View source for Review:Willis O'Brien: Special Effects Genius/Barbara Roden

{{Cargo_Reviews_Articles
 |Date=1996-09-01
 |Book=Willis O'Brien: Special Effects Genius
 |BookAuthor=Steve Archer
 |Reviewer=Barbara Roden
 |Topics=Cinema
}}
This review of the book ''"Willis O'Brien: Special Effects Genius", by Steve Archer'' was written by [[Barbara Roden]] and published in the [[The Parish Magazine (newsletter)|The Parish Magazine]] (No. 14, september 1996).

This review presents Steve Archer's book as a valuable study of Willis O’Brien's career in special effects, with special importance for [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] readers because of the 1925 film of [[The Lost World (movie 1925)|The Lost World]]. It highlights O'Brien's pioneering stop-motion work, explains how much of the original film has been lost, and argues that this adaptation was crucial to the later achievement of King Kong.


== Review ==
[[File:the-parish-magazine-n14-1996-09-p28.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[The Parish Magazine (newsletter)|The Parish Magazine]] (No. 14, september 1996, p. 28)]]
[[File:the-parish-magazine-n14-1996-09-p29.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[The Parish Magazine (newsletter)|The Parish Magazine]] (No. 14, september 1996, p. 29)]]

: [[File:mcfarland-1993-willis-o-brien.jpg|100px]]
: '''Willis O'Brien: Special Effects Genius'''
: by Steve Archer
: McFarland and Company Inc., 1993; 226pp; US$28.50/£28.50; ISBN 0-89950-833-2


'''Reviewed by Barbara Roden'''

This volume serves as a companion to another 1993 publication from McFarland, '[[The Lost World (movie 1925)|The Lost World]]' of Willis O'Brien ([[Review:The Lost World of Willis O'Brien/Barbara Roden|reviewed]] in [[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society|ACD]] Vol. 4, 1993). O'Brien was, of course, one of the great Hollywood pioneers in the art of special effects, and his undoubted masterpiece is the 1933 classic King Kong, which showcased his mastery of the art of stop motion animation, the technique O'Brien invented and pioneered. 

Previous to King Kong, however, there was another masterpiece: the 1925 film version of [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s [[The Lost World]]. The first chapter of this book traces O'Brien's life and career through the silent film era and up to 1935, and it is this section which will be of most interest to Doyleans, containing as it does a synopsis of [[The Lost World (movie 1925)|The Lost World]] as it was originally shown. There are several crucial differences between the film as it stood in 1925 and the film that survives today. The original movie was twice as long as the film that we know, over the years the original negative was destroyed, and all that survives is an edited version which kept most of O'Brien's special effects work but jettisoned most of the character development and plot. 

At least O'Brien's work survives. Right from the start, it was realised that good as the film as a whole was, the special effects were the real star and main attraction. Today, audiences are familiar with the behind-the-scenes trickery which makes dinosaurs appear to walk the earth; but in 1925 it was little short of magic, and the book compares O'Brien with magicians who produce their effects but don't spoil them by explaining anything. O'Brien's techniques were shrouded in mystery, contemporary audiences speculated as to how the effects were achieved. As late as the 1950s it was still thought that King Kong had been brought to life by a man in a monkey suit. A contemporary reviewer of [[The Lost World (movie 1925)|The Lost World]] wrote, 'whether [the dinosaurs] are really as large as they appear, and are worked by mechanism or even concealed men... they are the most startling and intriguing monsters who have ever invaded screenland'. 

The book stresses that [[The Lost World (movie 1925)|The Lost World]] was a turning-point, both for O'Brien's career and for special effects in movies. If he had not had the opportunity to pioneer his skills in the earlier film, it is doubtful whether O'Brien would have had the chance to go on to make King Kong, one of the greatest movies ever made. Unfortunately, the years following King Kong were lean ones in many ways: O'Brien was not comfortable trying to sell his talents to producers, and preferred to wait for work to come to him. Several pet projects of his are detailed in the book, but by and large they came to nothing, and all that remains are a few storyboard drawings and some of O'Brien's notes regarding plot and character. 

He was involved, in 1960, in the second film version of The [[The Lost World (movie 1960)|The Lost World]], this one starring a miscast [[Claude Rains]] as [[Professor Challenger]]. A photograph shows O'Brien posing in front of his storyboards for a dinosaur sequence, but producer/director [[Irwin Allen]] decided to use live lizards shot in close-up rather than O'Brien's stop-motion technique. The plot of the film, as synopsised in this book, bears little resemblance to [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s original, as O'Brien noted: "The story is completely changed. You wouldn't recognise it. They claim that the live technique looks smoother, that animation is jerky. I don't think so.' O'Brien was officially listed as Effects Technician on the film, and there is no doubt that his presence lent a credibility to the project that might otherwise have been absent. It was to be his last major work: he died in 1962, although the knockabout comedy It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, released in 1963, lists him as 'consultant and director of animation'. O'Brien did work on the film for several months, planning the climactic scene in which the main characters are thrown from a fireman's ladder, but he died before the technical work on the scene began. 

As Willis O'Brien: Special Effects Genius makes clear, O'Brien was one of the great men of Hollywood special effects, inventing techniques which are still in extensive use today (the Tim Burton feature film The Nightmare Before Christmas, 1993, was shot entirely using stop-motion animation). And, as this book also makes clear, it was the 1925 [[The Lost World (movie 1925)|The Lost World]] which enabled O'Brien to pioneer and hone his techniques. It is criminal that the entire film does not survive: but enough remains to ensure that his genius will be recognised for years to come. 








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