Fort, whose credits included work on both Dracula and Frankenstein; and Philip Wylie, whose 1930 novel Gladiator was one of the main inspirations for the Superman comics. Fort and Wylie both developed an original character for the film: the Panther Woman, a creature Dr.Moreau creates in the film in his House of Pain, which he tries to mate with a human. In one of Wylie's and Fort's early adaptations, Moreau beats the half-naked Panther Woman because instead of having sex with a younger male, The Panther lady violently slashes him. Their adaptation also had a far more gruesome ending, involving Moreau taking the character Prendick from the original novel to see a chained creature who had no face, with Moreau planning to kill Prendrick, slice his face off, and sew it to the creature. The final and highly revised script is dated September 30, 1932 and only gives credit to Wylie and Waldemar Young. Young had written such Lon Chaney silent melodramas as London After Midnight (1927). Paramount sent their script to the MPPDA on September 22, noting that the film was set to start shooting on September 26. Shooting was delayed as the writers continued working on the script. Pre-production To cast the role of the Panther Woman, Paramount Publicist Arthur Mayer developed a contest for the role that involved giving the winner a trip to Hollywood, $200 a week for five weeks, and home at the Ambassador Hotel, and a role in the film. The contest required the contestants to be between the ages of 17 and 30 years old and to be in good health, taller than 5 feet 4 but at most 5 foot 8, and not anyone who had worked or had a relative who worked at Paramount. In his memoir Merely Colossal (1953), Mayer stated that newspapers who were cooperating with Paramount on the project received floods of letters for the role. The contest attracted a reported 60,000 applicants. There were four finalists: Lona Andre, Gail Patrick, Kathleen Burke and Verna Hillie. According to Hillie who was living in Detroit, Paramount had published the content in several major city newspapers. Hillie was performing on radio at the time, and her mother had submitted her for the contest. When she was contacted by Paramount, she appeared in different theaters in Detroit on three succeeding Saturday nights, as one of the 12 finalists with a few