was most likely never part of the theatrical film. The scenario includes a brief post-title, pre-cred­ its shot of a man (presumably Maple White) hid­ ing in the jungle from a browsing Trachodon (aka Anatosaurus), the duck-billed herbivore that later falls prey to the ravaging Allosaurus. Presumably, scenarist Marion Fairfax felt the insertion of a di­ nosaur this early in the proceedings would whet the audience appetite and get them through the long introductory third of the film. As MacQueen argued in a personal conversation, there’s no way a showman would tip his hand so early in the game, defusing the slow buildup to the first rev­ elation of saurian life on the plateau (a scheme repeated, to even better effect, in KING KONG). MacQueen’s annotations and other sources
cited in this article (including Kinnard, Pilot and Rodin, etc.) also note the existence of 365’ of 35mm nitrate fragments from THE LOST WORLD still secreted away at the Library of Congress. The contents of these fragments, featuring the origi­ nal theatrical tints, is apparently unique (contain­ ing—I have been told “off the record”—perhaps a dozen one-of-a-kind shots, some of which has been supplanted by the Czech material located and rescued by Jan-Christopher Horak in the early 1990s), but they have been withheld from any and all restoration attempts to date.
Video releases of the Kodascope version of
THE LOST WORLD quickly surfaced with the growth of the video market, the first issued by Thunderbird Films before 1980. The Kodascope version has been widely reported as running “about an hour” or “just under an hour,” with many 8mm and 16mm catalogs and video versions errone­ ously listing the film as 62m. Roy Kinnard’s claim that the Kodascope version’s running time was “a mere 52 minutes”3 confirms that of all versions I’d seen (and projected in college venues) prior to 1991. For video libraries, Goodtimes Video’s release
of THE LOST WORLD is probably the best avail­ able edition of the Kodascope variant. Recorded in SP mode, working with a fair-to-good condi­ tion print that shows the usual wear, projected at a fairly accurate silent running speed, the Goodtimes edition clocks in at 51m 21s (though the box and cassette label claim a running time of 108m!). The most distracting damage to Goodtimes’ source print remains a rippling tear in midscreen that mars much of the climactic London rampage sequence. For the purposes of comparing the three ex­ tant video versions of THE LOST WORLD, I will
In Search of the Lost Chords
The Alloy Orchestra’s
Ken Winokur Interviewed By Stephen R. Bissette
/ recently interviewed Alloy Orchestra co-founding member and spokesman Ken
Winokur about their excellent new score for the
restored video edition of THE LOST WORLD. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Alloy Orchestra has been performing live for a full decade, contrib­ uting an extraordinary variety of scores for resur­ rected and restored classics from the silent era; many of these have graced recent video releases from Kino, as well as live performances in a sur­ prising variety of urban and rural venues. (I recently heard them perform in Chester, Vermont!) The current members of The Alloy Orches­
tra are Ken Winokur, Terry Donahue (both on percussion), and Roger Miller (on keyboards; Roger joined the ensemble shortly after the un­ timely death of co-founding member Caleb Sampson three years ago), all of whom per­ formed on THE LOST WORLD soundtrack. —SRB
When Weis Alloy Orchestra founded, and what were your earliest silent film soundtrack ex­ periences as The Alloy Orchestra? Alloy was founded in 1991 to do a single per­
formance (without film) at Boston’s first night performance. A local film programmer saw us, and thought our giant junk metal installation would be perfect to accompany METROPOLIS. We whipped together a score, thinking that this was a one shot deal, and did a couple of performances. The audience reaction was so good, we did a few more performances, and then started looking for other films to work with.
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