:16:01
All the scenes in and
around Dr Maia's camp -
:16:03
the fossilised arm sticking out of the rock,
the gill-man killing the natives in the tent,
:16:08
and these digging scenes -
were shot on the Universal back lot,
:16:11
at a spot called Sierra Canyon.
A few months earlier,
:16:14
Jack Arnold shot another movie in Sierra
Canyon: It Came from Outer Space.
:16:18
Most desert exteriors for that film were
shot on location in the Mohave Desert.
:16:22
But when Richard Carlson goes into
the crater and finds the spaceship,
:16:26
those scenes were shot
here in Sierra Canyon.
:16:28
They avoided showing the water
and trees, because in that movie
:16:31
Carlson was supposedly in a crater
in the middle of the Arizona desert.
:16:39
Ernest Nims, the supervisor of the
editorial department at Universal,
:16:42
often made script suggestions.
A recommendation he made for Creature
:16:46
was for the early scene where the
gill-man's arm reached out of the Amazon
:16:49
for Julie Adams' ankle
as she stood on the riverbank.
:16:52
In a memo he asked "Is the creature
that we see in the inland water
:16:56
the same as the one in the Black Lagoon?
This will be confusing to the audience."
:17:00
"Why not show the creature following the
boat up the river to the Black Lagoon?"
:17:04
"This would not only give added
suspense but would clarify the story."
:17:09
That was a good suggestion.
:17:11
The movie's famous now and
we know there's only one gill-man,
:17:14
but in 1954, when people were
seeing it for the first time,
:17:17
a gill-man in camp and another in the
lagoon might have been misleading.
:17:21
So, sure enough, somebody
added a shot to the script.
:17:24
As the Rita chugs toward the lagoon,
there's a shot of the gill-man following.
:17:28
It was a high shot from the boat deck,
showing the gill-man below the surface.
:17:32
"A long sharklike shadow, slithering
through the water, follows the vessel."
:17:36
"As he lifts one hand out of the water,
we recognise it as the green taloned thing
:17:40
we had seen poking out of the
inland water at the geological camp."
:17:44
OK, fine, so the shot's in the movie, but
then watch this cut right here in a second.
:17:49
That's where the shot was
before somebody took it out.
:17:52
You can hear the music
abruptly jump ahead.
:17:55
They must have taken it out,
and didn't have time,
:17:57
or maybe the inclination, to fix the music.
They just let it skip very noticeably.