A cast list in the Nov 1925 Pictures and Picturegoers and a photograph in the 13 Dec 1924 Exhibitors Trade Review identified actress Virginia Browne Faire as “Marquette,” a native girl, but she is not listed in film credits. Credits do include Alma Bennett in the role of “Gladys Hungerford,” the fiancée of “Ed Malone,” but her character was not in the abridged sixty-six-minute copy viewed for the Summary. Nor was the original introduction by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of The Lost World. There were also no production credits.
       The character of “Paula White” did not exist in Conan Doyle’s original story, but was added to the film to provide romantic interest. Also, Conan Doyle’s literary expedition brought a pterodactyl, not a brontosaurus, back to London, England. The film omitted a significant subplot about warring tribes of apemen and primitive humans.
       According to the 10 Jan 1925 Motion Picture World, 31 Jan 1925 Exhibitors Trade Review, and Apr 1925 Pictures and Picturegoers, co-producer Watterson R. Rothacker, founder of the Chicago, IL-based Rothacker Film Manufacturing Company, worked for seven years to bring The Lost World to the screen. He bought the screen rights, conducted research on dinosaurs, and experimented with photographic effects to bring nonexistent creatures to life. The non-miniature scenes of London were shot on a 220-yards-long studio set, using 2,000 people and many moving buses and automobiles, supervised by five assistant directors, as eighteen cameras rolled. A full-page advertisement in the Jul 1925 AmCin touted the use of sixteen Bell & Howell cameras in filming The Lost World, especially “double exposures” cameras that allowed actors to interact with dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. Chief technician Fred W. Jackman, normally a director, supervised the special effects scenes, assisted by Homer Scott and J. D. Jennings, according to the Jan 1925 and Aug 1925 editions of AmCin. The stop-motion action was created by Willis O’Brien, who was later responsible for the effects in King Kong (1933, see entry). King Kong followed the basic story line of The Lost World.
       The 24 Jan 1925 Moving Picture World noted that The Lost World was being titled and edited under Earl Hudson’s supervision.
       Several sources, including the 17 Jan 1925 and 21 Feb 1925 issues of Moving Picture World, reported that the world premiere was held at the Tremont Temple Theatre in Boston, MA, on 2 Feb 1925, and that the film opened six days later, on 8 Feb 1925, at the Astor Theatre in New York City. The 7 Feb 1925 Exhibitors Trade Review ran an illustrated article on the “Heavy Pulling Power” of the film’s dramatic posters, which displayed what appeared to be an Allosaurus or Tyrannosaurus Rex terrorizing Londoners. Newspaper reviews, which focused mainly on visual effects, were glowing, and the film broke attendance records wherever it was shown, according to the 17 Oct 1925 Exhibitors Trade Review.
       Before the release of The Lost World, Earl Hudson told the 19 Nov 1924 FD that he intended to make a sequel, but the project did not come to fruition.
       The Lost World was voted one of the “Top Best Features” of 1925 by the 1929 Film Daily Year Book, as reported in the 7 Feb 1930 FD.
       Conan Doyle’s The Strand magazine series and subsequent novel were also the basis for the 1960 Twentieth Century-Fox production The Lost World, directed by Irwin Allen and starring Michael Rennie and Jill St. John (see entry). In 1997, Steven Spielberg directed the similarly-themed The Lost World: Jurassic Park (see entry), but it was adapted from novelist Michael Crichton’s sequel to his own Jurassic Park, not Conan Doyle’s original.
       A copy of The Lost World was screened at the Kansas Silent Film Festival in Topeka, KS, on 28 March 1998.
       Also in 1998, the Library of Congress selected The Lost World for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. There have been a couple of restorations using Czech National Film Archive source materials, but neither included the entire original film. In 2001, Image Entertainment released the first of these, a restored ninety-three-minute version that included special features, such as animation outtakes.