Nomads of the North, 1920

Nomads of the North is a 1920 American drama film of the North Woods co-directed and co-written by David Hartford and James Oliver Curwood, and featuring Lon Chaney, Betty Blythe, and Lewis Stone. The film was based on Curwood’s own 1919 novel of the same name (he also produced the film).

The crew erected a phony forest on the Universal Studios lot, with fake trees, trimmed with natural foliage, planted in the ground, barked, and painted. The forest fire was filmed with 6 cameras. Betty Blythe and Lon Chaney were burned while filming the forest fire scene when a blaze that popped up unexpectedly blocked their escape. They were rescued through a tunnel that had been previously built for just such an occurrence, but filming was stopped for ten days while the actors recovered in a local hospital. Unfortunately their exciting real-life escape was not filmed.