King Kong (1933)

 

King Kong (1933)

                                                                                                  

"And lo, the beast looked upon the face of beauty.
And it stayed its hand from killing.
And from that day, it was as one dead."

-- An Old Arabian Proverb which opens this film … except one thing, the “old proverb” was invented for this film.

 

 

Introduction

 

It’s no exaggeration to call “King Kong” this one of the Greatest Movies Ever Made (the American Film Institute annual list designated it so twice). Hailed when it was released, hugely successful (well, true, but complicated, I’ll get to that), it has never slipped into obscurity even almost a century later, was hugely influential of other filmmakers, and its honors continue to mount with each passing generation.

 

It's a simple story, a Fairy Tale, explicitly referencing Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s “Beauty and the Beast" (1740), but providing a greater epic sweep while retaining the deft shifting in our sympathies in favor of the Villian, and doing so even though here Character Kong is more Villainous and Monstrous than the Beast in the original de Villeneuve.

 

It’s also enormous fun, reflected in how much the title Character is beloved by children even today. But it remains a remarkably Dark and Violent film, a powerful Parable of the unresolvable Conflict between longings of the Primitive Instinct and the confinements of Modern Society.

 

The film was very much a product of its time, the worst years of the Great Depression, lasting in the USA from 1929 to 1939. It was intended to offer the Audience a relief from that crushing World Financial Crisis. It addressed these depredations in the first few scenes while setting up another thread, separate but intimately related: A Metaphor for the relationship between Hollywood Fantasies and a landscape of Real Misery. The last act of story casts a cold eye on the Corruption of our Industrial Civilization, its Empty Promises and its Cruel Indifference to Individual Aspiration and Desire. The famous last line of the film (which I’ll address it later) is a Lie, a Defection of Guilt, a Balm to those who don’t want to admit the Cruelty of Entitled Indifference.

 

 

Part one: the first act

 

The film opens on the Docks of Hoboken, New Jersey, where a Nightwatchman (Russ Powell) pontificates about an insane voyage sponsored by a Hollywood Producer/Director Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong), "... that crazy fella that's a runnin' it ... They say he ain't scared of nothing. If he wants a picture of a lion, he just goes up to him and tells him to look pleasant."

 

Carl’s ship is stuffed with Illegal Cargo items that few understand the purpose of, and must sail prematurely; it wouldn’t pass a Fire Marshall’s Inspection and must reach its Secret Destination before Monsoon Season starts. But Carl has a problem, he’s missing element to complete his Grand and Secret Scheme, a Leading Lady for his up-coming movie.

 

The film is both Sexist and Racist by today’s standards, but ways that wouldn’t have been much visible to an Audience in the 1930s. But it was bold in how it subverted its own Sexism by making its soon-to-be introduced Shrinking-Violet Heroine a complex Character with real Pluck, and addressing how exploitive the film industry, and the whole world, was towards women even before that Character’s appearance.

 

Director Carl, in his cabin, berates Theatrical Agent Charles Weston (Sam Hardy) over his failure in providing a suitable Leading Lady, "Somebody's interfered with every girl I've tried to hire. And now all the agents in town have shut down on me.”

 

Charles responds that Carl has a "reputation for recklessness that can't be glossed over … I can't send a young pretty girl such as you ask on a job like this without telling her what to expect ... To go off on a trip for no one knows how long, to some spot you don't even hint at, the only woman on the ship with the toughest mugs I ever looked at ...”

 

Carl barks back, “Holy Mackerel. Do you think I want to haul a woman around? The Public Wants a Girl, and this time, I'm gonna give 'em what they want … [I will make the] greatest picture in the world, something that nobody's ever seen or heard of. They'll have to think up a lot of new adjectives when I come back.” Carl sets off to find a girl on his own, “even if I have to marry one!"

 

Carl is reduced to examining to drawn faces of women on Breadlines, but then sees Ann Darrow (Fay Wray). Ann’s out-of-work, broke, and hungry, and just been caught trying to steal an apple from a Fruit Stand. The Vendor (Paul Poracasi) threatens to call the Police, but Carl intervenes. The girl proves so hungry, she’s faint. Charles takes her to a Restaurant.

 

Carl: "How did you ever get into this fix?"

Ann: "Bad luck, I guess.". She’s an orphan, "I'm supposed to have an uncle someplace." She’d also just been laid off from a Brooklyn-based film studio that was folding.

Carl: "I've got a job for you ... It's money and adventure and fame. It's the thrill of a lifetime and a long sea voyage that starts at six o'clock tomorrow morning … I'm on the level. No funny business... just trust me and keep your chin up."

 

After only a moment’s hesitation, Ann accepts.

 

In fairness, Carl never tries to Sexually Exploit her, but considering the trouble he does get her into, that’s really damning him with faint praise.

 

Carl is clearly a stand-in for the film’s co-Producers/co-Directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, both of whom were Real-Life Adventurers and Documentarians who’d previously focused on the World’s most exotic places and animals. Carl’s role is ambiguous throughout the film, Hero or Villian? His Hero-role would seem cemented when he finds an equally brave Ally (I get to him later) and they face the Monster Kong together. But then, as the Monster becomes more sympathetic, it becomes harder-and-harder to ignore how exploitive Carl is. It is Carl who speaks the film’s final, deceitful, line.

 

The sea voyage is mostly uneventful, but serves to introduce the film’s main Hero and provide some deft foreshadowing.

 

Or main Hero is First Mate John, or Jack, Driscoll (Bruce Cabot) and it’s been reported that the final Screenwriter Ruth Rose used Schoedsack, her husband, as the template for John (so on top of helping to shape Character Carl). John and Carl are initially Antagonistic, then Allies, and by the end are acting almost as one person. John is handsome and brawny, but disgruntled and initially Chauvinistic towards Ann, calling her, “that girl Denham picked up last night." Further, women are a "nuisance" on board ships, “women just can't help being a bother. Made that way, I guess."

