The Lost World (Watterson R. Rothacker Productions, First National, 1925)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, October 19) my husband Charles and I watched the Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Showcase” presentation of one of the most historically important films ever made – and one of the best. The film was The Lost World (1925), based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel about an eccentric man named Professor Challenger (Wallace Beery) who is convinced that there’s a plateau near the Amazon river in Brazil where the dinosaurs never died out and are still alive to this day. He’s discovered an old diary from an American explorer named Maple White which contains his crude drawings of the prehistoric life forms White discovered there. Challenger insists that he personally saw the living dinosaurs, but all his records were lost when his canoe overturned in the Amazon on his way back. Naturally the other professors and members of his lecture audience scoff at him. Challenger insists that if he can mount another expedition to his Brazilian redoubt he can offer proof positive that there are living dinosaurs there. He gets financial backing from an unlikely source: the London Record-Herald, one of the newspapers that most eagerly discredited him. Record-Herald reporter Ed Malone (Lloyd Hughes) has crashed Challenger’s lecture despite his ban on members of the media because his girlfriend, Gladys Hungerford (Alma Bennett), refuses to marry him until he goes on some sort of life-threatening adventure. Determined to get an interview with Challenger and a berth on his expedition, Malone follows him home and there’s a bizarre fight between them that verges on slapstick comedy. (Remember that Wallace Beery had got his start in films at Mack Sennett’s Keystone studio.) When Malone discovers that Maple White’s daughter Paula (Bessie Love) is living in Challenger’s home and is eager to make the trip to Brazil to find her missing father (did Conan Doyle rip this off from H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines?), Malone is able to sell his editors on the idea of financing the trip as a human-interest story. The crew also includes Sir John Roxton (Lewis Stone), a veteran explorer with a May-December crush on Paula White; Prof. Summerlee (Arthur Hoyt), an expert on insects; Austin (Frank Fitch Smiles), Prof. Challenger’s butler; and a native bearer, Zambo (Jules Cowles), who’s depicted with the typical racism of the era. The expedition’s progress is illustrated by a cartoon of a model boat setting off from Liverpool to Brazil and a dark line showing the expedition’s progress up the Amazon – the sort of thing later parodied vividly by Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Victor Schertzinger in the Road movies.

When Challenger and crew finally get to the lost mesa, it’s a narrow promontory with a slope they can climb and a wide rock formation with a gorge between them. The explorers find a tree on the top of the promontory and chop it down so they can have a log bridge to walk across. Even before they make the crossing, they’ve already seen a Pteranodon (a flying dinosaur) in the skies above them, and once they cross they see a Brontosaurus lazily munching on the leaves of the trees. They’re also followed by an ape-man (Bull Montana) in singularly unconvincing makeup, who drops a rock on the party and comes close to killing one or more of them. Unfortunately, the Brontosaurus dislodges the log bridge, stranding the human party on the big mesa with no apparent way of escape. They witness the predatory Allosaurus (the Jurassic precursor to Tyrannosaurus rex, who lived later in the Cretaceous period) prey on various other dinosaurs, including Trachodons, Triceratopses, Monocloniuses, and Stegosaurs. The humans flee and take refuge in some convenient caves, in one of which Roxton finds the skeleton of Maple White, which he identifies from his pocket watch which is engraved with the initials “M.W.” and contains a locket with a photo of Paula. Ironically, Paula and Ed are confessing their love for each other just before Roxton arrives with the bad news. The Allosaurus knocks the Brontosaurus off the mesa and into a quagmire below. Then it turns out that the entire mesa is an active volcano, which blows just as all this is happening. In the film’s most thrilling sequence, there’s a stampede of Brontosauri as they try to flee from the eruption, unsuccessfully. The people find a network of hollows inside the mesa that allow them to escape, and Prof. Challenger hits on the idea of saving the Brontosaurus and building a raft with which to tow him back to London as proof positive that dinosaurs still exist. Unfortunately, the chains holding the Brontosaurus in place as it’s off-loaded from the raft break and the prehistoric creature wanders through the streets of London, causing the predictable havoc before it finally swims out to sea (remember that the original Brontosauri were amphibious). Paula White insists that Ed Malone must go through with his commitment to Gladys Hungerford, but it turns out he doesn’t have to because in the meantime Gladys has married a thoroughly milquetoast London accountant named Percy Potts (Leo White, later a frequent supporting player in The Three Stooges’ shorts) who looks like a contestant in the Monty Python “Upper-Class Twit of the Year” competition. So Ed and Paula get together after all and Roxton looks on sadly as a passer-by comments, “There goes Sir John Roxton – sportsman.”

