Manhattan Rare Book Company

“Lon Chaney’s grotesque yet sympathetic turn as The Phantom of the Opera marked a primordial moment in Hollywood history when melodrama morphed into horror and Universal noticed an appetite for monsters.” -Craig Ian Mann, “The phantom that birthed Hollywood monster movies: The Phantom of the Opera at 100,” British Film Institute (November 14, 2025)

AN EARLY WORKING DRAFT OF THE 1925 PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, PRESERVING THE DARKER SCENARIO UNIVERSAL WROTE BEFORE ITS FRONT OFFICE ORDERED THE TERROR TONED DOWN, AND INCLUDING AN ORIGIN STORY FOR THE PHANTOM THAT NEVER REACHED THE SCREEN.

Lon Chaney’s unmasking in The Phantom of the Opera remains one of the most famous moments in film history. The picture that audiences finally saw in 1925, though, came out of a long and difficult production, shaped by poorly received previews, reshoots, and repeated re-editing. Its story begins with Universal staff writer Elliott J. Clawson’s adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel. The present typescript records his scenario at an early stage, before the studio’s successive revisions reshaped it.

THE PHANTOM’S LOST ORIGIN STORY:

The most striking feature of the draft is a lengthy origin episode absent from every filmed version of the story. In it, a Sultan condemns the Phantom to die on an anthill, and the Persian, who becomes his lifelong associate, rescues him. Leroux’s novel only alludes to its Phantom’s past in Persia, where a police official spared him from the Shah’s death sentence. Clawson turned that background into a full dramatic sequence. The episode, though, was abandoned before filming began. Philip J. Riley mentions it in his narrative account of the production, The Making of the Phantom of the Opera (1999), but the present manuscript preserves it as Clawson actually wrote it. Riley records that by the fifth revised shooting script, most of the genuinely frightening scenes (like the anthill death scene) had been removed, because the front office feared the original material would drive audiences out of the theater.

RELATIONSHIP TO THE KNOWN RECORD:

Riley’s study draws on two principal script documents: an early Clawson draft, which he quotes in places, and the fifth revised shooting script, which he reproduces in full. The present manuscript shares the general scope and character of the early draft, yet it differs in both scene numbering and the wording of specific directions. At the bedchamber scene, Riley’s source is numbered 286; here the same scene is numbered 289. The three-scene offset indicates that this manuscript contains material Riley’s source lacks at that point, suggesting either an earlier compositional layer or a fuller parallel version. Riley does not say where his early draft is held, so the relationship between the two documents remains open. Our comparison is limited to the passages Riley chose to quote, and a full collation may well reveal further differences.

THE ANNOTATIONS:

Pencil annotations appear intermittently throughout. They are pointed and analytical, raising questions of continuity, pacing, and plot logic. One asks how Christine could communicate with Raoul while held captive, and another asks why certain developments do not occur earlier in a sequence. They suggest close review by a reader with editorial authority over the script.

Note: Although the draft breaks off during the climactic rescue attempt by Raoul and Ledoux and does not include the full text as we’ve come to know the story, the draft appears complete as it originally existed. There is no sign of removed pages – in fact, the last page with type seems to be on a different stock and serves also as the rear wrapper – which is consistent with an unfinished working draft rather than later loss.

RARITY:

Universal silent-era screenplays rarely survive. Scripts were typed in small numbers on unstable pulp paper, and much of the studio’s early paper record was later discarded. This draft documents The Phantom of the Opera before commercial pressure and successive rewrites displaced Clawson’s original conception. It preserves a version of the film that Universal chose not to make.

Typescript working draft. [Universal City, California: Universal Pictures, ca. 1925]. More than 200 pages, typed on 8.5 x 13 inch legal-size pulp stock; original blue wrapper; pale toned rear wrapper. Pencil annotations throughout. Front wrapper present but detached; leaves brittle, with edge chipping, creases, foxing, marginal staining, and small losses, as is typical of Universal scripts of the period. Housed in custom archival presentation box.

Price: $20,000 .