Book Description
The vampire has always had audience appeal. What is amazing is that Hollywood shunned the King of Vampires for years fearing the story was too gruesome of any movie audience's palette. When Universal finally decided to make a screen production of the classic novel and successful Broadway play, they were not originally going to pursue Bela Lugosi for the part even though he had stunned audiences with his performance in the Broadway role for years. This MagicImage Filmbook traces the long trail of the classic 1931 production from legend to screenplay to film. Includes treatments, preliminary scripts even, for the first time anywhere, reproductions of some of Bram Stoker's original handwritten and typed draft manuscript for the novel. Special Introduction by Bela Lugosi and Preface by Carla Laemmle.


From the Back Cover
60th Anniversary Edition 1931-1991 It's a Universal Picture! From the Vaults of the Ackerman Archives. Contain's Production Background! Press Book! Biography Notes on the Cast & Crew! Complete Shooting Script! Rare Photographs! Behind the Scenes Photos! See the film on MCA/Universal Home Video Or the restored version on MCA/Universal Laser Disc


Excerpted from Magicimage Filmbooks Presents Dracula : The Original 1931 Shooting Script (The Original 1931 Shooting Script) by Philip J. Riley, Magicimage Filmbooks, George Turner. Copyright © 1990. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
Around February 14, 1931, New York impresario S.L. Rothafel delivered an unusual Valentine to the patrons of his Roxy Theater. Advertised as "the story of the strangest passion the world has ever known," Dracula corralled the customers in droves. Of greater importance, ultimately, is its trailblazing position as the forerunner of a genre which has ebbed and flowed as the film perennial ever since: the supernatural horror "talkie." It's true that a number of sound pictures of the spine-chilling variety had preceded Dracula, including such popular numbers as The Terror, Stark Mad, The Cat Creeps, The Bat Whispers, and The Gorilla...Most of these were adapted from Broadway plays in which the scary stuff was intermingled with comedy and anything that appeared paranormal was always revealed as the machinations of malevolent human beings. What had made Dracula different was that the audience was expected to accept the villain as a genuine vampire and not another crook in disguise. There was a strong feeling in the industry that the producers were insane to ask moviegoers, who had just emerged from the Roaring Twenties and stumbled into the morass of the Great Depression, to suspend disbelief in a Medieval superstition.

ANNOTATION

Screenplay, production notes, and behind-the-scenes stories from this classic 1931 Bela Lugosi film.

FROM THE PUBLISHER