We take for granted the technology today that allows us to watch movies of humans interacting with dinosaurs, a la "Jurassic Park." But these works of cinema wouldn't be possible without the team of Willis O'Brien and Herbert Dawley introducing the very first movie that merged live action with stop-motion effects to create, back in its day, breathtaking, chilling sequences of dinosaurs and homo sapiens on the same screen. November 1918's "The Ghost of Slumber Mountain" gave viewers a sense of how earth's giant creatures millions of years ago looked liked, acted and the manner they fought one another.
The film's two creators appear in the movie that has Dawley and another companion stumbling upon Mad Dick, the hermit, played by O'Brien. Mad Dick tells Dawley to take his strange-looking telescope, climb the mountain, and use it to see some amazing sites in the valley. He does, and he spots some dinosaurs as well as other creatures from the way distant past. This makes "The Ghost of Slumber Mountain" the first movie to show time travel.
The film became a box office hit, collecting over $100,000 on a $3,000 investment. But the two creators didn't get along soon after its completion. Dawley, a former car designer for Pierce-Arrow automobiles, was the producer of "The Ghost of Slumber Mountain." He had approached O'Brien, the genius behind 1915's "The Dinosaur and the Missing Link" and who had just got laid off from Edison Company after making several Conquest Pictures geared towards little kids. O'Brien wrote the script and directed the stop-motion effects for the 40-minute movie, while Dawley designed and sculptured the creatures.
After some complaints from a theater owner, the producer cut the movie in half. Conflicting accounts of who burnt whom first, but when wealthy movie executive, Watterson Rothacker, owner to the rights to Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 dinosaur novel, "The Lost World," hired O'Brien to oversee the project, the lawsuits from Dawley started flying. "The Lost World" was tied up in the courts for years until the case was settled out of courts, allowing an even greater technological marvel than "The Ghost at Slumber Mountain" to be shown by O'Brien and Rothacker.