RARE 1925 PHANTOM SET DESIGNS

It's amazing to me how many original artifacts from the vintage years of monster movies keep surfacing after all this time. Today's offering is just one of the gems from our favorite movies that remained with a noted art director's widow for many years. The set design drawings were at one time loaned to Andrew Lloyd Weber for inspiration when he was preparing his music for the smash hit, longest-running Broadway play in history of the immortal THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. A rare and fascinating artifact of monster movie history!

The Phantom of the Opera: Production Designs by Ben Carré (Universal, 1925).

Rolled, Fine/Very Fine. Original Production Art in Pastel on Vellum Paper (22" X 18.75") & Brown Line Schematic Copy (18" X 22.5").

Making their debut appearances at Heritage are these incredible set designs from Universal's first major horror hit. When it came time for the studio to begin production, the filmmakers were unsure how to recreate the mysterious underbelly of the Paris Opera House. They consulted with French art director Ben Carré, who had worked at the Palais Garnier earlier in his career. He created a version of the theater's subterranean reservoir that was inspired partly by reality, partly by the descriptions in Gaston Leroux's novel, and partly by his own imagination. This resulted in a series of pastel drawings showing an intricate series of stairways and arched tunnels, as well as schematics of various rooms. Carré's widow held onto these drawings after the artist's death in 1978, and eventually loaned them to none other than Andrew Lloyd Webber when he was planning his musical adaptation of Leroux's gothic novel. Also featured in the lot is the only known brownline copy of Carré's schematic for the "Jail of Mirrors" set seen towards the end of the film. The intricate array of mirrors was considered a baffling marvel of set design, and Carré most likely created the schematic a few years after the movie's release in response to other filmmakers asking how he had managed it. The pastel artwork has some edge wear with small tears and minor chips, as well as faint staining and rippling in the white areas. The copy of the brown line schematic has a few light creases and a couple of spots of dark blue paint at the top with paper remnants. Truly unique, these pieces of cinema history would be a fabulous acquisition for any collector.