TREAT - The Lost Scenes
The terrified "brontosaurus" pokes his head through a window. A science magazine of the day revealed that this effect was done with a mechanical head operated off-screen by three men. Click on the image to see a high-resolution version: 49.5K
Having escaped machine gun fire, the frightened "brontosaurus" flees into the Thames and swims out to sea heading back to its tropical home. The shot is a combination of live-action footage and stop-motion matted together. Only a few frames of this shot (the last image in the film) still remain. Click the image to see a high resolution version: 45.7K
Steven
Spielberg's Jurassic
Park 2 : The Lost World
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