cholera bacteria
into New York's water supply that
no microscope would be able to detect.
Then the heroine crashes
a bottle of ink on his skull.
The bottle breaks,
and the ink deluges him,
making him visible and
an easy target for the police.
The early scripts were
quite faithful to Wylie's novel,
except that Garrett Fort modified
the invisible cholera
to invisible rats carrying bubonic plague.
But the invisible one is killed,
along with the rats,
by the police showering
his refuge with chlorine gas.
John I Balderston,
who had worked on the play versions
of Dracula and Frankenstein,
as well as the screenplay
of Universal's The Mummy,
wrote several drafts of the script
based on Garrett Fort's adaptation
of The Murderer Invisible.
A later draft of Balderston's was done
with the collaboration of Cyril Gardner,
who for a while
was going to direct the film.
Through the long gestation period,
various directors were announced
by Universal to do The Invisible Man.
In addition to Gardner and Florey,
James Whale was to be
on the project at different times.
Even EA Dupont, the German director.
Since HG Wells
supposedly had script approval,
it seems unlikely that Universal would
send versions based on another novel
but still titled The Invisible Man,
not The Murderer Invisible.
Perhaps these were considered
experimental drafts and not sent to Wells.
A puzzlement.
The train setting is a miniature
on a three-quarter-inch scale,
created for this film by Charlie Baker
and his miniature unit at Universal.
John Fulton and Baker
worked as a team at the studio.
The crash coming up
is very well executed in all respects.
Universal got a lot of mileage
out of this scene,
as it was recycled
for other features and serials,
one example being the 1942 feature
Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror,
with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce.
Philip Wylie, author of
The Murderer Invisible novel,
was a prolific writer
who worked in various genres.
Science fiction buffs know
such books as his When Worlds Collide
and After Worlds Collide,
among many others.
At the time The Invisible Man
was being prepared and filmed,
Wylie was at Paramount working on
the screenplay of another HG Wells book,
The Island of Dr Moreau.
The title was changed
to The Island of Lost Souls.
In addition, he contributed
to the scripts of Murders in the Zoo
and King of the Jungle
at Paramount during 1933.
The reporter asking the questions
is played by Dwight Frye.
We think of such characterisations
as the crazed Renfield in Dracula,
as the hunchback Fritz, Frankenstein's
loony assistant in the 1931 Frankenstein
and a similar role
in Bride of Frankenstein.
But here, his brief appearance
is one of complete normality.
Before coming to Hollywood in 1930, he
had an impressive career in the theatre.
Frye was in six of James Whale's films.
Moving on with the saga of
the evolving Invisible Man screenplays...
New approaches included
a treatment by Richard Schayer,
which has a scientist render
his mutilated assistant invisible
and later stand trial for a murder
committed by the assistant.
Preston Sturges contributed a script
that had a doctor treating his maniacal
assistant with an invisibility drug,
following which the two journey to Russia
to avenge the killing of the scientist's
relatives during the revolution.
James Whale decided to do
a six-page treatment of his own.
The approach presents
the invisible man as a scientist
who was able to make himself invisible
to obliterate a ghastly disfigurement.
But he too has a mind alteration
afterwards and goes on a killing spree.
Gouverneur Morris wrote a screenplay
based on Whale's six-page treatment.
For this version, Philip Wylie's invisible
octopus had a return engagement.
Apparently, Laird Doyle did a script