ALL SCI-FI

[Gord Green]

Herbert M. Dawley and Willis O’Brien : A feud or a fraud?

Dawley's involvement with dinosaurs began in 1917 with the making of his first film, The Ghost of Slumber Mountain, which was distributed to theaters in 1919. The movie was a huge box-office success.



Without Dawley's dream fulfilled of creating the illustion of realistic living dinosaurs for motion pictures, the history of motion pictures with dinosaurs in them would not have started as it did, and classic movies like the silent 1925 version of The Lost World, or King Kong in 1933 may never have been produced. In a twist of fate, Dawley has gone uncredited for his achievements in motion pictures. New information in this biography corrects that unfortunate error and restores Dawley's proper place as the significant pioneer of stop-motion animation that he was. A complete filmography of the many films that he produced further demonstrates his important contribution towards special effects in motion pictures.



Most special effects & film historians know Willis O’Brien and his association with the classic 1933 King Kong, however, mostly no one was aware of Herbert M. Dawley, which appears, he was just as capable & skilled as O’Brien, in the early pioneering days of stop motion special effects.
Willis O’Brien’s place in movie history is secure. He is the genius who engineered the stop-motion animation that made King Kong come to life in 1933.

He made a series of caveman shorts for Thomas Edison in the teens and worked on the prototype for Kong, The Lost World (1925).



We’ve always read that he was swindled by Herbert M. Dawley, his partner on an ambitious and widely-seen short called The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1918). There was even a battle over patents on the armatures that made its prehistoric monsters so realistic. Dawley has consistently been portrayed as the bad guy.

Now, thanks to the untiring efforts of the late Stephen A. Czerkas, it is time to rewrite history.



A talented artist and sculptor in his own right who created life-sized dinosaur skeletons for natural history museums (as well as movies), Czerkas founded the non-profit Dinosaur Museum in Blanding, Utah. He died in 2015 but his wife Sylvia has completed an elaborate book, Major Herbert M. Dawley: An Artist’s Life, and an accompanying DVD, Silent Roar: The Dinosaur Films of Herbert M. Dawley. They are nothing short of a revelation.





Dawley, it turns out, was a man of many talents: an actor, showman, artist, historian, and more. He was the chief designer for Pierce-Arrow, the classiest car on the road in the 1920s. He also helped to establish the Chatham Community Players in New Jersey, and it was in the attic of this institution that a partial 35mm print of his long-lost film Along the Moonbeam Trail (1921) was discovered. Footage from another local source, plus the British Film Institute, enabled Czerkas to cobble together a nearly-complete version of this tantalizing short, which is highlighted by impressive dinosaur action.



Willis O’Brien was an artistic diamond-in-the-rough. The towering ape in King Kong, O’Brien’s greatest claim to fame, may have been just a little rubber puppet, but it sprang to awesome, vicious, vibrant cinematic life in the grip of O’Brien’s enchanted hands. A versatile artist of demonstrable skill, O’Brien was equally adept at producing whimsical watercolors or bold charcoal sketches which threatened to leap from the page. His bona fides in the realm of movie special effects — particularly stop motion animation — were self-evident and unquestionable. In retrospect, when he’d alleged fifteen years earlier that he’d been cheated by an obscure, credit-grabbing producer named Herbert M. Dawley, who claimed O’Brien’s work in The Ghost of Slumber Mountain as his own, what serious film scholar could doubt him?

But now, nearly a century later, there are doubts, and cinema orthodoxy may be rewritten. Thanks to the detective work of sculptor animator paleontologist Stephan Czerkas, it now appears that Herbert Dawley may have deserved some of the credit he grabbed. And far from being a no-talent, front-office figurehead, it seems that Dawley had quite a bit of talent himself — particularly in the line of sculpting and animating dinosaurs. Were the acrimonious charges Dawley leveled at O’Brien as warranted as the ones O’Brien flung at him?

Did O’Brien learn as much about his craft from Dawley as Dawley did from O’Brien? Czerkas has uncovered documents, diaries, and — best of all — film footage which shows that the savage legal battle these two waged against one another was not a matter of black-and-white.

"Thanks to Czerkas’ efforts, the career of Herbert M. Dawley may need to be re-assessed, and the accepted verdict in O’Brien vs Dawley thrown out". – Randall W. Cook

Herbert M. Dawley and Willis O’Brien were both aspiring animators, but at this point Dawley hadn’t yet made a movie for release, whereas O’Brien had already directed and animated a handful of fairly impressive stop-motion films, and other odds and ends, such as commercials, at the Edison Company. However, in 1917 he was laid off from Edison because of cutbacks. Dawley, on the other hand, had a background as an engineer and amateur palaeontologist, and in 1918 had scraped together enough money to found his own film company, and hired O’Brien to help him make The Ghost of Slumber Mountain.


