Fantasia Obscura: Why You Haven’t Seen the 1966 Film That Inspired “Jurassic Park”
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, and not every film should remain obscure.
Because sometimes, good work by a great artist can get lost if the times change while the studio is changing hands…
The Valley of Gwangi (1969)
(Warner Bros.-Seven Arts; Director: James O’Connoly)
Ray Harryhausen was a giant in the history of film visual effects; at the very least, he could whip up such a good looking crowd of onlookers to dance around him at his desk that you’d see footage of him and believe that he was a giant. He apprenticed under Willis O’Brien, the man who brought the original King Kong to life for RKO, and influenced such film makers as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, James Cameron, and just about every visual effects house in operation today.
When Willis O’Brien died in 1966, he had an unproduced screenplay he wrote titled The Valley of the Mists. His work about cowboys finding an allosaurus at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and bringing it back to perform for crowds was heavily influenced by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, the film adaptation for which O’Brien did the effects work on, and elements of this screenplay ended up in the Mexican-American production The Beast of Hollow Mountain from 1956.
The idea of cowboys roping dinosaurs was a potent meme, one that Harryhausen could not let go of when he literally inherited O’Brien’s script. Perhaps it was loyalty to O’Brien, wanting to honor him through production of the script, that pushed him to produce the film and oversee the effects. And with the good notices he was getting for his last project, giving Raquel Welch dinosaur co-stars to work with in One Million Years B.C., the likelihood that doing another dino-pic would be just as successful must have seemed certain.
And while the final picture may have seemed familiar to viewers of other “lost world” pics that both O’Brien and Harryhausen worked on, there was very little from the production to keep people from watching it. Yes, it’s got a familiar story, the whole boy-meets-girl-again-after-last-fight, girl-and-boy-travel-to-lost-world- together, boy-and-girl-kiss-and-make-up-while-finding-king-of-beasts, boy-and-girl-bring-creature-back-home-where-it-escapes-and-hilarity-ensues plot that’s been around even before Warner Brothers introduced sound in The Jazz Singer, but if films with too familiar a story could not be made, we’d get only seven titles in theaters a year. And in any event, some of the visuals made folks stand up and take note; Spielberg is on record as having cited Gwangi as the inspiration for the meat eater jumping on its prey we see in Jurassic Park.
It’s hard for modern viewers to fathom how the film could have just disappeared from consciousness if one watches it without context (while assuming the viewer is not predisposed to hate genre films, Westerns, or stop-motion in general). O’Brien’s script, after the re-write by TV writer William Bast and musical lyricist Julian More, takes no more liberties with expectations or reality than other films Harryhausen did work on, such as Earth vs. the Flying Saucers or 20 Million Miles to Earth. Neither James Franciscus nor Gina Golan caused the film to flag when they appeared separately (although there was very little chemistry between them when they were together onscreen), and the cast (both flesh and Dynomation) served the story well. It’s not an unpleasant film to watch by any stretch of the imagination.
What doomed it to obscurity was being caught in a corporate kerfuffle.
The film’s release in 1969 came at a weird moment for the studio. A few years in either direction, and someone at Warner Brothers might have been able to see Gwangi through its distribution with few hiccups; however, there was no chance that the studio was going to hold itself together in the midst of the horse trading (dino trading?) flowing across the lot.
A few years earlier in 1966, Jack Warner, the last of the old studio system heads and last of the Warner Brothers, sold his shares in the studio to Seven Arts Productions, an independent producer that got involved with equity stakes and back-end deals that made them rich enough to buy control of a studio for $24 million. Unfortunately, the new studio, Warner Brothers-Seven Arts, did not turn a profit reliably during its brief run, and shot themselves in the foot when they acquired Atlantic Records in a badly thought-out deal, so by the time the final cut of Gwangi showed up, the studio was in a tailspin.
As the film was being released, the studio landed on “Free Parking;” or, to be more precise, Free Parking landed on them. Kinney National Services Inc., a concern built out of a company than handled parking garages in New Jersey, was diversifying its holdings, getting into the entertainment business. After picking up National Periodicals (better known as DC Comics), the company bought Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, just in time for Gwangi to get treated like an afterthought by the marketing and distribution departments.
Had the film come a few years later, when money started to come back into the studio through Woodstock, and the conglomerate’s need to avoid federal price fixing charges leveled against the parking operations, which forced the company to spin off all non-entertainment properties from their core business, Harryhausen’s production might have done better. The new company, which through more wheeling and dealing years later would become what we know today as Time Warner Inc., would probably have done more than place the film on a double bill with The Good Guys and the Bad Guys, a Western whose only dinosaurs on screen were Robert Mitchum and George Kennedy, dooming the film to subsisting on passing references and the occasional late-night TV appearance.
Such was the way of it, though. While Harryhausen would never do another dinosaur picture, he still enjoyed success with two Sinbad pictures and the original Clash of the Titans. With his overall body of work still highly regarded, the man could afford a few holes in the record, even ones the size of an allosaurus…
NEXT TIME: The film that gave Bela Lugosi a break from Dracula, and Robert Barleth Cummings a career path…
