The Lost World 1925

The story

A journal left by the explorer Maple White sends the combative Professor Challenger to a plateau in South America, where, he claims, dinosaurs still live. A party goes with him: a sceptical rival professor, a big-game hunter, a young reporter and, in the film, Paula White. On the plateau they meet dinosaurs and an ape-man, and they are stranded for a time. Wallace Beery plays Challenger, Lewis Stone the hunter Sir John Roxton, Lloyd Hughes the reporter Edward Malone and Bessie Love Paula White. The ape-man is an actor in a hairy suit, not a model.

The film ends in London. Challenger brings back a Brontosaurus, it breaks loose, damages Tower Bridge and swims off down the Thames. That is the film's own invention. In Doyle's novel, serialised in the Strand Magazine in 1912, the animal brought home is a young pterodactyl, and it simply flies away.

Models, a frame at a time

Willis O'Brien had made animated dinosaur shorts since the 1910s, in clay on wooden frames. For this film he hired an art student, Marcel Delgado, to build the creatures. By then they had metal skeletons and rubber skins, and the Library of Congress describes them as built over complex, articulated metal armatures.

The dinosaurs were small. JSTOR Daily gives their height as 18 inches, and Turner Classic Movies counts 49 of them. To make one move, O'Brien shifted it a hair's breadth and photographed it, then did it again. By one account O'Brien did all the animation himself and was lucky to get about 30 seconds of footage from a ten-hour day. Split-screen and other effects put the models in the same shot as the actors.

Doyle, the magicians and the premiere

The best-known story comes from 1922. Conan Doyle, the author of the novel, showed some of O'Brien's test footage to the Society of American Magicians, whose president was Harry Houdini. By most accounts he did not tell them it was a film or how it was made. The newspapers were impressed, and one report is said to have concluded that if the creatures were fakes, they were masterpieces. How far Doyle deliberately played the joke is told differently by different sources, so treat the neat version of the tale with care.

The film opened in New York, at the Astor Theatre, on 8 February 1925, as the date is usually given. First National released it. It was a success: the Chicago Tribune called it a box-office phenomenon, and some audience members are said to have believed the film-makers had found the real thing.

Zambo

The film has a character that modern viewers find hard to watch. Zambo, the expedition's servant, is played by a white actor, Jules Cowles, in blackface. In Doyle's novel Zambo is a strong and loyal figure. In the film he becomes a comic stereotype, and film writers today say plainly that this change has aged badly.

Cut down, and found again

The film did not last in full. A 1929 agreement is reported to have withdrawn the original 1925 prints from circulation, and for decades audiences saw only worn 16 mm copies reduced to little more than an hour. The full-length version was thought to have gone.

It had not quite. From the 1990s, missing footage began to surface, above all a near-complete print in the Czech national film archive. A restoration made with the George Eastman Museum in the late 1990s used it, but gaps remained. Later versions added more: a Blu-ray from Flicker Alley, produced by Serge Bromberg of Lobster Films, carries a new 2K restoration with a score by Robert Israel. Sources date the latest restoration to 2016 or 2017, and one counts eleven sources behind it. The Library of Congress holds two rolls of nitrate, including slated outtakes, and says the search for missing material goes on.

Why it matters

It is an early feature built on stop-motion. The Library of Congress calls it one of the first full-length features to combine stop-motion animation with live actors. Some writers go further and call it the first, but that rests on how "feature" and "first" are defined.

It leads to King Kong. JSTOR Daily says that after this film O'Brien began work on an 18-inch model meant to climb the Empire State Building, and that this led to King Kong eight years later. The Library of Congress notes that Kong's ending reprises a primitive monster loose in a modern city, the film's one big change from the novel.

It is on the National Film Registry. The Library of Congress added it in 1998 as culturally, historically and aesthetically significant.

It shows how films get lost. A hit was trimmed, withdrawn and worn out, then rebuilt from archives in several countries. Because its copyright was not renewed, the film itself is in the public domain in the United States, though restorations and new scores can have rights of their own.