 

In time, Ann softens John’s feelings towards her, Chauvinism becomes Chivalry, and the two Fall in Love. This begs comparisons to the coming Monster, because in both cases, and perhaps even with Carl, the Beauty deeply touches the Heart of the Beast. Carl makes these connections explicit in a moment of Jealousy where he starts kvetching at John:

 

Carl: “Oh, you have gone soft on her, eh? I've got enough troubles without a love affair to complicate things. Better cut it out, Jack.”
John: “Love affair! You think I'm gonna fall for any dame?”
Carl: “I've never known it to fail: some big, hard-boiled egg gets a look at a pretty face and bang, he cracks up and goes sappy.”
John: “Now who's goin' sappy? Listen, I haven't run out on ya, have I?”
Carl: “No, you're a pretty tough guy, but if Beauty gets you, ya... [Carl voice trails off a moment as a new thought intrudes] Huh, I'm going right into a theme song here.”
John: “Say, what are you talkin' about?”
Carl: “It's the idea of my picture. The Beast was a tough guy too. He could lick the world. But when he saw Beauty, she got him. He went soft. He forgot his wisdom and the little fellas licked him. Think it over, Jack.”

 

That was fore-shadowing for sure, but there was more to come.

 

Carl preps Ann, who still hasn’t seen a script, setting up a camera on the ship’s deck. Carl asks her to react to something she can’t see:

 

Carl: “Now Ann, in this one, you're looking down. When I start to crank, you look up slowly. You're quite calm. You don't expect to see a thing. Then you just follow my directions … Now look higher. Still higher. Now you see it. You're amazed. You can't believe it. Your eyes open wider. It's horrible, Ann, but you can't look away. There's no chance for you, Ann. No escape. You're helpless, Ann, helpless. There's just one chance, if you can scream. But your throat's paralyzed. Try to scream, Ann. Try. Perhaps if you didn't see it, you could scream. Throw your arms across your eyes and scream Ann, scream for your life!”

 

Ann does let loose a blood-curdling scream, her first of several over the course of the film. The film’s sound-mixing was quite sophisticated for its day, and Actress Wray provided all her Character's screams in a single recording session. She later said she "couldn't speak even in a whisper for days" and referred to the session as an "Aria of the Agonies." When she saw the final film, she felt "uncomfortable watching the film ... mostly because of my screaming -- Too much, too much, I thought.”  Those screams were so impressive they would be used in later films, some of which Wray didn’t even appear in. Not-for-nothing, Actress Ray is now referred to as Hollywood’s first “Scream Queen.”

 

Character Jack observed this and commented, "What's he think she's really gonna see?"

 

All the above is the first forty-minutes of a 100-minute picture. Well-paced and crammed with story-telling, but it is nothing compared to the hour that follows. It’s utterly breathless in its forward momentum, set on two savage islands, first Kong’s home of Skull Island, then Manhattan for the climax.

 

Part two: the second act

 

Skull Island is a Mythical place, somewhere in the Indian Ocean "way west of Sumatra." A bit of nick-picking, but still worth noting, if the ship was really going to the Indian Ocean, it should’ve left from the USA’s West Coast, not the East. But the climax was in NYC, so that location needed to be established early on. Though Hollywood had already stolen New York and New Jersey’s title of Film Capital of the World, it still didn’t then compare to the power of the Times’ Square Theatre District in NYC, and that unspoken acknowledgment makes a Native NYer like me proud.

 

Skull Island’s jungles were all created in Hollywood studios and modeled on the sinister phantasmagoria of 19^th c. Engraver Gustave Doré. On the ship’s approach to its rocky shores, our Sailors, Film Crew, and Adventures hear Native Drums. On their landing, they enter a Native Village which was the creation of the Production Designer, Art Director, Set Decorators, and Costumer Designer, Carrol Clark, Alfred Herman, Thomas Little, Roy Moyer, & Walter Plunett, all of whom went uncredited, and that set was later used in another Cooper Production, “She” (1935). Our Heroes interrupt a Ceremony where a dark-skinned woman is about to be Sacrificed to the God Kong, who lives on the other side a Great Wall. The Wall’s impressively massive gate originally constructed for the film “Intolerance” (1916) and expanded on for “The King of Kings” (1927) and finally burned down as part of the Inferno of Atlanta in “Gone with the Wind” (1939).  

 

The crew is unwelcome and prepare to leave, but then the Native Chief (Noble Johnson) and Witch Doctor (Steven Clemente) become fascinated by the Ann, a “Golden Woman.” The Chief wants her as a substitute Sacrifice and offers six of his women for the one blonde. Notes Carl, "Yeah, blondes are scarce around here." The White men refuse to sell Ann and retreat.

 

Okay, lets summarize this scene: Near-naked, non-White, Savages are holding a Human Sacrifice Ceremony. The Chief and Witch Doctor, played Actors of African and Mexican descent even though the setting is the Indian Ocean, decide that this Blonde was worth as much as six of their own Persons of Color (POC).  I should also note, Actress Ray wasn’t blonde, she wore a wig for this production. The intruding White men are offended by the dirtiness of these lesser peoples.

 

Umm … just move along, nothing to note here.

 

The Allegiance between Characters Carl and John cements after Monster Kong successfully runs off with Ann. They journey beyond the Wall to rescue her, and many anonymous Crew Members die horribly in the Prehistoric Hell filled with vicious Dinosaurs. Also, we get to see another side of the Monster Kong.

 

The Lost World theme has been essential to SF from the very beginning, long before its emergence as a recognized Genre. SF came to be with the explosion of Scientific Discovery and World Exploration of the 1700s, and reflected in the beginning by popular Genre of the Fantastic Voyage. There’s really no difference between the Fantastic Voyage and the Lost World except context, both represent the purest of Escapist Possibilities, but the Lost World was a bit specific, that some Forgotten and Fantastical Civilization still survives alongside our (presumably) Advanced one. It beckons us either to escape our shackles, look smugly down on our lessors, or maybe both at the same time.

 

The popularity of the Lost World trope was likely at its peak in the Great Depression. Some of these Worlds were Utopian (example, James Hilton’s novel “Lost Horizon” published same year as this film was released) and even the Nightmare Landscape of Skull Island was in a way Idealized, because hinted at a more Meaningful, and Masculine, life could be found in the still Undiscovered Regions of Earth.

 

The film seems to take the same view of Primitiveness as Pulp Writer Robert E. Howard, who lusted for a less-Civilized World where he thought he better belonged, "Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph." Howard’s work was often Racist, yet his Admiration, perhaps even Jealousy, of the Primitives was more potent as than his Racism. He created the great Lost World series, “Conan the Barbarian” (first story was published in 1932, merely a year before this film was released), which wallows in that conundrum.

 

And “King Kong’s” Racial attitudes reflect this. Monster Kong is an Ape, a slur often applied to Black People, and he proves remarkably, capriciously, Savage, but Kong also represented Innocence and Freedom.

