The Ghost of Slumber Mountain

We take for granted the technology today that allows us to watch movies of humans interacting with dinosaurs, a la "Jurassic Park." But these works of cinema wouldn't be possible without the team of Willis O'Brien and Herbert Dawley introducing the very first movie that merged live action with stop-motion effects to create, back in its day, breathtaking, chilling sequences of dinosaurs and homo sapiens on the same screen. November 1918's "The Ghost of Slumber Mountain" gave viewers a sense of how earth's giant creatures millions of years ago looked liked, acted and the manner they fought one another.

The film's two creators appear in the movie that has Dawley and another companion stumbling upon Mad Dick, the hermit, played by O'Brien. Mad Dick tells Dawley to take his strange-looking telescope, climb the mountain, and use it to see some amazing sites in the valley. He does, and he spots some dinosaurs as well as other creatures from the way distant past. This makes "The Ghost of Slumber Mountain" the first movie to show time travel.

The film became a box office hit, collecting over $100,000 on a $3,000 investment. But the two creators didn't get along soon after its completion. Dawley, a former car designer for Pierce-Arrow automobiles, was the producer of "The Ghost of Slumber Mountain." He had approached O'Brien, the genius behind 1915's "The Dinosaur and the Missing Link" and who had just got laid off from Edison Company after making several Conquest Pictures geared towards little kids. O'Brien wrote the script and directed the stop-motion effects for the 40-minute movie, while Dawley designed and sculptured the creatures.

After some complaints from a theater owner, the producer cut the movie in half. Conflicting accounts of who burnt whom first, but when wealthy movie executive, Watterson Rothacker, owner to the rights to Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 dinosaur novel, "The Lost World," hired O'Brien to oversee the project, the lawsuits from Dawley started flying. "The Lost World" was tied up in the courts for years until the case was settled out of courts, allowing an even greater technological marvel than "The Ghost at Slumber Mountain" to be shown by O'Brien and Rothacker.

Having previously only done clay-animated shorts depicting dinosaurs, Willis H. O'Brien would by this period in his life attempt something more ambitious of which this film is the result. It begins in live-action as a man-played by this film's producer Herbert M. Dawley-starts telling his two pre-teen male nephews a story as it segues to him and a fellow traveler on a canoe with a dog setting up camp. His friend tells of an old hermit named Mad Dick (O'Brien) who has a telescope that allows him to see prehistoric creatures. So those creatures come to life on screen as we see some dino fights. I'll stop there and just say Willis improves himself here as he attempted more realistic renderings of the dinosaurs instead of the cartoony ones previously. While this film was a mix of live-action and clay animation, they're not done together in the same scene as the split-screen method hadn't been developed yet. Still, it does the job as well as one could expect at the time. Too bad that only an 18-minute version exists, instead of the 40-minute one that was originally released. What makes this a really important work for O'Brien was the fact that it led him to be hired to work on something even more ambitious: the original filmed version of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World...

This short hasn't aged well-and I don't simply mean film stock aging either. The plot, the script and the idea are now creaky. Given that Willis O'Brien was part of the technical crew on King Kong some 15 years later, the stop-motion work in the last fourth or so of the film is really training for what he did on that film. It has a certain historic significance, but little else. Not even as a charming, if dusty curio. For ardent film buffs only, with the above caveats.

This film by stop-motion animation pioneer Willis O'Brien, the same guy behind the effects of "King Kong" (1933), "The Ghost of Slumber Mountain," reportedly, was originally a three-reel feature, but was subsequently cut to a reel by the producer and with only about half the original picture surviving today. What remains isn't only interesting technically for the stop-motion animation of dinosaurs, but also for the separate live-action bits, which anticipate the structure of "King Kong" in another way with a reflexive narrative that incorporates within the film a surrogate for the filmmaker outside it. The dinosaur stuff is framed as seen through some kind of telescope or visual medium--like a camera. This is further framed by a painting within a dream, which in turn is a story told by the protagonist to children, who've interrupted him from his work of writing--perhaps doubly authoring the very story that is the film. Quite elaborate for under twenty minutes from 1918 and for a film that was already meticulously piece of construction in its modeling and stop-motion animation. It makes me wonder, along with similarities in "The Lost World" (1925), if O'Brien didn't have more to do with the shaping of "King Kong" beyond action scenes such as a giant gorilla fighting a T-Rex--not that that's not incredibly impressive on its own.

Also, I joked about the double entendres of his prior "The Dinosaur and the Missing Link" (1915), but now I'm even more suspicious that O'Brien is pulling our legs here with such title cards full of homoerotic suggestions as, "I tried to persuade Joe to remove his clothes and pose as a faun," and all the talk about the hermit "Mad Dick" and his having "gazed through a queer looking instrument." Come to think of it, it seems on odd choice to pick as your story to tell being that male camping trip where you dreamed about giant lizards.

It's not the best old movie ever, but it's good. Highly recommend.