The sculptor's nightmare / motion picture

At a political club, the members debate whose bust will replace that of Theodore Roosevelt. Unable to agree, each goes to a sculptor's studio and bribes him to sculpt a bust of the individual favorite. Instead, the sculptor spends their fees on a dinner with his model during which he becomes so inebriated that he is taken to jail. There he has a nightmare, wherein three busts are created and animated from clay (through stop-motion photography) in the likenesses of Democrat William Jennings Bryan and Republicans Charles W. Fairbanks and William Howard Taft. The drunken sculptor arises from his cot to see the animated faces of the three politicians. The busts disappear and he falls on his cot, writhing in distress. While he is prone, another figure begins to appear: first the clay forms itself into a G.O.P. donkey, then a teddy bear, and finally, into the animated face of Teddy Roosevelt himself. The sculptor rises again, and is startled to see yet another apparition. It disappears and the sculptor collapses on his cot and is still.
H110169 U.S. Copyright Office
Copyright: American Mutoscope & Biograph Co.; 4May1908; H110169.
Mack Sennett, Harry Solter, Anthony O'Sullivan, Eddie Dillon, D.W. Griffith.
Camera, G.W. Bitzer.
Duration: 9:15 at 16 fps.
End sequence lacking from digital file on loc.gov.
Filmed on April 18 and 20, 1908, in Biograph's New York City studio.
Biograph production no. 3415.
Paper print shelf number (LC 2741) was changed when the paper prints were re-housed.
Available also through the Library of Congress Web site as digital files (incomplete).
Complete digitial file for this title is available on-site. Contact reference librarian.
Sources used: Copyright catalog, motion pictures, 1894-1912; Niver, K. Early motion pictures, p. 290; American Film Institute catalog, film beginnings, 1893-1910, p. 955; Biograph production log, v. 2; Biograph bulletins, 1896-1908, p. 350, p. 448.
Early motion pictures : the Paper Print Collection in the Library of Congress / by Kemp R. Niver. Library of Congress. 1985.