 

Sexual Intercourse between a fifty-foot-tall Ape and Human female of average height is too silly to consider, but the fact that Kong’s desires are Sexual are undisguised. This evoked the Dark Theme of Miscegenation, then universally disapproved of, sometimes inspiring Lynching Murders, and Criminally Prosecutable in many States. Kong, like the Chief and Witch Doctor, hold the commodity of Ann’s Whiteness superior to anything a POC woman could offer. But Kong is also shown as sensitive towards, and committed to, Ann. He protects her from a string of equally huge and fierce Monsters and cares for her with some tenderness. Critic Cynthia Erb focuses on that, saying the film "arguably embodies both the demonic and Edenic impulses of the jungle tradition" which was core to 1930s film.

 

Just as Blacks were often collectively referred to as “Apes,” they were often they referred to as “Children.” And Kong, both in his Monstrousness and his Lovingness, was a child, or more accurately an adolescent, dangerously lacking in Impulse-Control but longing to prove he can be more that he first seems to be. In a late-in-life interview, co-Director Cooper proved revealing on this point; he didn’t personally identify with Character Carl, whom Screenwriter Rose in part based on him, but the Monster, who he conceived before the Script-Writing process began. “I was a little, timid boy. Put that on your tape if you want. I made myself be a champion boxer and wrestler. I fought three consecutive wars. I'm King Kong.”

 

 

Ann develops real feelings for Kong, but she’s not foolish, at every second she’s thinking of escape. When she finally does, into Hero John’s arms, two things happen: First Kong is enraged. Second, all the pieces of Director Carl’s improbable plan fall into place:

 

Carl: “Wait a minute. What about Kong?”
John: “Well, what about him?”
Carl: “We came here to get a moving picture, and we've found something worth more than all the movies in the world ... We've got those gas bombs. If we can capture him alive.”
John: “Why you're crazy! Besides that, he's on a cliff where a whole army couldn't get at him.”
Carl: “Yeah, if he stays there. But we've got something he wants.”  

 

Kong smashes through the massive wallWall and kills Natives indiscriminately. He’s then felled by Carl’s illegalIllegal Gas-Bombs and is captured alive. Carl is triumphant, "He's always been the king of his world, but we'll teach him to fear. Why, the whole world will pay to see this! In a few months it'll be up in lights: 'Kong, the Eighth Wonder of the World!’”

 

Part three: the third act

 

Kong, captured and chained, becoming part of a stage-show in Times Square, NYC. The name of the theatre is not mentioned in the film, and in articles it is often assumed it was Radio City Music Hall. As someone who has walked those streets, and recognize the side-alleys that lead to the theater’s backstages, I say it was the Minsky Theatre on 42^nd St. There’s some historical significance in that, the same space had previously been the famous Republic Theatre, but as the economic woes of the Great Depression crushed “legitimate” theatre in NYC, the Minsky was then a sleazy Burlesque House, so perfect for Character Carl. (Today, it’s known as the New Victory Theatre.)

 

Ann and John are clearly uncomfortable with Carl’s plans to put Kong on display, but not only do they not object, they continue to be part of Carl’s Entrepreneurial Ambitions. Carl, in tuxedo and top-hat, introduces Kong to the Audience:

 

“Ladies and gentlemen, I'm here tonight to tell you a very strange story - a story so strange that no one will believe it - but, ladies and gentlemen, seeing is believing. And we - my partners and I - have brought back the living proof of our adventure, an adventure in which twelve of our party met horrible death. And now, ladies and gentlemen, before I tell you any more, I'm going to show you the greatest thing your eyes have ever beheld. He was a King and a God in the world he knew, but now he comes to civilization, merely a captive, on show to gratify your curiosity. Ladies and gentlemen, look at Kong - the Eighth Wonder of the World!”

 

He brings both Ann and John into his speech:

 

“The bravest girl I have ever known ... There the Beast and here the Beauty. She has lived through an experience no other woman ever dreamed of. And she was saved from the very grasp of Kong by her future husband. I want you to meet a very brave gentleman, Mr. John Driscoll.”

 

The audience is aghast at their first sight of the giant Ape who is chained to an “X” shaped scaffolding, suggesting a Crucifixion:

 

"Don't be alarmed ladies and gentlemen. Those chains are made of chrome steel."

 

Things start spiraling out-of-control immediately thereafter. Newspaper Photographer flashbulbs panic and enrage Kong, and the chains prove less-substantial that Carl promised.

 

Kong escapes and rampages across Midtown Manhattan, killing many and destroying every man-made obstacle, including a Subway Train full of innocents, an unsubtle substitute for the Dinosaurs that Kong battled earlier. This is all while he searches for fleeing Ann.

 

Having recaptured Ann, he carries her and he climbs the then-tallest building in the world, the Empire State Building. There, he’s at the top of the world, but also cornered. Navy bi-planes (which Carl had somehow arranged) with powerful machine guns swirl around him. Kong swats at them as if they were flies, even felling one, but the bullets continue to find the target. Co-Directors Cooper and Schoedsack appear on-screen as pilot and gunner in this scene.

 

Kong had put Ann down by this point, she understands he thinks he’s protecting her. She’s horrified as the blood oozes from his wounds. He falls.

 

The last scene is Kong, dead on the street.

 

Police Lieutenant (George MacQuarrie): “Well, Denham, the airplanes got him.”
Carl: “Oh, no. It wasn't the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast.”

 

Critic Tom Shales, “I think it's a great 20th century story in which we confront our own primal origins, try to imagine civilizing them, which is, in effect, a kind of corruption of them, and then the tragedy is the result. I don't think beauty killed the beast. I don't think that's at all the moral of the tale, even though that was stated and restated throughout the whole movie.”

 

May I add, it was Carl killed Kong. Carl invaded Kong’s land, put others at risk, many died, kidnapped and chained Kong, and dragged Kong to the USA for the sake of profit. There is no real difference between Carl and Jean Riaux who became the most notorious of the string of Showman to exhibit and exploit Sarah Baartman (better known by her stage-name the “Hottentot Venus”). Baartman was a member of South Africa’s Khoikhoi people and displayed a particularly striking Steatopygia, basically her buttocks was abnormally huge; she was taken to Europe, sold into Slavery, displayed naked before, and poked and prodded by, Audiences in England and France at private parties and Freak Shows, as well as being used to demonstrate several Quack Theories of Scientific Racism, until her miserable, impoverished, and lonely death in 1815. In this film, Kong was Monstrous, but Carl was the real Monster.

