Original Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer screenplay for the Technicolor film “The Mysterious Island” (1929), dated July 24, 1928 and credited to Lucien Hubbard; personal copy of leading actress Jacqueline Gadsden (Jane Daly).

Culver City, Calif. : Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer [MGM], July 24, 1928. Original yellow wrappers preserved (with some marginal loss) on later card covers (303 x 230 mm), front wrapper with typed title at centre ‘”The Mysterious Island” / Screen Play / by / Lucien Hubbard’; at top right is typed ‘Prod. No. 273’, and at lower right ‘Script Okayed by Mr. Thalberg. July 24, 1928’; above the title is the original MGM studio label rubber-stamped ‘No. 4664’, with the typed film title and same date of July 24, 1928; the pencilled name ‘Jane Daly’ [i.e. Jacqueline Gadsden] above the label appears to be written in the film star’s own hand, while her name is also written in pencil (but in a different hand) near the foot of the front wrapper; 121 leaves (280 x 215 mm), mimeograph duplication; the film’s title, crediting Hubbard as the screenwriter and dated July 24, 1928, is integral with the first page of the script; contents very clean throughout (corners a little dog-eared), with the two original brads in place.

Rare and important draft shooting script for the Hollywood film The Mysterious Island. Loosely adapted from Jules Verne’s science fiction novel L’ile mystérieuse, this MGM production – a part-talkie – was filmed in two-strip Technicolour and had a checkered production history: shooting had commenced in 1926 but the film was not released until 5 October 1929. Lucien Hubbard (1888-1971) was officialy credited as the writer of the screenplay and as director, even though scenes shot earlier by Maurice Tourneur and Benjamin Christensen – both removed from the project by Irving Thalberg because of their painstaking approach to filmmaking – were used in the final version. Lucien Hubbard is today perhaps best-known as the producer of the silent film Wings (1927), for which he won an Academy Award.

Until recently, a single ten-minute reel with a colour sequence in the UCLA Film and Television Archive was thought to be the only portion of The Mysterious Island that had survived in Technicolour (although complete black-and-white prints had always been known). Then, in 2013, experts from George Eastman House discovered that a colour print had been preserved in the Czech National Film Archive; the restored colour print of the film was screened at the 33rd Pordenone Silent Film Festival in October 2014.

The cast of The Mysterious Island included Lionel Barrymore [Count Andre Dakkar], Jane Daly (Jacqueline Gadsden) [Sonia], Lloyd Hughes [Nikolai], Montagu Love [Falon], Harry Gribbon [Mikhail], Snitz Edwards [Anton], Gibson Gowland [Dmitry], Dolores Brinkman [Teresa], and Major Roup [an underwater creature]. Art direction was by Cedric Gibbons, with technical effects by James Basevi, Louis H. Tolhurst and Irving R. Ries.

Jacqueline Gadsden (1900-1986) was an American film actress during the silent era. Her most famous role was in It (1927), in which she starred alongsde Clara Bow. In 1924 she had married William Harry Daly, and in fact she made two other films in the same year that The Mysterious Island was released (1929) – one for Columbia and another for MGM – in which she was billed under the name Jane Daly. The Mysterious Island was her last film prior to retirement from motion pictures.