The Trail of ’98 (Clarence Brown, 1928) and the Klondike Gold Rush: The Last Big road show of Hollywood’s Silent Film Era
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper consists in a study of The Trail of ’98 (1928), a film directed by Clarence Brown for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, whose plot deals with the Klondike Gold Rush in Canada, in 1898. Although this was one of the last great epic films produced by Hollywood in the late 1920s, it remains Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s biggest commercial failure to date. As a result, it is largely unknown and still undocumented today. This paper will aim to create a historical reconstruction of the shooting, establishing its chronology and researching the extreme circumstances of its location shooting. It will also scrutinise the merits of a new, albeit short-lived, widescreen process called Fantom Screen that was used specifically for its exhibition, and its distribution under the concept of road show. Finally, it will analyse the reasoning behind the film’s structure and the specific Hollywood context that led to its commercial failure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".