Feb

Filming ‘Treasure Island’ at Denham 1949

With the temperature at Denham hovering close to the 90 dergree mark – this is at the very end of July – the luckiest actor on the Denham set was Walter Fitzgerald who plays Squire Trelawney.

He spent much of one of the hottest days of the year in the cool waters of the tropical lagoon which had been achieved at the back of Denham Studios by damming up the River Colne.

Director Byron Haskin was filming one of the final sequences of the story in which Long John Silver ( Robert Newton ) produces a hidden gun after his capture in one of the long boats and forces the Squire to jump overboard so that Long John can escape

Walter Fitzgerald didn’t take much persuading to make the required dive nor did it require much urging for the camera crew and the other technicians to don their bathing trunks to facilitate the handling of the camera equipment on the barge where it was situated.

Other sequences scheduled for this week, was for work on the Spyglass Inn in Bristol but my own view is that this was little used in the final film with studio sets at Denham being used

Visiting the set during this last week was Robert S Wolff Managing Director of RKO Radio. Afterwards producer Perce Pearce took him into the projection room to show ‘rushes’ from the first two weeks of filming and judging from the smiles on their faces afterwards, progress must have been satisfactory