#The cutting room floor movie#
#The cutting room floor driver#

It turns out that they painted everything except the road and the coach onto a pane of glass and put it in front of the camera. It’s an amazing shot because it’s obvious that the coach and the road are real, but the rest of it isn’t and for years I couldn’t figure out how they achieved it. They travel down this long and winding road, towards their destination, and you can see Castle Dracula in the distance with the wilderness surrounding it. The second is after he climbs aboard the waiting transportation-seeing the driver’s face clearly, mind you, and somehow not recognizing that it’s bloody Count Dracula himself when he finally meets the bloke about 20 mins later-and they tear off at about a thousand miles an hour towards the castle.

#The cutting room floor driver#

I know it was supposed to portray that the coachman didn’t want to hang around any longer than he had to, but the look on Frye’s face, and the way that the driver isn’t waiting for love or money, is so funny that no matter how many times I’ve watched Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, I can’t help but laugh. The first one happens when they arrive at the crossroads in the middle of the night-because, yeah, that’s safe-and the driver just throws Renfield’s bags off of the coach and buggers off quick sharpish. It is here that we have two of my favorite scenes in the film. Renfield is having none of this Johnny Foregnier nonsense and with his common sense gland fully removed from his brain, gets back on the coach and heads off to his meeting. This causes the villagers to beg him not to go, warning him that the Count and his three brides eat people like him for breakfast. In fact, he’s so convinced that it’s all hocus pocus that when they arrive at the small village he informs everyone that he’s going on to Castle Dracula that very night, as he has an appointment with the Count. And nowhere is that lip stiffer than on the face of Renfield ( Dwight Frye).

#The cutting room floor movie#

The movie starts with a coach journey wherein the party is being regaled with tales of the evil that awaits them when they reach their destination, to which those sharing the ride are all very British about it with “Piff and poff, we don’t believe such rubbish.” Even when they are informed by a couple of locals making the return trip home that it’s all true, they still huff and puff and have a stiff upper lip about the entire situation. It was Freund’s genius behind the camera that made what could’ve been a car crash of a Dracula adaptation, considering everything that was going on around it, into Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and shot the actor into the stratosphere, while at the same time typecasting him forever as the infamous Count. This led to the vast majority of Dracula being shot by Karl Freund who may have only been credited as the cinematographer but was the director in all but name. While one man’s tragic loss should’ve been another man’s gain, the death of Chaney severely affected director Tod Browning-who was already in the midst of full-blown alcoholism-and he would hardly do anything on set outside of tearing pages out of the script and swearing at anyone who went within five feet of him. The role was supposed to go to Lon Chaney, but Chaney contracted pneumonia, was diagnosed with lung cancer, and then died of a throat hemorrhage in 1930. You would’ve thought that by proving his worth to the company Bela Lugosi’s Dracula would’ve been a straightforward thing to cast and shoot, but Lugosi wasn’t even in consideration for the role, even though he’d had a hugely popular run in the stage adaptation.

He negotiated with Stoker’s widow and the play’s author, Hamilton Deane, on behalf of the studio and managed to get the deal sealed for the tidy sum of just $40,000, which was almost three times less than they had originally wanted for it. When Universal Pictures needed to buy the rights to the book and the stage play adaptation of it-which is what the movie would eventually be based on-it was Bela Lugosi who was instrumental in making this happen.

Hell, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula wasn’t even the first adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel either, with that honor going to Nosferatu (1922), but what it had that all the other early forays into the world of the dark and macabre lacked was a large studio behind it, willing to do whatever it took to make it a success. Cinema had already given us such classics as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925), two productions that still stand up to this day as cornerstones of horror. That’s not to say that before it crawled from its coffin and into the consciousness of the people there hadn’t been a fair representation of horror in film, as there had. Bela Lugosi’s Dracula was, without a shadow of a doubt, the movie that kick-started an entire genre into life.