And you did your own restoration, without reference to theirs? Yes, although I did see their version several
years ago at a film festival [Cinefest 18 in Syra­ cuse, New York], projected in a theater. Of course, I knew what the basic sources were. I think 1 actu­ ally got more material than they had. Our ver­ sions are different—they published a script of their restoration outline, so I know that their approach was somewhat different in several ways. First of all, they’re an archive; they did everything in 35mm film. We did everything in video. Theirs has the advantage, of course, of now being available on 35mm film, and the disadvantage that everything went through duping generations before it got to the point where anybody could see it. Ours has the disadvantage of being available only on video, although we certainly have thought of transform­ ing the video back to film, a process which now can produce very fine results. But it also has the advantage of having been put through all of the electronic cleaning processes that are not avail­ able in photo-mechanical work, and there was no loss of photographic generations as we made digital video masters of the best sources that we had for each component of the film. One might, I guess, say that their restoration is slightly more academic than ours. But you have to keep in mind that nobody knows exactly what this movie looked like when it was new. There is a script, but the script is a production script, and it varies considerably from the final film. In small ways, such as the wording of titles, and in much larger ways as well, such as extensive sequences which apparently were photographed (there are stills for them) but which were never in the movie even when it was new. They seem to have shot enough footage to make two mov­ ies, in case Willis O’Brien’s animation failed, so that they could have made a movie without the dinosaurs.
They were prepared to fall back on other adventurous subplots, right? Right. But in fact, of course, the animation
was a triumph, and they ended up leaving out a lot of material which is in the script and a lot of material which was shot. We know this because there are many detailed synopses of the film as it was first shown, and none of those components that are in the script are in the synopses.
How complete is your restoration? I would say it’s probably about 90% of what audiences first saw in 1925.
And the recent Eastman House restoration? How long was that? I think that their version and our version are
very close to the same length. But I know they put in more of the intertitles from the script than we used.
So what was your objective when you set out to do your own restoration? My primary objective was to make a film which
played well and was entertaining and reflected the intention of the original film, without making it look like it had been pieced together from shards. I think their primary objective was to get in every­ thing they could possibly get. There are certain things we had that I left out—not ònly title cards, which are in the original script and which may or may not have been in the original cut of the film, we don’t know, but there are also—Have you read the novel?
As a high schooler, yes. Well, there’s a character in the novel who’s a
Brazilian Negro by the name of Zambo, who is really one of the heroes of the story. In the screen­ play, this guy gets transformed to a sort of comic black right off the plantation! His dialogue titles are in Negro dialect as imagined by a white writer. I put Zambo’s dialogue in standard English, and left out some of the shots of him rolling his eyes and doing other comic things that I think are just simply not acceptable to modern audiences. I don’t regard those shots as really integral to the film, but I do regard them as an obstacle to enjoyment of it by a modern audience.
Are there any instances where you had SOME footage from a scene—but just not enough to be able to include it in your restoration? There is a sequence around a monkey who
plays an important part in the story because he ends up carrying a rope up the cliff to the pla­ teau, enabling the folks to escape. At some point in the original film, the monkey has broken a leg and Paula [Bessie Love], the girl on the expedi­ tion, treats the monkey, which explains its deep affection for her. We had a couple shots of Paula treating the monkey, but not enough to make sense of the sequence. So 1 didn’t use it at all. Then there are other gaps in continuity. For
example, Zambo breaks his arm, and suddenly appears with it in a cast. I don’t believe that [the incident of Zambo breaking his arm] was ever in the film as it played theatrically. The episode in which it occurred is in the script, and I’ve seen
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