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Interesting note about Griffith's presence on the set while filming was going on, though. This belies the oft-told story that he was dumped early in pre-production.

There's a documentary I saw and even exceptd some stuff from, the title of which for the life of me I cannot recall. It was a retrospective of the movies from the vantage point of the late 1930s. At the end, to show how movies are better than ever, there are some clips of "current" stuff. One shot, I remember, is a close-up of a script in someone's hands, titled "The Dictator, by Charles Chaplin." This would make the production date of this doc' about 1938 or '39.

The on-point thing is, there's about a 10 second shot of Roach, Roach Jr. and Griffith standing together with a voice over talking about their new collaboration, One Million BC. Wish I had that clip.

As for Richard Denning-- he told me the same thing, but I don't know that his timeline is off vis a vis his Paramount contract. His memory seemed to be pretty clear on stuff. It would not be inconceivable that Roach wanted him in 1938 or even 1939, but that either Paramount wouldn't loan him out (unlikely, since he wasn't exactly a name star at the time) or Roach made the decision to go with a dark-haired guy rather than a blond. In fact, I think Denning's first (or so) role at Paramount was in a Dorothy Lamour movie where he was pretty much un-dressed like Tarzan, which would make sense from a casting aspect.

Also on the BC footage-- as sharp-eyed Don Glut has pointed out-- the stock shots we invariably see in other films (TWO LOST WORLDS, TARZAN'S DESERT MYSTERY, etc.) are usually alternate takes, rather than lifts directly from the footage used in the film. The major exception to thatis VALLEY OF THE DRAGONS, which is ALL stock shots from the 1940 film.

One more thing. In the film proper, there's an extraordinary shot that in its own way is as neat as the lava-drowning. Mature and Landis are huddled in a trench while the lizards are battling, and there's a low-angle, pointing up to the sky from the trench, showing them cowering beneath the lizards, who are chomping and thrashing above them and rolling over them and the trench. It's an unnecessarily imaginative angle, and must've taken a great deal of time to set up. You'd need to do a very low angle on the lizards themselves, plus completely re-arrange the process screen set-up (though maybe there's an easy way around that, like having the players pretend they're laying on their sides, or something.)