The “official” story has always been that Willis O’Brien directed the movie and created the dinosaur effects, perhaps with producer Dawley as his assistant, but that Dawley swindled O’Brien out of his money and credit by removing his name from the film.

However, thanks to years of research by paleo-artist, animator and model maker Stephen Czerkas, we now have a broader picture of the feud. According to Dawley’s version, Dawley had hired O’Brien as as his assistant. It was Dawley who created the dinosaur puppets and acted as primary director, writer and animator, but at the opening night he discovered, to his astonishment, that O’Brien had made leaflets that removed all his credits, and presented O’Brien as the main artistic force behind the movie. This angered Dawley to the point that he then took revenge by removing O’Brien’s credits altogether.

The feud between Dawley and O’Brien continued. Both moved on as animators, with O’Brien eventually ending up doing the animation for the feature film The Lost World, with Marcel Delgado as partner: it was Delgado who created the puppets that O’Brien used. Dawley continued to make shorts for his own company, including the 1920 movie Along the Moonbeam Trail. The film has long been a matter of hot debate, as it was presumed lost for several decades, and film scholars assumed that the dinosaur sequences in it were actually outtakes of Willis O’Brien’s work for The Ghost of Slumber Mountain.

However, upon screenings in later years, it has become clear that the scenes were all original, and animated by Herbert M. Dawley, which has also helped to somewhat clear his name of the reputation he gained over the years.
In 1922 when First National Pictures published the first promotional images for The Lost World, Dawley noticed a photo of Willis O’Brien playing with a dinosaur puppet that looked suspiciously much like it was made using the same technique that Dawley himself had recently patented, and that he had used when making The Ghost of Slumber Mountain with O’Brien. He threatened to sue, but the matter was eventually settled out of court. When the film was released in 1925, Dawley had already moved on to the theatre business.

Anyway – the film The Ghost of Slumber Mountain itself is not much of a masterpiece, partly due to its episodic nature, but the stop-motion animation and the dinosaur puppets are masterfully made. O’Brien had had some practice with the technique by now, and you can see a very clear improvement from the very crude 1915 dinosaur film to this one, partly, one would imagine, thanks to the contribution of Dawley and his puppets. The motions are still a bit jerky, and not nearly as fluid and naturalistic as those O’Brien achieved with The Lost World and King Kong, but one still marvels at the way he controls the bodies of the dinosaurs, and gives them personality, rather than just making rigid monsters. Especially impressive is a close-up sequence of a Triceratops eating. The way the animal’s jaws move in a circular motion, the hint of a tongue, the movement of the legs and the body when it shifts its weight – it looks big and heavy, its skin wrinkles.

Absolutely fabulous. And all just made on a tiny budget of 3 000 dollars (the whole film!). It grossed 100 000 dollars at the box office, most of which went to Dawley.

The film is, if course, inspired by the literary depictions of lost worlds inhabited by pre-historic creatures, first introduced by French author Jules Verne in A Trip to the Center of the Earth (1864). In this book we only meet aquatic dinos, though, and the ultimate inspiration for dinosaur-filled lost worlds comes from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s (yes, the Sherlock Holmes dude) 1912 novel, appropriately named The Lost World. The genre was further popularised byEdgar Rice Burroughs’ (yes, the Tarzan dude) Pellucidar series, starting with At the Earth’s Core from 1914. The film is not an adaptation of either novel, though.

Sources of research:

http://cinefex.com/blog/tag/herbert-m-dawley/

http://leonardmaltin.com/the-unsung-grandfather-of-king-kong/

https://scifist.net/2018/05/11/the-ghost-of-slumber-mountain/
_________________
There comes a time, thief, when gold loses its lustre, and the gems cease to sparkle, and the throne room becomes a prison; and all that is left is a father's love for his child.

[alltare]

Thanks for the very interesting review, Gord.

There are several copies of the movie The Ghost of Slumber Mountain on youtube. It's about 18 minutes long.

[Bud Brewster]

________________________________

A magnificent post, Gord! Thanks.

I love the artwork, and I found a better version of that fine poster, one which isn't so dark.



_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[orzel-w]

Awww... That Triceratops on the poster is so cuuuute.
_________________
...or not...

WayneO
-----------

[Maurice]

Nice post, Gord.
_________________
* * *
"The absence of limitations is the enemy of art."
― Orson Welles