When Dinosaur Movie Palaces Ruled The Earth
A Lost Cleveland Theatre Presents The Lost World in 1925
Jack Pickford and Norman Shearer were fine, I
suppose, and Anita Stewart would do, but whoa, how did Clevelanders react to
sight of a brontosaurus on Now Playing pages? Movies were news in 1925, many
papers devoting pages ... sections ... to programming tendered by temples of
the shadowplay (to borrow verbiage of that era). Didn't Joni Mitchell lament
paving paradise to put up a parking lot? Well, that was fate of the Stillman, a
Loew's venue seating 1,800 that was torn to rubble so that apartment dwellers
could be closer to their cars. How long are periods of mourning for a great
theatre sacrificed to the heavy ball? I've not yet had to endure the Liberty's wreckage, and could
visit its bisected-since-70's remnant any time, though said change to the
auditorium keeps me at bay. Still, I wouldn't want to see it wrecked. The
Stillman lasted till 1965, and like many a monolith, had flirtation with 70mm
and even Cinerama before value of real estate tempted fate. Old theatres
everywhere have fallen like so many dinosaurs of a past century, but ad art
survives to tell what a long-lost Stillman did with The Lost World and others
we call classic. Imagination alone tells us what the stop-motion
masterpiece was like in 1925 when brand new and truly a fresh thrill. Dinosaurs
on screen? Impossible!
So this raises my question: Had moviegoers seen
prehistoric animals before? There was The Ghost Of Slumber Mountain in 1919,
with effects by Willis O' Brien, but that was a short subject. Certainly The Lost World was a first big production with
dinosaurs. How did 1,800 patrons at the Stillman react? Was it like French folk
in 1895 whooping it up over trains that rushed toward them from a hung sheet?
Did youngsters think the creatures were real? (one of these days I'd like to
get around to answering some of endless questions asked here) We're running out
of people who'd know. In fact, I'd say it's already too late. What lore surrounds
The Lost World in earlier incarnation is limited to memory of Kodascope prints
in 16mm, home movie reels like what I had in 1964, and Eastman House dig that
turned up footage gone missing since 1925. It's a lot like recover of dinosaur
bones constructed to semblance of how the monster appeared a million years
ago. Cleveland's
crowd might as well have lived in primordial time for access they had to a Lost
World so nitrate-clear as to look like stone-age documentary. For myself and
others who care, 8mm was grand, and digital reconstruction is better, but
they'll not approach "The One Kind Of Photoplay YOU Never Saw Before"
at Leow's Stillman.
More of The Lost World HERE at Greenbriar Archive, and another vanished Cleveland venue, the New Lyceum, HERE.
THE GHOST OF SLUMBER MOUNTAIN has most assuredly survived... was a favorite for 8mm collectors back in the 60's. You can find several postings on YouTube.
ReplyDeleteDonald Benson considers tricks of the Hollywood trade:
ReplyDeleteA big thing to remember is not just the novelty of dinosaurs in 1925, but the general unawareness of how many ways film could lie. Nobody questioned when a Keystone film was edited to imply a row of seedy storefronts were directly across the street from a mansion with acres of lawn. Or when a low-budget movie asserted we were in London.
Today even a casual viewer knows what trickery is available. We also have an idea of what's technically and financially rational (Did anybody believe the 1970's Kong was the heavily hyped giant robot and not a guy in a suit?). At the same time we can still be fooled by artful use of stock footage as well as painted mattes and detailed miniatures, even in old films. Careful, plausible lies still convince us.
In 1925, a sophisticated adult might well believe that Hollywood had at least built full-sized robots, just as he might assume Doug Fairbanks' "Robin Hood" castle was as tall as it looked. After all, Hollywood pushed the idea that money and moderation were no object in the manufacture of dreams.
For the more innocent, it was real because you could see it was real, period. It's not as if they had other dino footage -- or even that much exposure to, say, elephants -- to question how it looked.