My next silent movie night will be on Wednesday, March 13, at 8:00 PM Eastern US time. Once again, I’ll provide live, improvised keyboard accompaniment. Live accompaniment is what makes silent movies special to me. You can react in real time in chat and even (gently!) criticize my playing.

The main feature will be the 1925 The Lost World. It’s based on the Conan Doyle novel of the same title, and he makes a brief appearance at the start, effectively putting his stamp of approval on the movie. The main character, Professor Challenger, is as smart as Sherlock Holmes but his opposite in temperament. Holmes is always calm and analytical, but Challenger has an explosive temper, especially when anyone doubts his claims. His present claim is hard to believe; he says he’s discovered a land in the upper Amazon basin with living dinosaurs. He organizes an expedition to go back there with two aims: to bring back proof and to find the missing member of the earlier party.

For a 1925 movie, the special effects are spectacular. Willis O’Brien used stop-motion techniques to make dinosaur models move on the screen. Sometimes as many as half a dozen dinosaurs are visible at once. There’s also a flying “pterodactyl” (though its crest makes it look more like a pteranodon). Eight years later, O’Brien refined his techniques further for King Kong.

The movie generally follows the novel; the biggest changes are to allow more impressive special effects. In the book, the party brings back a mere live pterodactyl as proof of its discoveries. What they bring back in the movie is far more impressive and dangerous. Some things are scaled back, though; the movie party is harassed by just one hostile hominin, rather than a whole tribe.

The version which I downloaded from the Internet Archive is about 1 hour 32 minutes long. Some parts, especially Challenger’s interview with the journalist Malone, clearly have missing bits. Since then I’ve found a more complete version; it’s 1 hour 44 minutes, and it’s tinted! That’s the one I’ll accompany on March 13. Several scenes are more satisfying in the longer version. I especially like a sequence where a character delivers some bad news, already known to the audience, to another character and no intertitles are necessary to convey what he says and how both of them react. It’s all in their expressions and actions.

The technobabble is odd in a scene where Challenger and another expedition member argue over whether their catapult will hurl an object in a curve or a parabola. The last I heard, a parabola is a curve! No matter, it’s a great movie, much better than the 1960 remake with lizards for dinosaurs.

To keep the dinosaur theme going, I’ll start the show with the short Gertie the Dinosaur, created by Winsor McCay and released in 1914. It’s a cartoon within a live-action film, and it’s generally considered the first animated film with characterization. Earlier cartoons, including McCay’s own, didn’t do much more than show off the techniques. In this one, McCay is shown making a bet that he can animate a dinosaur and then presenting the results. He talks to Gertie like a trainer putting a smart animal through its paces.

The technical innovations for this short included what came to be known as “in-betweening” and separate drawing of backgrounds, saving the principal artist from drawing every frame in full. Unfortunately, McCay didn’t give due credit to his assistants, and the live-action part of the presentation gives the impression he did it all himself.

I hope you’ll drop by on Twitch on March 13 to see these movies and hear the accompaniment I provide. As always, it will be improvised on the spot, so the performance will never be repeated the same way. Meanwhile, you can get a sample from my silent shorts on YouTube.