stills for it, so they shot it. But it’s one of those sequences which was not in the final cut of the film. So some of the gaps which are in [the resto­ ration] are the way the film was originally edited. In any event, I’m actually very pleased with
what was done. Of course, it was not my work alone: My co-producer was a French friend by the name of Serge Bromberg, and we had an ex­ tremely fine French film editor, Mathieu Dubosco. It was the three of us who sat up days and nights, and nights, and more nights, figuring out what to do with this. We did all the work in Paris.
Did you get a lot of your material from sources in France? No, not much of it was found in France. There
were nine sources that went into the film. The prime source for the new footage came from Czechoslovakia, Narodni Filmovy Archiv. The Czech version is slightly longer than the 54m American home movie version, but not very much. But they used substantially different material. So in looking at the two, it was clear that it was go­ ing to be possible to put them together and come up with a much longer film. Then there were some additional sources—there was a trailer from which we took a couple of shots that weren’t anywhere else. When Willis O’Brien spoke about his work at the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, a dem­ onstration reel of footage was run—it included some shots that were nowhere else, and we had that. And there was an educational film made by Eastman Teaching Films, an educational films department of Eastman Kodak. Their one-reel version was called A LOST WORLD and it was sup­ posed to be an educational film about prehistoric animal life. They used different footage than was used in the home movie cut-down. By the way, the American home movie ver­
sion was so popular that I was unable to find one print that was not all cut-up. So I had four prints, all original tinted prints from 1929, 1930, and by putting all of them on tape, I was able in each case to find an uncut shot. In each case but one, I found an uncut shot so that I was able to put it together and it looked smooth and new. The one exception was a shot, right at the end of the film, of Sir John Roxton, which you can see (if you look carefully) has been pieced together from sev­ eral copies.
You've also replaced the long-lost LOST WORLD
footage of Arthur Conan Doyle—sort of. At the beginning of the original film, Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle was shown sitting at his desk writing 48
what was supposed to be the epigram for the book. That footage is lost, but I had other footage of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, so I faked it. The footage I used was from an Arthur Conan Doyle interview that was shot in 1927; I found the decomposing 35mm nitrate camera negative and the outtakes in 1974 and I reconstructed an 11-12m film. So I took those two shots out of that.
What scenes are you confident WERE filmed and are still missing, and you would love to have found? I don’t think we’re missing any key material.
There are no gaps that really bother me. The most conjectural components are at the very beginning and the very end. The very begin­ ning of the film, the beginning of the material that came from the Czechoslovakian copy, starts in the middle of a scene between Malone [Lloyd Hughes] and his fiancee Gladys [Alma Bennett]. It doesn’t even establish where the scene is, although we know from the script it ’s supposed to be Gladys’ house. So I found a shot from later in the film where a tugboat is going by and it says LONDON on it, and I put that in there as an establishing shot, to at least tell the audi­ ence where we’re supposed to be. Then we cut straight inside the house to Malone and Gladys. For their version, the Eastman House people took a shot from later in the film and slowed it down and repeated it so that the exterior of Prof. Challenger’s [Wallace Beery] house also became the exterior of Gladys’ house! [laughs] But in either instance, it was an editorial decision that someone had to make. It would have been nice to have that [Malone-Gladys scene] from the very beginning, but it ’s not a very important scene except as a motivation for Malone, so we know he’s going on this expedition to please this girl—who seems a particularly unworthy love object, but who am I to judge? [laughs]
And the scene at the end that you men­ tioned? The end of the film is trickier. The last shot
in the Czechoslovakian copy is that shot of the dinosaur swimming out to sea past the steam­ ship. The script suggests that the film concludes that way. Eastman House used it as their last shot. But it ’s quite a truncated shot and it gives a feeling of incompleteness, because it doesn’t last long enough and it doesn’t fade. I felt that it was better to conclude with the last shot in the short American version, which holds for several beats and does fade: It’s a shot of Challenger
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