Bela Lugosi won the role of Dracula by accepting a tiny salary
Universal did not want Bela Lugosi. The studio hoped for Conrad Veidt, then Lon Chaney, then a string of established screen actors. Lugosi, who had played the count on Broadway and happened to be touring in Los Angeles, lobbied relentlessly and took just $500 a week. His performance defined the screen vampire for generations.
Casting was a scramble. Veidt went back to Germany, worried his English was not good enough for sound films, and Chaney died suddenly. Producer Carl Laemmle Jr. announced John Wray for the part before Lugosi finally won over the executives, earning $3,500 for seven weeks of work. Helen Chandler, cast as Mina, was paid more, at $750 a week, the top salary in the cast.
The studio had paid $40,000 for rights to Bram Stoker's novel and the stage adaptations, wary of repeating the fate of Nosferatu, the unauthorised German version of 1922 whose prints a court had essentially ordered destroyed after Stoker's widow sued. The first scriptwriter, novelist Louis Bromfield, proposed a Dracula who starts as a ghoulish old man and grows young on blood, but he was replaced and the final film followed the stage play closely.
Shooting began on September 29, 1930, on a budget of $355,050 and a 36-day schedule, and by many accounts it was disorganised, with cinematographer Karl Freund often directing in place of Tod Browning. The same sets were reused at night for a separate Spanish-language version. On set, Lugosi paced in front of a full-length mirror swirling his cape and declaring that he was Dracula, speaking to his castmates little beyond good morning and good night; Chandler sometimes laughed at the ritual. Edward Van Sloan, who played Van Helsing on stage and screen, later called the film overplayed and overwritten, and Chandler dreaded being remembered as a pale girl in a trance.
Audiences disagreed. The first sound adaptation of Stoker's novel was a hit, spawned sequels and turned Lugosi's count into the model for countless later vampires. Small details reveal history: the villagers pray in Hungarian because Transylvania had belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary, although it was Romanian by 1918. The Library of Congress added the film to the National Film Registry in 2000, and it enters the American public domain on January 1, 2027.
Source: Dracula (1931 English-language film)
