The Lost World 1925

The Lost World is a 1925 American silent fantasy giant monster adventure film, directed by Harry O. Hoyt and written by Marion Fairfax, adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel of the same name. Produced and distributed by First National Pictures, a major Hollywood studio at the time, the film stars Wallace Beery as Professor Challenger and features pioneering stop motion special effects by Willis O'Brien, a forerunner of his work on King Kong (1933). Conan Doyle appears in a frontispiece to the film, absent from some extant prints. In 1998, The Lost World was deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.Due to its age, the film is now in the public domain. This was the first feature-length film made in the United States, possibly the world, to feature model animation as the primary special effect, or stop motion animation in general.[citation needed] Willis H. O'Brien had previously, in 1918, worked on a film called The Ghost of Slumber Mountain that used stop motion photography. In The Lost World, he combined animated dinosaurs with live-action footage of human beings, but at first he was able to do this only by separating the frame into two parts (also known as split screen). As work went on, O'Brien's technique grew better and he could combine live-action and stop-motion footage in the same part of the screen. For the live action scenes, an open sewer behind the MGM studio in Los Angeles was used as a river. The dinosaurs of this film were based on the artwork of Charles R. Knight. Some of the dinosaur models used in the film came into the possession of collector Forrest J Ackerman. In 1922, Conan Doyle screened O'Brien's test reel to a meeting of the Society of American Magicians, which included Harry Houdini. The astounded audience watched footage of a Triceratops family, an attack by an Allosaurus and some Stegosaurus footage. Doyle refused to discuss the film's origins. On the next day, The New York Times ran a front-page article about it, saying "(Conan Doyle's) monsters of the ancient world, or of the new world which he has discovered in the ether, were extraordinarily lifelike. If fakes, they were masterpieces" This is the first dinosaur-oriented film hit, and it led to other dinosaur films, from King Kong to the Jurassic Park series. Michael Crichton's sequel to Jurassic Park was named The Lost World, in homage to Doyle's novel and film From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Los...) Five Armies by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...