:10:09
There were monster's-eye-view shots
in It Came from Outer Space,
:10:12
produced by Alland and directed
by Jack Arnold several months earlier.
:10:15
Alland and Arnold,
again teamed on this picture,
:10:18
used that gimmick here,
and then again later, in Tarantula.
:10:20
They also teased the audience by keeping
the gill-man offscreen in its first scenes.
:10:25
We don't really see the creature
until a third of the way through.
:10:28
For the roar of the gill-man,
which you'll hear in a moment,
:10:31
the Universal sound technicians
experimented with a lot of strange noises,
:10:35
from a foghorn blown underwater, to
an opera recording played at low speed.
:10:39
To be honest, I don't know
what they did use for the roar,
:10:42
but I do know that for the
Steven Spielberg TV movie Duel,
:10:45
a distorted gill-man roar is used
as the sound of the truck crashing.
:10:48
That's just great, that baseball-mitt-sized
hand grabbing Rodd Redwing's head.
:10:53
Everybody I know who saw this movie
on its original run in 1954
:10:56
tells me this was one of
the scariest scenes in the movie.
:11:04
Here's our first shot of the Rita. Most of
the rest of the movie takes place on it.
:11:08
Back to the script of Black Lagoon.
Maurice Zimm handed in his draft,
:11:11
then a writer named Leo Lieberman
came in and worked for two months.
:11:15
But the story still wasn't in very good
shape. In fact, according to Arthur Ross,
:11:19
the Universal front office turned it down
and said they wouldn't do the picture.
:11:23
That was the point at which Alland turned
to Ross, a Chicago-born screenwriter,
:11:27
who did a lot of work
whipping the story into shape.
:11:30
Ross looked at what had been written
and quickly realised
:11:33
"that it was an imitation of films made
in the genre at Universal for 25 years".
:11:37
"The only difference was
it was an undersea creature
:11:40
instead of a mummy or
Frankenstein or Dracula."
:11:43
Ross was at the time reading
The Silent World by Jacques Cousteau,
:11:46
and it gave him the idea that the scientist
should be the hero, not the villain.
:11:51
Remember, neither of the two scientists
in Zimm's Black Lagoon was a hero.
:11:55
One was a publicity-seeking nut, the other
the villain, a real Snidely-Whiplash type.