Though Harry Hoyt is credited with “dramatic direction,” the real auteur behind The Lost World is its special-effects genius, Willis H. O’Brien. Born in Oakland, California in 1886, O’Brien caught the moviemaking bug early, though in a special and unique way. He pioneered the art of stop-motion animation, a way of making models appear to move on screen by taking one frame of film, moving the model slightly, taking another frame, and so on until a convincing illusion of life was achieved. O’Brien begun by making clay models of boxers in a variation of the process that is now called Claymation, but soon he took an interest in bringing the dinosaurs and other prehistoric life forms back to life with his model process. Harold Wobber, an exhibitor in San Francisco, saw a 90-second test O’Brien made with this process and hired him to make a novelty short called The Dinosaur and the Missing Link (1915), which proved so successful that the Edison company hired him to make similar novelty reels with titles like R.F.D. 10,000 B.C. and Prehistoric Poultry. In 1918 O’Brien connected with producer Herbert M. Dawley to make a three-reel short called The Ghost of Slumber Mountain, but Dawley tried to take credit for inventing the stop-motion process himself. O’Brien next hooked up with another independent producer, Watterson R. Rothacker, who had bought the screen rights to Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and figured O’Brien’s technique was good enough to dramatize the dinosaurs as part of a feature-length film. In 1922 Rothacker and O’Brien had completed a 10-minute test reel which was shown to an audience in New York with Conan Doyle introducing it from the stage. “These pictures are not occult, but they are psychic, because everything that emanates from the human brain or the human spirit is psychic,” said Conan Doyle – who was already getting ridiculed for his belief in spiritualism and psychic phenomena. “It is not supernatural; nothing is. It is preternatural in the sense that it is not known to our ordinary senses. It is the effect of the joining on one hand of imagination, and on the other hand of some power of materialization. The imagination, I must say, comes from me – the materializing power from elsewhere.” A New York Times reporter wrote that Conan Doyle’s “monsters of the ancient world, or of the new world he has discovered in the ether, were extraordinarily lifelike. If fakes, they were masterpieces.” After Conan Doyle read that article, he issued another statement acknowledging what the images were – and O’Brien’s former producer, Herbert Dawley, announced he was going to sue O’Brien for stealing a process Dawley had invented.

Watterson Rothacker cut a deal with First National Pictures to co-produce The Lost World – an unusual arrangement in 1925, though it would become the way most major films were made once the all-inclusive studio system gradually met its demise in the early 1950’s. First National’s publicity claimed that the film had taken seven years to make and cost over $1 million. This included building a set representing two blocks of London that was one-eighth of a mile long. Bessie Love, in an unpublished autobiography called Love from Hollywood, recalled that the “Amazon” was played by an open-air Los Angeles sewer that predictably stank to high heaven. She also recalled the then-new experience of having to flee in terror from a menace that didn’t exist because it would be added later in post-production. She praised the patience of Harry Hoyt: “In place of yelling, ‘Run!,’ when the prehistoric animals started chasing us, Mr. Hoyt explained in detail why we should run; namely, the tyrannosaurus [sic] was a carnivorous dinosaur. The animals were not actually on stage … it was double exposure. It didn’t really matter if you called them Joe, Gus, and Heimie as long as you looked terrified and scampered.” To create the effect of the Brontosaurus rampaging through the London streets, O’Brien and his technicians animated it against a stark white background so that both a negative and a positive could be made. The negative, which showed the beast as a clear hole against a black background, was used to mask out the parts of the image in which the dinosaur would appear in the finished film. In their book The Making of King Kong, Orville Goldner and George M. Turner wrote that in 1925, “Audiences and critics were so wild about the dinosaurs they were willing to tolerate the long and unexciting portions dealing with a standard romantic situation.” The original running time was nearly two hours, but for years the only prints of The Lost World in existence were of an hour-long cut-down version produced by Eastman Kodak under license from First National for home-movie showings. Various attempts were made to restore The Lost World, including a laserdisc version produced by the George Eastman House in 1997 with production stills used to fill in the missing scenes.

Charles and I had previously seen the hour-long version, but when we watched The Lost World on October 19, 2025 it was in a 100-minute cut created by Lobster Films in association with Flicker Alley and Blackhawk Films. This restoration was completed in 2016 and involved no fewer than 11 film archives, each contributing scenes from partially extant prints to fuse into a whole that came as close as possible to what 1925 audiences saw. Though the film was saddled with a rather anemic score by Robert Israel – when the audience assembled to watch Professor Challenger give his triumphant lecture announcing the arrival of a living Brontosaurus in London, Charles said he wished we were hearing the march from O’Brien’s next project, King Kong (1933), instead – the extra footage made The Lost World a much better movie than the cut-down one we’d seen before. O’Brien’s triumph in bringing The Lost World and its dinosaurs to life should have led him to a much happier career than he had. The rest of his résumé would be filled with unrealized projects, including a Lost World sequel; a version of Frankenstein in which the Monster would have been played by a stop-motion model; an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The Food of the Gods; a partially shot 1930 project called Creation which would have reunited him with Harry Hoyt; a 1942 film called Gwangi in which prehistoric monsters would have been discovered on an Argentine plateau (later filmed in 1969 as The Valley of Gwangi with effects by O’Brien’s great disciple, Ray Harryhausen, and the setting moved to Mexico); and a potentially fascinating story called War Eagles in which an expedition to the Arctic discovers giant eagles that, because they’re living beings instead of metallic creations, prove useful when the U.S. is attacked by an enemy that has an infernal device that instantly fatigues metal. In 1930 O’Brien was working on Creation when David O. Selznick, newly appointed production head at RKO, hired documentary filmmaker Merian C. Cooper as his assistant. Cooper was assigned to review all the projects RKO was then involved with and make recommendations to Selznick as to which should be continued and which scrapped. Cooper nixed Creation as “just a bunch of animals walking around,” but he ordered O’Brien and his crew kept on salary because Cooper had had in mind a story about a giant ape running loose on the streets of New York City. Cooper saw O’Brien’s stop-motion process as a financially viable way to film his giant-ape story, and the result was King Kong (1933), a timeless classic, one of the most iconic movies ever made, and the film on which Willis O’Brien’s reputation rests.