The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1919)

On the strength of the short films and other educational films that Willis O'Brien created for Thomas Edison, a producer named Herbert Dawley hired him to animate a full length dinosaur film entitled The Ghost of Slumber Mountain in 1919. The story revolved around an uncle telling his nephew and friends about the time he was out in the woods and came across a cabin in the woods occupied by the ghost of a palaeontologist. Exhorting him to look through his spyglass, the narrator sees magnificent prehistoric scenes unfold before him.

A fanciful story that certainly hearkens to Scientific Romances in a folksy way, Slumber Mountain is an early point of development in O'Brien's craft. He graduated from the charicatures of the Mannikin comedies into accurately constructed and moodily photographed models. These were built of clay and wood under the consultation of the famous palaeontologist Barnum Brown, discoverer of T-rex. The effect of the Triceratops, T-rex and Diatryma are fantastic for a film of its vintage. Rumour has it that O'Brien also played the mad, ghostly palaeontologist.

Unfortunately, the film was less than a success for him. The original 45 minutes were trimed down to 16 minutes, and though it made $100,000 dollars, O'Bie's paycheck stayed at a relatively meager sum. On top of that, Dawley tried to take credit for the animation. Years later, in a suit against O'Brien over the stop-motion animation in another, greater film, he would claim that:

An employee of mine who learned the process by working in my office has been claiming, as employees sometimes do, that he did all the work and that the idea belongs to him and that sort of thing.

In the hands of Dawley (who, among other things, even claimed that many of the dinosaur models were life sized), the leftover footage from Slumber Mountain made its way into Along the Moonbeam Trail in 1920 and the documentary Evolution in 1923. Prospects were looking down, but this film was the best thing to ever happen to O'Brien.

By 1922, Dawley's attempts at noteriety had come and gone while O'Brien was working studiously on another picture. Hollywood knew who did The Ghost of Slumber Mountain, and producer Watterson R. Rothacker hired O'Brien to do the animation for the first film adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World, one of the great epic adventures of the silent screen.