:56:01
a film intended for Lon Chaney, for which
Chaney had already designed a make-up
:56:06
before he walked off the production.
:56:08
The make-up was salvaged for the smiling
vampire in MGM's London After Midnight.
:56:13
Press from the mid-1930s notes
that Pierce had been working with Chaney
:56:17
on a "special secret make-up"
at the time of Chaney's death in 1930.
:56:23
The truth may never be known,
but Miss Foster says
:56:26
"Jack Pierce thought the world of
Lon Chaney and learned much from him."
:56:38
The phantom's disfigurement
in the original story
:56:41
has almost always discomfited
writers adapting the tale.
:56:44
Leroux had Erique born disfigured.
:56:47
So horrified was his mother
that she'd thrown him his first mask
:56:50
and refused to kiss him.
:56:52
In the earliest script
for the Chaney film,
:56:54
scenarist Elliott Clawson wrote
a back story set in Persia,
:56:58
where Erique was punished for political
crimes by being lashed to an anthill
:57:03
and his face eaten away
by the ravenous insects.
:57:06
Modern writers always seem to need
an event to trigger the phantom's tragedy.
:57:10
In 1936 Phantom was being planned
for Boris Karloff,
:57:14
who had had enough of the eight-hour
ordeals of Jack Pierce's make-up chair.
:57:19
WP Lipscomb's modern script posited
the phantom as a Parisian music master
:57:23
whose disfigurement was psychological.
:57:26
William Lipscomb was an English actor,
poet and playwright turned screenwriter.
:57:31
He wrote early talkie
Sherlock Holmes films in England,
:57:34
and came to Hollywood
to adapt his play Clive of India.
:57:38
He wrote scripts for A Tale of Two Cities
and Garden of Allah for David Selznick,
:57:42
Les Misérables and Cardinal Richelieu
for Zanuck, among many others.
:57:47
At Universal, he did B-movies with English
Empire themes, like The Sun Never Sets.