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Cast Amid Boomerang Throwers, the 1913 Gaston Melies silent Australia shipwrecked sailor melodrama short ("The breath abating experiences of a sailor shipwrecked on a land of savages"). We found a contemporary 1913 review of this movie in Moving Picture World, and the plot is wild! A sailor is shipwrecked among Australian Aborigines, and he has a case which contains a chart, which does him little good, but the natives are petrified of the case, and they stay away from him. A native boy helps him, but is then killed by his tribesmen for doing so, and then the sailor starves to death, but before he does, he writes about a huge find of gold the boy showed him, writing on the chart in his own blood! 50 years later, some explorers find the case, and the wife of one of them reads the chart, which lets them fend off the natives with the case, and also lets them find the gold, and the movie ends with them registering their claim! Note that the IMDb says this is a U.S. movie that was filmed in Australia, and they give no other details. Note that Gaston Melies is the brother of celebrated French director Georges Melies. He was sent by his brother to New York City in 1902 to open an American branch of Melies' film studio, called Star Films, because many people were pirating the Melies films. Gaston distributed his brother's films, but he also began making some documentaries on his own, but they were not successful. He hated the New York weather and moved the studio to Texas in 1907, and then moved it to California in 1910. He was not a good businessman, and in 1912 he went to the South Pacific, New Zealand, Australia, Tahiti, Southeast Asia and Japan, directing filming on those locations, and sending the footage back to his son in Hollywood, but most of the film he sent was unusable! Apparently there was enough usable footage shot in Australia to make this movie, because this poster exists, and we have seen an exhibitor magazine review of the movie! The poster has "G. MELIES" at the top with two horseshoe Melies logos, and at the bottom, it has "No 193" and "10-9-13", and the movie was in fact released in October of 1913. By this point, Gaston had separated himself completely from his brother, who had stopped making movies because of his financial problems, but he still put "G. Melies" on the poster, no doubt hoping to trick the general public into thinking that his brother made the movie! In 1914, Gaston sold his studio to Vitagraph Studios and moved to Italy, and he and his brother blamed each other for their failures, and they never talked again. In 1915, Gaston died, of "shellfish poisoning", and was buried in France!
NOTE: Click on linked names to see a biography.

If you know who did the art (if any), please let us know.

Important Added Info: Note that this poster measures 28 1/2" x 42" [72 x 107 cm].

UPDATED 12/03/2013: Note that we have greatly revised the above description based on added research and help from an advanced collector. We were tricked by the 'G. Melies' at the top of the poster into thinking it was a Georges Melies movie, just as Gaston Melies intended, so his deceit still worked 100 years after he first did it!

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