About The Lost World (1925)
The story behind the film
Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, published his adventure novel The Lost World in 1912. It introduced the explosive Professor George Edward Challenger, who insists that dinosaurs still survive on a remote plateau in South America — and leads an expedition to prove it. First National Pictures' 1925 film was the first feature-length adaptation, directed by Harry O. Hoyt from a screenplay by Marion Fairfax.
The real star was special-effects pioneer Willis O'Brien, who had experimented with stop-motion dinosaurs in short films such as The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1918, also on Starlite TV). For The Lost World, O'Brien and his team built detailed miniature dinosaurs around jointed metal skeletons, moved them a fraction at a time between single frames, and combined them with live-action footage of the actors. At first he had to split the frame to combine the two; as the work went on, his techniques improved so that live action and animation could share the same part of the screen.
Cast & crew
- Directed by Harry O. Hoyt; screenplay by Marion Fairfax
- Wallace Beery as Professor Challenger
- Bessie Love as Paula White, whose explorer father is lost on the plateau
- Lloyd Hughes as Edward Malone, a young reporter
- Lewis Stone as Sir John Roxton, the big-game hunter
- Arthur Hoyt as Professor Summerlee
- Special effects by Willis O'Brien
Why it's worth watching
This is the great-grandparent of Jurassic Park. A hundred years on, the dinosaurs — brontosaurus, allosaurus, pteranodon and more — are full of personality, and the scenes of them fighting, grazing and fleeing a volcanic eruption are still wonderful. It's also a rousing adventure with jungle perils, an ape-man and a rope bridge over a chasm.
The finale is the most famous part: the expedition brings a live brontosaurus back to London, where it escapes and rampages through the city before reaching Tower Bridge. Eight years before King Kong climbed the Empire State Building, The Lost World invented the giant-monster-in-the-city movie.
Fun facts
- Conan Doyle himself appears in an introduction at the start of the film, though it is missing from some surviving prints.
- Before the film was released, Conan Doyle showed some of O'Brien's test footage at a 1922 meeting of the Society of American Magicians in New York without explaining what it was, reportedly leaving the audience puzzled about whether they had seen real dinosaurs.
- O'Brien went on to create the effects for King Kong (1933).
- The Library of Congress added the film to the National Film Registry in 1998.
- For decades only a shortened version circulated; restorations from prints found in archives around the world have since recovered much of the original.
Public-domain status
The Lost World was published in 1925 and its US copyright has expired; the 1912 novel is also in the public domain. The film is in the public domain in the United States. See "Rights & source" below.