 

Part four: development of screenplay

 

The initial story was Producer/Director Cooper’s idea, but the screenplay was created by many hands, many of whom were uncredited, but three Writers were the most significant.

 

The first draft was penned by Novelist Edgar Wallace, working from an outline Cooper had penned. Wallace died suddenly and the story unready to shoot, but his credit was retained. Later Cooper would complain that Wallace got too much credit having contributed so little, though at the time he encouraged Wallace’s credit at the time because the Author was well-know and this helped marketing. Cooper seemed to think there was nothing in Wallace’s first draft that wasn’t in Cooper’s own outline.

 

This is almost certainly unfair. Though the film’s most iconic imagery was born of Cooper’s own dreams, one of Wallace’s earlier Mystery novels, “The Avenger: or the Hairy Arm” (1925, filmed in German as “Der Rächer“(1960) and then promptly forgotten by everyone), was ludicrously improbable though had no specifically Fantastic elements, and hit several plot points with “King Kong” despite other radical story differences. It is set in an isolated place, the gloomy English provinces instead of Skull Island, concerned a Movie Producer who shows up and disrupts the place to complete his project, he elevates an anonymous female Extra to Stardom, but gets her into a world of trouble in the process. She’s even chased across the forbidding landscape by an ape, normal-sized, pet of the main Villain.

 

After Wallace’s death, Ashmore Creelman was brought in. He was a prolific and skilled Screenwriter and penned “King Kong’s,”  co-production, “The Most Dangerous Game.” He also is on record complaining of Cooper’s grandiosity, "There is certainly such a thing as reaching a limit to the number of elements a story can contain and make sense."

 

After Creelman quit, it was completed by Ruth Rose, Producer/Director Schoedsack’s wife. She was already a Published Author, but this was her first screenplay. Rose seems the main driver here. She was uniquely qualified for this project, not many years earlier she had been an Actress on Broadway, NYC, but finding herself unemployed, embraced Scientific Writing and even a bit of Exploration, which is how she met her future husband Schoedsack. She traveled with Cooper and Schoedsack on their more Adventurous film productions to wildly exotic places. She focused on how to believably people the impossible tale, notably the development of Characters Carl and John, and gets the most credit for the development of the Character of Ann. She cut most of the instances of attempted Sexual Assault that peppered Wallace's first draft, though she did keep one, now notorious (I’ll get to that later). She was also credited for streamlining the script, like removing scenes concerning Kong’s ocean voyage from Skull Island to NYC. She invented a language for the Skull Island Natives, based on an existent language for some Isolated and Exoreic place, and was then required to provide an English translation to Censors to make sure she didn’t sneak any dirty words in.

 

All this was under Cooper and Schoedsack’s supervision. Cooper made compulsive additions to the script, something that had infuriated Writer Creelman, and created a situation where the script was still unfinished throughout shooting.

 

But the final film is both tight and perceptive, so one can only assume the ambiguities of Character Carl were intentional. It very much feels as if the two Producer/Directors Cooper and Schoedsack were posing a question to themselves, “Am I a good man or not?”

 

Part five: influences and inspirations

 

“King Kong” was both a film of bold originality, but also sorta inevitable. It grew as much out of Popular Fancy as it did Producer/Director Cooper’s Impulses and Dreams, and some time should be devoted to what shaped it. They are, of course, too many to list, but I’ll share those that seem most important include:

 

In prose one can see “King Kong’s” predecessors in the popular works of Writers who forged Literary trails into an array of Lost Worlds: Pierre Benoit, H. Rider Haggard, Jules Verne, and especially two Authors whose novels had, then-recently, had been adapted to landmark films, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, because the greatest influence of film is always film itself. To keep this chronological, the Burroughs and Doyle films will have to wait a moment:

 

1915 – 1920: The beginning of the career of Stop-Motion Animation Master, Willis O’Brien. He Directed a series of short films set in Prehistory, most demonstrating Dinosaurs interreacting with Cavemen, so not Scientifically rigorous. He’s most remembered for his landmark FX work on “King Kong” but his early films (“Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy,” “10,000 B.C,” “Prehistoric Poultry,” “Curious Pets of Our Ancestors,” “The Ghost of Slumber Mountain” and “Along the Moonbeam Trail,” most of which are now lost), were all landmarks in FX development. O’Brien was then working with what we now “Claymation” and were primitive compared what O’Brien would deliver in just a few years.

 

1918: Saw the first film adaptation of Burroughs’ novel “Tarzan of the Apes” (the book was published 1912) starring famous Muscleman, Elmo Lincoln, in the title role. It was filmed largely on location, but not in Africa (though some publicity said it was) but the swamps of Louisiana pretending to be Africa. It should be noted, Burroughs fantasies of Africa and Lost Worlds made him the the most popular of those Writers listed two paragraphs above, and his tales were the purest fantasy as he, himself, never visited the continent (above-mentioned H. Rider Haggard had lived there, and that is reflected in his work). Many involved in King Kong and other projects I’ll mention had impressive resumes as Real-Life Adventurers, but Burroughs ideals of a “Noble Savage” shaped the idea more than any other, even those with greater experience and hands-on knowledge.

 

1922: “Nanook of the North” is an undeniable landmark in cinema. Though the earliest commercially released short films (by the Lumière brothers, oldest film 1896) could be called Documentaries as they were street scenes without scripts or Actors, just cameras set up to record what actually happened, and travelogues to remote places were common in cinemas thereafter, most Critics call “Nanook of the …” the first true Documentary feature. Director Robert Joseph Flaherty went to the Ungava Peninsula of northern Quebec, Canada, to document the lives of Inuit Hunter, Nanook, and his family. Though the film was mostly non-fiction, there was scenes that were scripted and staged, and this mannerism, later frowned upon, would be a feature of most Documentaries for the next several decades. It created a tidal wave of Documentary films that involved Filmmakers traveling to the most remote corners of the world to engage in “Salvage Ethnography” (a phrase not coined until the 1970s), the attempt to preserve on film Cultures threatened by the Worldwide Expansion of Modernity. Among the most important Filmmakers to follow in Flaherty’s footsteps were the Adventurers turned Directors/Producers Cooper and Schoedsack. Cooper’s biographer Mark Cotta Vaz referred to the motto of this kind of filmmaking as “distant, difficult, and dangerous.”

