Creation is an unfinished film from 1931 by Willis O’Brien and Merian C. Cooper. Essentially it’s about a rich family who get stranded with a Chillean submarine crew on an island of prehistoric animals and try to survive on it before the island blows itself up.
The film was scrapped by Cooper himself and producer David O. Selznick, who deemed it too boring and lacking in action. O’Brien and Cooper would later team up on a much more successful project that DID end up getting finished. What film was that? King Kong. In fact a lot of ideas and concepts from this made it into Kong.
Presumed lost, some test footage of the film was discovered to have survived. The story treatment also survived and both were unveiled during the anniversary of King Kong by future remake director Peter Jackson. The test footage can be seen here
but the really fun part is the story treatment which can be seen read aloud here in all it’s cheesy glory.
Creation contains examples of:
- Artistic License – Paleontology: The Arsinoitherium is described as being the size of “20 elephants", even though in reality it would’ve actually been smaller than modern elephants.
- Captain Obvious: The treatment points out the blatantly obvious in a lot of places.
- Disposable Fiancé: Hallet, to the point the script flat out describes him as “arrogant and useless”.
- Invincible Hero: Steve. He’s always right, knows more about the wildlife and survival than anyone else, gets the girl, always escapes death and in the concept art is drawn as looking dashing and handsome.
- Kid Hero: Billy though he’s more of a side character.
- Satellite Love Interest: Elaine Armitage’s scenes all revolve around Steve and Hallet.
