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IN ATTEMPTING TO ENVISAGE THE CITY OF NEW York in the year 1906 I was given great help by both Professor Kenneth T Jackson of Columbia University and Mr Caleb Carr, whose books The Alienist and Angel of Darkness so vividly bring to life what it must have been like to live in Manhattan around the turn of the century

For a detailed description of the origins and development of Coney Island and its funfairs at the sah Historian of Brooklyn

For allof the Manhattan Opera House on 3 December 1906, I had recourse to none other than Mr Frank Johnson, editor of the Spectator, as unstinting in his helpfulness and has surely forgotten more about opera than I shall ever know

The idea of even atte to write a sequel to The Phantom of the Opera derives from a first conversation with Andrew Lloyd Webber hi further and intensive discussion that the basic outline erateful for the benefit of his iination and enthusiasm

PREFACE

WHAT HAS NOW BECOME THE LEGEND OF THE Phantoan in the year 1910 in the otten

As with Bram Stoker and Dracula, Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, Victor Hugo and Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Daue folk-tale and saithin it the kernel of a truly tragic story From this he spun his tale But here the similarities must end

The other three works becaends known to every reader, cineoer and millions more besides Around Dracula and Frankenstein entire industries have been built, with scores if not hundreds of reprints and re-creations on filo When his slied in 1911 it caused a brief flutter in France and even received newspaper serialization before falling into virtual oblivion Only a fluke eleven years later, five years before the author’s death, brought his story back into prominence and set it on the road to immortality

That fluke took the forenial once-Gerrated to America as a boy and by 1922 had become president of Universal Motion Pictures of Hollywood In that year he took a vacation in Paris Leroux had by then started to dabble in the sh this connection that the two men met

In an otherwise desultory conversation the Aul mentioned to Leroux how impressed he had been by the vast Paris Opera House, still to this day the biggest in the world Leroux responded by giving Laearded book of 1911 The president of Universal Pictures read it through in a single night

It just so happened that Carl Laemmle had both an opportunity and a problem on his e actor called Lon Chaney, a man with a face so mobile that it could assume almost any shape its oished As a vehicle for Chaney, Universal had coo’s Notre Dame de Paris, then already a classic Chaney would play the deforly Quasimodo The set was already under construction in Hollywood, a huge timber and plaster replica of round

Laemmle’s problem hat vehicle to offer Chaney next, before he was stolen away by a rival studio By dawn he thought he had his project After the hunchback, Chaney would star as the equally disfigured and repulsive but essentially tragic Phantoood showmen, Laemmle knew that one way to pack audiences into cinehten theht to do that, and he was right

He bought the rights, returned to Hollywood and ordered the construction of another set, this time of the Paris Opera House Because it would have to support a cast of hundreds of extras, the Universal replica of the Opera becairders set in concrete For that reason it was never dise 28 at Universal Studios to this day, and has been reused many times over the years