 

1925: “The Lost World” was based on Author Doyle’s novel of the same name (book was published 1912, the same year as “Tarzan of the Apes”) concerned Adventurers encountering Dinosaurs in the contemporary Jungles of South America, then bringing one back to a Modern City. O’Brien was the FX Supervisor, and his achievement was leaps and bounds beyond his above-mentioned shorts. Gone was the Claymation, he was now using articulated metal skeletons covered with rubber. O’Brien’s Protégé, Sculptor Marcel Delgado, constructed 49 Dinosaurs for the film. Author Doyle, still alive at the time, took to showing reels from the film to his friends, attempting to fool them into believing modern Dinosaurs had really been found. The film had a more spectacular Climax than the novel, with a Brontosaurus rampaging across London, so though “King Kong” had many similarities with the novel, it had even more with this film.

 

1925 -1927: Cooper and Schoedsack had worked together on others films as least as early as 1924, but these two years saw this first collaboration Producers/Directors, so the driving force behind the finished product. “Grass” (1925), financed by the American Geographical Society, followed a nomadic Bakhtiari caravan of 50,000 across treacherous rivers and steep mountain passes in Iran, taking a now-forgotten trail to find a pasture for their livestock. “Chang” (1927) filmed in Siam, and perhaps crossed the film into complete fiction, documented a rural Farmer’s struggles to maintain his home while being constantly besieged by wild animals.

 

1927: Explorer and Trustee of the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, William D. Burden, a friend of Cooper’s, published the book, “The Dragon Lizards of Komodo” about his 1926 expedition to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), where he encountered 10-foot-long Komodo Dragons, which to most eyes looked like Dinosaurs. Years later, Cooper wrote in a letter to Burden, "Then one day, after one of my conversations with you, I thought to myself, why not film my Gorilla ... I also had very firmly in mind to giantize both the Gorilla and your Dragons to make them really huge. However, I always believed in personalizing and focusing attention on one main character and from the very beginning I intended to make it the Gigantic Gorilla, no matter what else I surrounded him with ... I had already established him in my mind on a prehistoric island with prehistoric monsters, and I now thought of having him destroyed by the most sophisticated thing I could think of in civilization ... My very original concept was to place him on the top of the Empire State Building and have him killed by airplanes ... I thought that by mattes and double printing and the new technique called rear projection it could be done ... I personally conceived and initiated development of the photographic process afterwards called 'miniature projection' ... I ... went ahead and wrote a number of outlines of ‘King Kong’ in the years 1929-30." Elsewhere, Cooper stated that the book "the most important influence" for “King Kong.”

 

1929: Cooper and Schoedsack abandoned all pretense of non-fiction the “The Four Feathers,” based on A.E.W. Mason’s novel of the same name (1902), a War Film/Romantic Melodrama set during the Mahdist War (1881 – 1899) during which the British Empire established its Rule over the Country of Sudan. Much of the filming was done in Africa, but the main Cast (including Actress Wray, her first collaboration with Cooper and Schoedsack) stayed in the USA to control costs. It’s an unapologetically pro-Imperialism film, showing the Hadendoa people as utter Savages; the Hadendoa were Nomads who sided with Mahdists, both were Native of Sudan, and they fought against the Invading forces from British and Egyptians. Cooper, son of a prominent family of the Southern USA, not only made this film more hostile to non-Whites than his previous collaborations with Schoedsack but also became so enraged with his Black African extras, who took a day off to go Hippo hunting, he whipped them viciously. Cooper’s Biographer, Mark Cotta Vaz described Cooper’s attitude of, “racial superiority was typical of a southern white man who grew up in times when the American memory still recalled the practice of slavery.” Chattel Slavey in the USA officially ended in the USA in 1866, barely more than 60-years before this film was made.

 

It is worth noting here Cooper’s most spectacular Real-Life Adventures were already documented in his Memoir, “Things Men Die For” (1927). The book focused on his Adventures an Aviator in WWI (1914-1918) and especially the Polish-Soviet War (1919-1921) where he spent time in a Russian POW Camp but then escaped. After publication, he destroyed most of the copies because it revealed too much about a Romantic Tryst, but apparently wasn’t embarrassed by this passage, “The lust for power is in us, we white men. We’ll sacrifice anything for the chance to rule. And I believe that it is right that black, brown, and yellow men should be dominated by the white.”

 

Film Historian John Michlig, “There’s passages in some of Cooper’s memoirs, where he’s describing a native village, and because he’s the white man from an industrialized civilization, he says he’s just going to confront the leader of this entire village and basically dress him down like he’s a child in front of his whole tribe. If you happen to take their object of worship away, that’s just your right, because you came from an industrialized civilization. There was never any question about that at all in [‘King Kong’].”

 

1930: “Ingagi” was a low-budget pseudo-Documentary likely inspired by Cooper and Schoedsack’s earlier successes and, in turn, helped lay the groundwork for “King Kong.” The filmmakers, who never left the West Coast of the USA, claimed it was "an authentic incontestable celluloid document showing the sacrifice of a living woman to mammoth gorillas." It mixed stock-footage with staged scenes and had naked women (Caucasian women in Black-Face) offered to an Ape God as Sex-Slaves. When the Producers, “Congo Pictures,” tried to find theaters to run their film, they were turned down over-and-over, the film’s fake-ness was not well-disguised (from Variety, "Photography is poor … Accompanying lectures, synchronized on the film, are supposed to have been done by [London-based Explorer Sir Hubert] Winstead [who didn’t actually exist], but the speaker uses a plain American accent."). The Orpheum Theater, owned by RKO studios, not only allowed it to be shown, but aggressively Marketed it. The theater brought in an impressive $4,000 on opening day, followed by an unprecedented $23,000 over the first week. RKO then secured the National Rights, and “Ingagi” started playing coast-to-coast, becoming one of the highest grossing films in the USA.

 

Motion Picture and Distributors of America, better known as the “Hays Office” quickly adopted an Advertising Code of Ethics in response to the "Ingagi" scandal. At this point, the Hays Office was not in a position to execute an out-right ban, but were not going to let the film, its distributors, or the theaters, off that easy. Detectives were hired, the production was investigated, and the fraudulence exposed. Make-Up Artist/Costumer Designer/Actor, Charles Gemora, signed an Affidavit admitting that he had portrayed the principal Gorilla in "Ingagi." Finally, RKO pulled the film from all houses, having already brought in $4 million.

