Whale had met Claude Rains while working in the British theater and was particularly enamored of his voice, obviously the key element of the Dr. Though Clive showed interest, he passed on the part. The director offered the role to Colin Clive who had played the creator of Karloff’s monster in their previous collaboration. After Karloff’s departure, which was not entirely unwelcome- Whale did not feel his voice was right for the scientist Dr. He returned to the studio when Laemmle realized what an asset Karloff was for Universal to costar with Bela Lugosi in The Black Cat (1934). Though attached to star in The Invisible Man since late 1931, in 1933, Boris Karloff broke his contract with Universal over a salary dispute and briefly pursued a freelance career. As with that later film, Whale would make the film on his terms, infusing it with visual flare, a distinctly British flavor, and plenty of humor and sometimes savage wit. This would become a theme once again two years later when he was eventually lured back once again to direct Bride of Frankenstein, a film he was even more reluctant to make. ![]() (Before you come after me with torches and pitchforks, The Old Dark House is certainly a horror film, but of a very different type from Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, and company). and return to Universal’s most successful filmmaking stable during the Depression years, monster movies. Whale was reluctant to make another monster movie after Frankenstein but the successive box office failures of Impatient Maiden and The Old Dark House (both 1932) left him little choice but to give in to the urgings of Carl Laemmle, Jr. The final script hews closely to the novel for about the first third before blazing its own, more cinematic second and third acts. Sherriff wisely began his screenplay with the novel and slowly branched off in new directions, adding several characters and situations of his own along the way. Moreau, had script approval and most simply disgusted him. Wells, who had been very unhappy with Island of Lost Souls (1932), the first adaptation of his novel The Island of Dr. One of the biggest reasons so many versions of the script were written and discarded was that H.G. ![]() Whale himself took a crack at a treatment for the film, which mixed what we know of The Invisible Man with elements of Faust, The Phantom of the Opera, and even a touch of Dracula, and had been attached and removed as director twice before seeing it to completion from a script written by his friend R.C. Balderston who adapted the British plays of Dracula and Frankenstein for the American stage and later wrote The Mummy, and future Hollywood legends John Huston and Preston Sturges. Some of those writers included Robert Florey and Garrett Fort, who had written a draft of Frankenstein, John L. ![]() After Frankenstein was an even bigger success, both director James Whale and star Boris Karloff were immediately attached to The Invisible Man and several writers tried their hands at treatments and screenplays. It involved four directors, nine writers, six treatments, and ten separate screenplays-all for a film that emerged very much in harmony with the book on which it was based.” It was first suggested as a possible follow-up to Dracula (1931), perhaps as a vehicle for new star Bela Lugosi, but was dropped in favor of Frankenstein (1931) due to the complicated special effects it would require. As biographer James Curtis put it in his book James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters, “The gestation of The Invisible Man was the lengthiest and most convoluted of all of James Whale’s films. Like most movies, The Invisible Man travelled a long and winding road to the silver screen, and perhaps longer and more winding than most.
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