Burroughs-Tarzan Enterprises In 1929, a would-be movie entrepreneur,
Ashton Dearholt, arranged an introduction to Edgar Rice Burroughs, using his wife's friendship with Burroughs' daughter. Dearholt had held several jobs within the film industry during the 1920s and had even produced, directed and starred in a brief series of western films. As of 1929, he was familiar with Burroughs' work and wanted to get the rights to one of Burroughs' several singleton novels and film it in conjunction with RKO-Pathé. Burroughs, long dissatisfied with Hollywood's treatment of his Tarzan character, refused, but he took a liking to Dearholt personally and they became friends. MGM's contract with Burroughs was for just two pictures and this had run out with
Tarzan and His Mate. Guatemala had no motion picture industry of its own, so everywhere they went the company had to carry tons of equipment brought with them from the States, including an enormous sound truck that was not designed for the winding, dirt mountain highways which made up most of the country's transit infrastructure. and had major stations at
Puerto San José,
Guatemala City and
Puerto Barrios, which allowed the crew to transport their equipment easily to these locations. The only difficult locations to reach were
Chichicastenango and
Tikal, since there were no IRCA services available to those places, although there was airline service to Peten available. ruins in 1875; the Green Goddess temple scenes were filmed at this location in 1935. Photograph by
Eadweard Muybridge. The places where the filming took place were: •
Chichicastenango: scenes of a native town where the explorers first met. •
Antigua Guatemala: The Green Goddess temple in the abandoned Spanish city, filmed at the ruins of
San Francisco Church. •
Livingston: scenes where explorers prepare to go into the jungle •
Puerto Barrios: arrival and departure of the boats carrying the explorers •
Tikal: jungle scenes •
Quiriguá: Mayan city where they get lectured on the
Maya civilization •
Guatemala City: then-luxurious Palace Hotel was used to shoot the scenes of the hotel in the imaginary town of At Mantique
Problems While in Guatemala in 1933 troubleshooting for RKO, Ashton Dearholt met and fell in love with a young swimmer whom he hired as the serial's lead actress. She was named Florence Watson, but he rechristened her Ula Holt. He brought her back to Los Angeles with him and installed her in the Dearholt household. Dearholt's wife,
Florence Gilbert, left with their two children and eventually filed for divorce shortly before the expedition's departure. While filming, Edgar Rice Burroughs divorced his wife Emma Hulbert and married Florence Gilbert, 30 years his junior, on 4 April 1935, after which they escaped to Hawaii for their
honeymoon. He would write in his personal diary that he had fallen in love with Florence when she accompanied Dearholt to his first meeting with Burroughs in 1929. Burroughs decided that he needed immediate money and that Burroughs-Tarzan Enterprises was not going to make it for him after all. He reoptioned MGM's contract for a third Weissmuller film and approved the sale of three of Sol Lesser's remaining four options to MGM, who agreed to make a large "authorisation payment" to Burroughs. (Sol Lesser had acquired options for five Tarzan productions from a defunct company, the first of which he used to make
Tarzan the Fearless in direct competition with MGM's films.) MGM paid Lesser $500,000 for his options and paid Burroughs $25–50,000 per film. In the
ape language used in the Burroughs' Tarzan novels, "Tarmangani" means "Great White Ape".
MGM's
Johnny Weissmuller films, featuring the now standard yell, had been in production for some time when this serial was created, starting with
Tarzan the Ape Man (1932).The original version of the plot involved munitions runners and government agents, focussing more on the super-explosive formula hidden in the idol. This was rewritten during production, but some elements remain, such as the otherwise nonsensical final chapter name "Operator No. 17" (Ula Vale was originally written as a government agent using "Operator No. 17" as her
code name, but this entire plot line was dropped from the final script).
Stunts and effects Brix performed his own stunts in the serial, including swinging from real jungle vines, but this presented further problems. Despite testing a vine for safety beforehand with a 200 lb weight, when Brix tried himself, with a run up, he overshot the pool of water he was meant to land in. "I still have the scars from that fall," he told the Monitor. The scene where Brix bursts the ropes binding him is real. ==Critical reception==