^
...Continued
different footage altogether for some sequences. At the time of THE LOST WORLD’S original pro­ duction and release, studios would ship a single complete negative overseas, from which all for­ eign release prints would be struck. Such “ inter­ national version” negatives were necessarily composed of different takes, or footage shot by a different camera. The IMG restoration of THE LOST WORLD incorporates footage from the for­ eign version, providing occasional glimpses of completely different takes from familiar scenes.
1&egment One begins in London and ends with the fadeout before the fullscreen shot of the LONDON RECORD JOURNAL article announcing the expedition’s progress down the Amazon. This se­ quence runs 16m 3s in GT; in LUMI, it runs 18m 59s (19m 19s including restored credits); and a remarkable 28m 24s in IMG (including restored credits: 28m 47s), adding almost 10m to the story and character development of this opening move­ ment. Note that all reference points designated hereafter are from the respective DVD versions, and are duly noted as such. The primary revisions and additions in IMG
include: The original credits are partially “ restored” (ac­
tually recreated). Note that GEH did attempt a clumsy insert of the scenario’s Trachodon foot­ age, to negligible ef­ fect, with their own Main Title recreation; as MacQueen noted in private conversation after the Cinefest 18 screening, the original
FIRST NATIONAL PICTURES, INC. Presento
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s
Stupendous Story of Adventure and Romance
The Lost World
score cue sheets “don’t provide for it.” The introductory prologue with Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle. The actual intro featuring Doyle, sitting at his desk penning the novel’s introduc­ tory inscription, remains lost; Shepard and Bromberg supplanted the lost footage with ex­ tant footage of a somewhat older Doyle in his garden, taken from a short sound footage docu­ ment in which the author expounded on his mys­ tical beliefs. A blue-tinted establishing shot of London,
showing a tugboat in the foreground chugging past Tower Bridge and Big Ben in the back­ ground, has been in­ serted here to replace the still-lost introductory establishing shot of
Had you performed THE LOST WORLD score live with an audience before recording? No, this was an experiment for us: trying to
compose a new score directly to tape. We felt the experiment succeeded. We’ve just started perform­ ing the score we wrote: last February at The Lin­ coln Center, and this June at the “Halfway to Hollywood Film Festival” in Kansas City.
Had you scored live performances of the earlier, shorter Kodascope version of THE LOST WORLD before this project? Yes. The first performance was in 1992 at the
Coolidge Corner Theater here in Boston. We were glad to see, and ultimately work with, the more comprehensive version you now see on DVD. It made the film much more coherent, and inter­ esting. This is a completely new score.
What was your feelings about the restora­ tion when you first saw it? We were worried that the longer version would
be tedious. The short one is fun for its great ani­ mated dinosaurs, but the story is kind of soft. The longer version surprised us. It’s a much more in­ triguing story with fully fleshed-out characters. Instead of seeming tedious, it got exciting.
How did you approach the scoring process, and how W3ls
this different from your usual
approach to scoring silent films? Normally, we spend a summer slowly com­
posing our score. We work with a video tape, go­ ing scene by scene, roughly recording our ideas as we go. Once we’ve gotten through the film, we go back to the beginning and start tightening things up, making transitions, simply finishing the songs. Then we spend forever rehearsing. This time, we had a much shorter deadline
and didn’t need to be able perform the score. So, we went through the film scene-by-scene and tried to record our final versions. The whole process took about two weeks. We were very happy with the more spontaneous composition method.
Though Tue only caught a few of your live performances, THE LOST WORLD seems to incorporate far more literal “sound effects” than any prior score by The Alloy Orchestra I am aware of. Why did you take this ap­ proach? Because we could. Composing on the tape
recorder allowed us to overdub sound effects in a Continued...
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