In Universal’s latest entry in the Jurassic Park film franchise, Jurassic World: Rebirth, it’s suggested that people became bored with the notion of looking at dinosaurs. When it comes to the world of motion pictures, that clearly is not the case. While they haven’t been around in real life for 65 million years, the prehistoric creatures have entertained and enthralled audiences since the days of silent movies.
Perhaps the most remarkable example of early “dino cinema” celebrates its centennial this year. The Lost World, based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel of the same name, debuted in February of 1925. By then moviegoers had seen the likes of animated cartoon star Gertie the Dinosaur and even watched Buster Keaton ride a Brontosaurus in 1923’s The Three Ages. Even so, jaws in theaters around the world dropped at the sight of long-extinct behemoths moving on screen, courtesy of groundbreaking stop-motion animator Willis H. O’Brien.
In both the book and the film, mercurial Scottish scientist Professor George E. Challenger–Doyle’s most famous protagonist after Sherlock Holmes–leads an expedition to a primordial plateau deep in the central South American rainforest. Following the path of a deceased American explorer, the group discovers that dinosaurs, prehistoric mammals, and even a tribe of “ape-men” call the mysterious land home. With help from local indigenous people, the expedition manages to leave the plateau safely. They also bring one of the animals back with them to London to prove their claims, only to have it escape.
The story, first published in serial form in The Strand Magazine, was immediately popular and led Chicago-based film producer Watterson R. Rothacker to purchase the rights from Doyle. Rothacker then made a deal with First National Pictures to bring The Lost World to the screen.
The studio tapped veteran director Harry O. Hoyt to shoot the picture, with his brother, actor Arthur Hoyt, signing on to play skeptical group member Professor Summerlee. Lewis Stone, best known as Mickey Rooney’s dad in the Andy Hardy series, played hunter Sir John Roxton, with Lloyd Hughes as reporter Edward Malone. Bessie Love was cast as a new character, Paula White, daughter of the missing American (and Malone’s eventual love interest). And for the larger-than-life Professor Challenger, First National hired the larger-than-life Wallace Beery (who had played Keaton’s Stone Age rival in The Three Ages).
Assembling the human cast was a simple matter, but where would a Hollywood studio in 1925 find prehistoric animals? That job fell to Willis O’Brien. A former cowboy ranch hand who once guided fossil hunters in the Pacific Northwest, O’Brien made animal models move one frame at a time in 1915’s The Dinosaur and the Missing Link. He later created a series of short films for Thomas Edison’s film company and scored a success with the 1918 feature The Ghost of Slumber Mountain. That picture convinced First National that O’Brien was up to the task.
So realistic were O’Brien’s stop-motion monsters that Doyle presented his test reel of a Triceratops brood and a marauding Allosaurus to the Society of American Magicians at a 1922 meeting as the real thing. The publicity over the scenes (a front-page New York Times article exclaimed “If fakes, they were masterpieces”) led to a failed but troublesome lawsuit from The Ghost of Slumber Mountain’s producer and convinced Doyle to leave the project (some prints of The Lost World still feature a filmed intro by the author).
The movie’s story begins with Paula journeying to London with her father’s journal of his South American odyssey, hoping to convince Challenger to lead a rescue team. Joined by Malone, Roxton, and Summerlee, they find the plateau but must defend themselves from antediluvian beasts (Brontosaurus, Pteranodon, Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus, and others) and an antagonistic ape-man (played by wrestler-turned-actor Bull Montana). Both Malone and Roxton become attracted to Paula, but upon learning that her dad is indeed dead, she finds solace in the arms of the young newsman (never mind that he went on the trip in order to impress his fiancée back in England).
When the Challenger crew finally find a way off the plateau and back to Britain, they have more than notes and photos for evidence; they also managed to bring a live Brontosaurus home with them. In a memorable conclusion which undoubtedly inspired King Kong eight years later (and Steven Spielberg’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park 64 years after that), the massive sauropod escapes while being unloaded from the ship and runs amok in the London streets. It lumbers along onto Tower Bridge before falling into the Thames and is eventually seen swimming back towards its home. Fun Fact: In Doyle’s novel the expedition brought back a young pterodactyl which flies around the city. A Brontosaurus was more impressive and probably “easier” to animate than a flying reptile.
A century after its debut, The Lost World holds up as a drama as well as the granddaddy of prehistoric adventure films. Beery is his usual boisterous self as the brash and self-assured Challenger, and while he leaves little in the way of unchewed scenery for his human co-stars they all come off nicely. There is some controversy regarding the movie’s stereotypical depiction of the South American natives (Trust me, they came off worse in the book). But the main reason it still catches audiences’ attention after 100 years is, of course, the animated menagerie brought to life by O’Brien. Inspired by the contemporary works of famed paleoartist Charles R. Knight, his animals were the standard for accurate cinematic dinosaur depictions for decades.
Doyle’s story has been remade several times. 20th Century-Fox and Lost in Space producer Irwin Allen made a 1960 version starring David Hedison, Claude Rains, and Michael Rennie, but the film is best known today for featuring iguanas and crocodiles with horns and fins glued to their bodies (and for co-star Jill St. John’s pink pants). Footage was later used in Allen’s TV shows Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (with Hedison) and The Time Tunnel.
There were also two 1990s movies made to piggyback on the 1993 release of Jurassic Park, along with a 1999-2002 syndicated TV series. And Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton titled his 1995 follow-up novel The Lost World, which became The Lost World: Jurassic Park when it hit the big screen two years later.
Perhaps the most unusual tribute to the silent film came in Disney/Pixar’s 2009 animated gem Up, when the filmmakers used its depiction of the title plateau as the basis for Paradise Falls, the mysterious South American locale that Carl Fredricksen’s ultimately lands upon…
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In his intro to The Lost World, Doyle wrote “I have wrought my simple plan…If I give one hour of joy…To the boy who’s half a man…Or the man who’s half a boy.” As a middle-aged writer who’s been enthralled by dinosaurs ever since he walked through the Sinclair Dinoland exhibit at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, I can comfortably say that 1925’s The Lost World still gives me joy.