1919 FILM SHOT HERE TO BE RERELEASED
‘Valley of the Giants’ features scenes in Eureka, Arcata, Korbel
“The Valley of the Giants,” a silent film shot in Eureka, Arcata and Korbel that was released on Aug. 31, 1919, was thought to be lost for 90 years, dust in the winds of film history.
The film was discovered in the Russian Gosfilmofond archive and repatriated to the Library of Congress in 2010, the only place it could be viewed, albeit with Russian-language text cards and the characters’ names changed to suit Russian audiences. However, Edward Lorusso, a film historian based in Maine, was able to acquire a print of the film a few months ago and converted it into DVD and Blu-Ray forms.
The film shows Humboldt County as it was 100 years ago, featuring scenes filmed inside and outside of the Carson Mansion, several Eureka and Arcata street scenes and a logging camp in Korbel.
“All the interior shots of the film are shot in that mansion, and judging from the pictures that I saw online, it looks like it’s been repainted in various ways, but it looks the same. It hasn’t changed any,” Lorusso said.
Lorusso translated the text cards back into English, created new opening and ending credits and commissioned an entirely new score for the film.
The film’s plot revolves the battle over the trees in the fictional town of Sequoia, California, and the budding romance between the star, box office dynamite Wallace Reid, and the niece of his worst enemy, played by Grace Darmond.
The film’s production was not seamless and was eventually responsible for Reid’s death. Before filming began, the cast and crew were on a train to Korbel when the caboose overturned on a gauge rail, sending the train plummeting down a hill into a creek. Reid sustained severe back injuries, needed six stitches to close a three-inch gash on his head and had glass embedded in his arms, though he aided in extricating other members of the cast and crew from the wreckage.
To treat the long-term pain from the crash, Reid was given morphine, which he used for the rest of the shoot to be able to perform several action scenes, such as gigantic brawls and sprints on the top of a moving train. Reid became severely addicted and died in a sanatorium attempting to recover in 1923, just a few years after the release of “The Valley of the Giants.”
“To keep the film going, Paramount, who was producing the film, decided that they would give him morphine to cut the pain and to keep him working, and that’s what they did, they would give him morphine,” Lorusso said. “The film has several really strenuous sequences that he does himself, no stunt double. There’s a brawl with a rail crew, he’s got a scene where he runs along the top of a railroad train just be
fore it crashes which sort of echoes the actual accident itself, and by the end of the shooting of the film, and when they went back to Hollywood, he was addicted to morphine.”
The film will have a wider DVD and Blu-Ray release by Grapevine Video, but Lorusso does not know when the release will happen. This is Lorusso’s 21st silent film restoration project.
“You can see things and it’s like, ‘Oh, my God, I recognize that, that was here 100 years ago,’ that kind of thing,” Lorusso said. “Hollywood came to this small town in Northern California and had this major production with a major star.”
Lorusso uploaded the digitized film to Vimeo, where it can be viewed at https:// vimeo. com/734336955/53 f664aa87.