sitting on a bridge by himself, looking down the Thames estuary. My feeling is that he’s con­ templating what’s happened. And since the story is really about him—he is the center of the story, not the dinosaurs—I made that the last shot. It holds, it fades, it has a kind of finality about it. And it takes the curse off the truncated shot of the dinosaur swimming. But it was an editorial choice. We might have the real end of the film there, but I don’t know it for sure.
You've also included, as a supplement to the VHS and DVD, 12m of dinosaur animation outtakes that are now being officially re­ leased for the first time. Needless to say, the mere existence of out-
takes from a film like this is flabbergasting. They’re clearly outtakes—they’re shots where the animator pops into the shot for a few frames. There are shots in there which would dovetail into the film, but I did not put them in. One of my friends made the argument that [the effects men] were running multiple cameras on that animation, and they wouldn’t have shot it if they hadn’t meant to use it, and it should have been in [the restoration]. I think the shots that were possibilities made the dinosaurs look like do­ mestic kitty cats [laughs], and that they prob­ ably were not used because, when they were screened, the dinosaurs didn’t have a very men­ acing quality about them. I’m sure people will debate whether the shots should be in the con­ tinuity or not, and no doubt somebody will have a lot of fun making a tape and putting all those shots into their own “personal” copy!
What else would you like readers to know about your restoration? I’m proud of it! I think that, considering in
particular the deplorable condition of the mate­ rial that survived in Czechoslovakia, we were able electronically to do wonders with it. It looks beau­ tiful, it looks like it’s right off the negative, it’s sharp, it’s amazingly clean. It suggests to me that there are many films beyond THE LOST WORLD which would be better restored by taking them to an electronic medium, doing all that one can elec­ tronically and then going back to film, rather than simply copying them from film to film straight across in the first place. So I’m pleased with what we were able to do with it.
It takes an impossible man to achieve the impossible: Wallace Beery as the great zoologist George Edward Challenger.
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