Julian, who had rescued Merry-Go-Round from Stroheim’s budget-breaking extravagance, seems to have had all of Stroheim’s ego with little of his talent and, on the Phantom set, he swiftly alienated cast and crew. Chaney wanted Erich von Stroheim, but the studio picked Rupert Julian, an actor/director who, like Stroheim, had made his reputation playing evil Germans (he specialized in Kaiser Wilhelm). After a contentious shoot the film went through a torturous string of rewrites, reshoots, and re-edits before-and after-its 1925 release. The studio, however, never stopped tinkering with the story. Costar Mary Philbin, who plays the Phantom’s virginal victim Christine, later recalled that Chaney distributed excerpts from the novel to his castmates. Even when the idea was revived, the studio proposed turning it into a historical swashbuckler called The Phantom Swordsman, but Chaney insisted on a script that followed Leroux’s story. “That ungrateful little bastard is leaving me with a million dollar picture that has a misshapen freak as the main character!” Laemmle wailed, according to Riley.Īfter Thalberg’s departure the studio shelved the property as too morbid. Laemmle’s former protégé Irving Thalberg purchased the book for Universal just before ditching penny-pinching Uncle Carl for the newly formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The novel is soaked in late-Victorian decadence, its preoccupation with the heroine’s purity in the face of her obsessed stalker-kidnapper a transparent veil for titillation. Inspired by a tour of the extensive cellars beneath the Paris Opera, Leroux spun a fantastical tale of a disfigured musical genius living in the bowels of the Opera who stalks a young singer. Leroux invented the Phantom in 1909 shortly after he retired from journalism to write potboilers like the 1907 locked-room mystery The Mystery of the Yellow Room. Riley’s book on the film, picked by Chaney after Laemmle’s planned adaptation of The Man Who Laughs fell through. Gaston Leroux’s Phantom was a last-minute, second choice, according to Philip J. No one cared what the as-yet-unnamed picture was Chaney meant profits. When studio chief Carl Laemmle announced at a sales convention that he’d booked Chaney again, his audience gave him a standing ovation. In 1924 the Phantom was just a means for Universal to get one more picture out of money-maker Lon Chaney, who had been a box-office smash in The Hunchback of Notre Dame the previous year. He anticipates both superheroes and psychotics, with future shock purveyors like Hitchcock and William Castle endlessly reworking his monstrous reveal, the moment of unmasking, that makes the unwary jump.
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The roots of the Phantom movie lie in Gothic fairy tales like “Beauty and the Beast” and “Bluebeard,” in films such as the 1913 Fantômas serial, and even in the disfigured veterans of World War I. He is the unholy spawn of three mismatched parents: a French writer who claimed his fiction was fact-based, a brilliant actor whose career was built playing villains and outcasts, and a studio head who-like a torch-wielding villager-feared and almost destroyed the monster he never understood. Before Dracula, before Frankenstein, before the Universal Pictures Corporation understood there was money to be made scaring the bejesus out of its audience, there was the Phantom.