 

Cooper never cited “Ingagi” as one of his influences despite the over-lapping plot points, but there is little doubt its success encouraged RKO to greenlight “King Kong,” an expensive film, so a big-risk for the financially struggling studio.

 

From Variety that same year, "So many people are going into woolly Africa with cameras that the natives are not only losing their lens shyness but are rapidly nearing the stage where they will qualify for export to Hollywood." All the studios jumped on the Jungle-Craze band-wagon, and the next two films listed were produced by MGM.

 

1931: “Trader Horn” an African Adventure Directed by W. S. Van Dyke and loosely based on the exploits of Real-World Alfred Aloysius Horn. It was also filmed entirely in Africa, perhaps the first film Dramatic Feature to do so, and proved a huge hit. But, the production proved a disaster. The Filmmakers were not adequately prepared to work in harsh and isolated circumstances. The Lead Actress, Edwina Booth, contracted an exotic, career-ending, disease, and ugly Law Suits followed. Booth appeared as a “White Goddess” Character, common in Jungle Films, and it was truly remarkable how many Blondes an Explorer could find in Darkest Africa if he were in a Hollywood movie.

 

1932: Jungle Films probably reached their pinnacle with the first sound adaptation of Burrough’s Tarzan, “Tarzan the Ape Man,” again Directed by Van Dyke, but this time not in Africa, but a studio lot. It was far more successful than “Trade Horn” with far fewer headaches. Even today it is the most beloved of all Tarzan films, starring five-time Olympic Gold Medalist Johnny Weissmüller as title Character, and launched a legendary Franchise.

 

Part six: production

 

Culturally, the stars were aligning for the creation of “King Kong,” leading the more-or-less bankrupt RKO to embrace a huge gamble. This was early in the career of David Selznick, who would later become among the most legendary of all Hollywood Producers. He was already a veteran of MGM and Paramount when the financially failing studio tempted Selznick away from Paramount and made him Head of Production in 1931. He did two, seemingly contradictory, things that saved the studio: He implemented rigorous cost-control measures while at the same time championed a Unit Production System, wherein Producers of the individual films, often specialists in specific Genres, had greater independence than they had under the Central Producer System. "Under the factory system of production, you rob the director of his individualism and this being a creative industry that is harmful to the quality of the product made."

 

(You’ll note the use of the word “Director” in the above paragraph, that was only half-true for Selznick. He believed that the Producer, not the Director, was the primary Creative Force behind a picture, which would bring him many headaches when he successfully got Alfred Hitchcock to move to the USA in 1940, only to fight with him constantly, but that’s a different story.)

 

That same year, Cooper was not only trying to sell the idea of “King Kong” but trying to secure the rights to the “Tarzan” franchise from MGM and exploring making a remake of “The Lost World.” He was getting nowhere on any of these fronts but was hired by Selznick as an Associate Producer at RKO and assigned to the "problem of studying and cutting down the overhead" of a project titled “Creation.”

 

“Creation” was going to be FX Artist O'Brien’s next big film following his landmark “The Lost World,” but it also been already a year’s labor. Cooper recommended that the troubled production be scrapped, but that might have been self-serving: The FX techniques were a revelation to Cooper, he could make his Ape film much more cheaply, no real Ape made giant by challenging camera tricks, no shooting in Africa. Cooper wrote in his report, "I have prepared and am sending ... my conception of this Giant Terror Gorilla, and the kind of scenes in which he should be used ... However, before any large amount of money is spent on this picture, I suggest that we make two scenes with the Giant Gorilla, to see how lifelike and terrible a character it can be made."

 

Selznick agreed, though other RKO Executives pushed back. The test-reel was impressive, and Selznick secured a larger budget for “King Kong” than any RKO picture then-being made and the longest production schedule in RKO history. Still, the budget wasn’t huge, about $400,000. Still, the average RKO picture at the time was about $225,000 and because of the studio’s financial woes, a $200,000 cap had been recently imposed. The money repeatedly ran out, and Selznick squeezed cash out of other productions to make up for the short-falls.

 

Cooper on Selnick, "David played one vital part. He was the only human being that backed me up 100 percent. He didn't know what the hell I was doing. Everyone thought it was nuts. And everybody wanted me to put a man in a gorilla suit. And it would have been just horrible."

 

Cooper never got to make his “The Lost World” remake, but he did get the rights to Author Doyle’s novel. It was necessary because of the many similarities between the two stories, without the rights to the novel, RKO was inviting a Law Suit. Then Cooper had to fight to assure there was no mention of Doyle’s novel in any of the promotional material because he wanted to claim it was a wholly original stary.  

 

As Cooper’s first job with RKO was cost-cutting, he got creative to make sure his lavish picture was accomplished while paying out the minimum. Some employees received "script redeemable from the picture's profits." Production files so that that Black Extras and Bit Players were paid half as much as their White counterparts.

 

Much of this essay is focused on Cooper, and there are reasons for that: The film’s idea started with him, all the preliminary battles to get the movie off the ground can be credited to him (Schoedsack wasn’t even the USA for most of 1931, he was filming a Documentary-style Drama about Orangutans in Sumatra called “Rango”) and Vaz’s Biography of Cooper “Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper, Creator of King Kong” (2005) has become a key source for most who are researching this film. But Cooper and Schoedsack were true partners, dividing the Directorial duties of this complex production equally and effectively.

 

One of the many tactics to control costs was to make “King Kong” a dual production, filmed on the same sets and with many of the same people both in front and behind the camera, as the memorable Thriller “Most Dangerous Game.” Early on in production, Cooper filmed “King Kong’s” live-action scenes as Schoedsack finished off “Most Dangerous Game.” After that, Schoedsack took over the live-action scenes while Cooper worked on integrating the completed live-action scenes with the Stop-Motion sequences. The making of the non-In-Camera FX sequences during Principal Photgraphy is somewhat unusual, even today, that is mostly often left for post-production, but was essential for Stop-Motion films where Actors and Fantasy Beasts are expected to extensively interact.

 

Likely, both men’s experience in shooting in difficult locations taught them exceptional organizational skills, necessary here because though the studio settings protected one from some chaos, this film was way-more complicated than just “show-up and shoot.” The soundstages were full of real foliage so one had to assure lockdowns so no breezes would disrupt the leaves. The heat of the lights was intense enough that plants tended to wilt on-camera and, at one point, a plant on the set flowered during filming.

 

After the production wrapped, both Cooper and Schoedsack would continue up the ladder of success. Schoedsack remained a respected Director, but Cooper’s rise was truly remarkable. Even before the film was wrapped, Head of Production Selznick had left RKO to return to MGM, but “King Kong” was now a favored production by the whole of RKO, and Cooper stepped in Selznick’s job. For decades to come, he would be a leader among Hollywood Executives, credited with the first pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, arranging Katherine Hepburn's screen test, all before leaving Hollywood to fight in WWII (beginning for the USA in 1941, but already raging elsewhere). At the age of nearly 40 was flying Combat Missions over Enemy Territory. Returning to Hollywood, he Produced most of Director John Ford’s Greatest Films and was a lead champion of the Cinerama. Though Cinerama failed to live up to its initial promise, it still changed the directory of feature filmmaking as its technical successors rose above its limitations.

 

“King Kong” went over-budget, but how seriously so is a matter of debate. According to RKO, its final bill was $672,254.75, or roughly $270,000 more than originally projected. Cooper insisted that RKO padded this number by about $200,000 and he may be correct, as RKO tacked-on the $177,633 spent on “Creation,” which Cooper scrapped to make “King Kong.”

 

Part seven: FX

 

O’Brien’s FX Crew was largely the same as his on “The Lost World” and included Sculpturer Delgado, a key figure in the transition from Claymation for Animated Beasts to metal armatures. It was O’Brien who designed Kong, but it was Delgado who built him. He covered the metal skeleton with rubber muscles that expanded and contracted as they were moved and then covered all with rubber and latex skin and rabbit fur. A number of the Dinosaurs from the abandoned “Creation” made their way into this film.

The Stop-Motion Animation was done during principal photography and stretched on long afterwards. The incremental movements, shot frame-by-frame, required 24 shots for one second of action; only 15 to 20 feet of animation could be completed in a 10-hour day, but some work days stretched on for 20-hours. The battle between Kong and the Pterodactyl took seven weeks to film. After each day’s grueling effort, the models needed their skins removed to tighten the hinges on the armatures within.

 

When viewing the rushes, Cooper and Schoedsack were appalled to see Kong’s fur was rippling; that was unintended, caused by the hands of the Animators moving the models. Then they were relieved when a Studio Executive thought it was intentional, “Kong is mad! Look at him bristle!”

 

That work dragged on for a total of 55 weeks. After Actress Wray finished her work on “King Kong,” but before she got to bask in the glow of its premiere, she completed four other films.

 

There were stories, all false, that Kong wasn’t Stop-Motion Animation, but a guy in an Ape costume. These libels were, to a degree, a compliment, speaking of the remarkable illusion accomplished, no one had ever seen anything like it before. A least two Actors claimed to be the “real” Kong, Carmen Nigro AKA Ken Raody, who probably fabricated his entire Hollywood career, and the more significant Make-Up Artist/Costume Designer/Actor Gemora, mentioned above related to his part in the “Ingagi” Scandal.

 

Gemora had a long Hollywood resume, though the vast majority of his roles were uncredited. He studied the movements of Apes in zoos to improve his performances in costume and earned the nickname, "King of the Gorilla Men." Historians are less inclined to accuse him of fraud than Nigro as his claim came late-in-life, and during the years 1932-1933 he played an Ape in eleven separate films that saw release, plus the never-completed “The Lost Island” which would’ve been the first Parody of “King Kong” and might have been a simultaneous production.

 

In addition to the miniatures, O'Brien constructed full-size versions of parts of Kong and other Dinosaurs, most notable being a 20-foot-high head of Kong. It required a crew of three men within to give Kong convincing facial expressions.

 

Kong's height changed over the course of the film, this seems to have been a deliberate choice, but one made on the fly. He is not as tall at the time of his first appearance and in the climax. Early in act two, the 18-inch model given the illusion of being eighteen-feet tall, but later in the film he had grown to twenty-four-feet because he needed to be impressive against the landmarks s of NYC. In close-up shots of his face, so the full-sized model, he’s clearly taller than that. Then in the ads he is described as a fifty-foot tall and that’s what the Audience believed.

 

O’Brien’s team pulled out all the stops for this production, using every FX technique available, making advances of all, and even creating some new ones. Key among them where scenes that Actors interacted with the Stop-Motion Beasts and relied heavily on the Williams and Dunning Processes.

 

Williams Process (developed by Frank D. Williams in 1916) created “moving mattes” by combining separately filmed scenes, allowing Actors to move within a background they weren’t actually present in. It required high-contrast-film with the foreground being strongly lit, the background black, and then the illusion of some other background created in a composite added through “Bipacking,” or running two reels of film together in the same camera. It was effective, but also subject to light bleeding from foreground into the background, hurting the illusion.

 

The Dunning Process (developed by C. Dodge Dunning in 1927) was an improvement of the Williams Process and was the B&W equivalent of the later Blue-, or Green-Screen Processes. In the foreground a subject is strongly lit in yellow against a blue background. The intended background was composited in later, like the Williams Process, but generally to better effect. An example, Explorers in the foreground, filmed on a shallow studio-set, while the separately filmed background features an apparent greater depth-of-field and had a Stegosaurus strolling by.

 

Rear-Screen Projection, where the Characters in the foreground act before a background projected behind them, was also used. Most notable was the fight scene between Kong and the Tyrannosaurus Rex, while Character Ann, in the foreground, watches from the branches of a tree Kong placed her in. The fight, filmed earlier, played out where Actress Wray could see it (though not very clearly) and she could react more naturally. That was an especially laborious scene to film, Wray later saying she’d spent 22-hours in the fake tree and was sore for days after the shoot. Here, Sidney Saunders, Head of RKO's Paint Department, advanced the already existing technique, by using the largest cellulose-acetate screen ever in a feature film; it was flexible, heat resistant, and reduced the lighting problems.

 

Another laborious technique was in response to the difficulties in the scene where Kong remove Ann’s clothing while she rested in the palm of his hand. The human Actor was filmed, then O'Brien composited the image Kong’s hand one-frame-at-a-time. This should’ve been patented, but wasn’t, and a fortune was lost as it was mimicked in later Filmmakers.

 

The quality of O’Brien’s effects is stunning. It was not only extraordinary detail, but emotional expression.  The dying Stegosaurus’ tail gives one final twitch. The battle between Kong and a Triceratops that goes on for minutes and was never surpassed within Stop-Motion. Kong shakes his head and rubs his eyes as he is hit by the gas bombs. Kong’s last look at Ann before he falls to his death was heart-breaking. Said Associate Producer Archie Marshek, Kong “could assume more expressions than many of our actors.”

 

Part eight: Fay Wray

 

In 1972, at a party, the mostly-retired Actress Fay Wray was introduced to Playboy Magazine Founder Hugh Hefner and he said, “I loved your movie.” Without missing a beat, she came back with, “Which one?”

 

Fay Wray is an odd place among Hollywood Icons. Her career began in 1923 and she mostly retired in 1964 (one last production came later, a small part in “Gideon’s Triumph” (1980), considered among the best TV movies ever made) with a total of 127 credits on IMDb, but she remembered for only one this one film; maybe two if you include “King Kong’s” co-production, “Most Dangerous Game.”

 

Wray was of the same era of Joan Crawford, Katerine Hepburn, Ginger Rodgers, and May West, all of whom still remembered today, but for a body of work, not a single picture in a long career. Though she has been repeatedly honored, most of those Honors were retrospective, like a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 and many more after she retired completely. During the height of her career, I can find only two awards, both from Photoplay Magazine in 1928 for “The Legion of the Condemned” and “The Wedding March,” but I’ve seen neither, and both are largely forgotten now.

 

She’d worked with Producer/Director Cooper before, she was the female Lead in “The Four Feathers” and was signed up for “Most Dangerous Game” before being offered “King Kong.” In an interview Wray said that when Cooper pitched “King Kong” to her he, “said, you're going to have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood.” Wray thought it was gonna be Cary Grant.

 

But she did make an impression. At the time of the film’s release, The Guardian newspaper praised the, “hardness of the heroine, for she is flung from cliffs, perched in tree tops, chained to stakes, and poised on skyscrapers, and at the end merely observes, ‘I’m all right.’ No one, indeed, can say that modern young women are soft after seeing Fay Wray in ‘King Kong.’”

 

When “King Kong” was remade for the third time by Director Peter Jackson (most people think it was only the second remake, I’ll get to that later) he was negotiating with Wray to deliver the film’s last line, “It was Beauty killed the Beast," but she passed away on August 8, 2004, before this could be realized.

 

Two days after her death, the lights of the Empire State Building were lowered for 15 minutes in her memory. Also, after her death, a park was named after her in the city was born in, Cardston, Canada, and in 2006 she was honored with a Canadian a postage stamp.

 

Part nine: Music and Sound Design

 

“King Kong” was snubbed by the Academy Awards in 1934, receiving not a single Nomination. It had the disadvantage that in the two categories that offered the clearest past to Honors, Best FX and Best Score, the Oscars simply didn’t exist yet, but what of the other categories? Best Picture? Best Original Story? Best Cinematography (by Eddie Linden, Vernon Walker, and J.O. Taylor) who had the extra challenge of integrating separately-shot live-action and Stop-Motion scenes? Most appallingly, the Academy ignored how the Musical Score was integrated with the Sound Design which was just as landmark as the FX.

 

I’ll address the score itself first:

 

“King Kong” is credited as being the first feature-length Musical Score written specifically for a USA Sound Film or “Talkie,” and though this is probably an overstatement, it was damned early and bold in the transition process. Paying for original music and a 46-piece Orchestra was a huge cost for a film that was pressured to keep its budget modest budget. Universal’s hit “Dracula” (1931) had a near-equal budget (well, projected budget, “King Kong” had some serious over-runs) and had a memorable score, but  no original music. RKO specifically told Composer Max Stiener not to write original music but Producer/Director Cooper intervened and paid $50,000 out-of-pocket to Stiener. Eight-weeks later, Stiener delivered a historic achievement.

 

The score’s most important innovation was borrowed from Animator/Director/Producer/Voice Actor/ Entrepreneur Walt Disney. The public’s introduction to the Characters Mickey & Minnie Mouse was the Animated Short “Steam Boat Willie” (1928, so only a year after “The Jazz Singer,” the first official Talkie) and among its other historical significances was being the first, or near first, time the musical score was created in post-production and carefully synchronized with the action on-screen. The process, both an obvious choice and boldly innovative, became known as “Mickey Mousing.” For feature-length live-action films, “King Kong” was the first, or near first, to fully embrace that silly-named, but all-important technique. Critic Laurence MacDonald called that "perhaps the single most noteworthy aspect of Steiner's score.”

 

Stiener’s score was wildly dramatic; it has been referred to as “Wagnerian.”  Steiner said he wanted his score to be "impressionistic and terrifying,” and his main inspirations were Composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. He memorably created Character-specific theme’s, King Kong’s theme was three descending notes, but when Kong is on display in Times Square, this became three ascending notes. Ann’s theme was a Viennese-style Waltz. When Kong dies, his and Ann’s themes are mixed together.

 

Speaking volumes of its day, the objections to a full score were not only financial, they also reflected and Aesthetic Philosophy concerning what this New Art Form Talkies was supposed to be. Perhaps the greatest Producer of the era was Irving Thalberg, a veteran of Universal Studios, a key figure in the development of that studio’s Classic-Ear Monsters, but in 1933 was at MGM. Thalberg had triumphed during the transition from Silent to Talkie, and had championed many improvements in sound technology, but had very specific ideas about how music should be used. He wanted any music playing to come from a source obvious to the audience, a radio visible on-screen or a stage during a nightclub, because otherwise it would be confusing. The first official Talkie was a Musical, “The Jazz Singer,” so it had plenty of music, but many of the Characters were Musical Performers, and the music was only heard when they were preforming on-screen. This is known as “Diegetic Music.” A full-score is called “non-Diegetic,” the Characters on screen can’t hear it, it is solely to enhance the experience of the Audience, like Epic Music playing during a Battle Scene. 

 

Stiener mixed Diegetic and non- Diegetic together, like when Carl’s ship approaches Skull Island, and the Native drums and singing are heard, but the non-Diegetic and thunderous score of the rest of Stiener’s music doesn’t stop. It’s a musical complexity that Hollywood rarely attempted in that decade.

 

The music is swooningly romantic when John and Ann first embrace, but doesn’t lose sight of what else is going on in the same scene, pausing when the shot cuts to the Captain (Frank Reicher) who calls for John. Then swooning again with a cut back to the couple. Then pausing again when cutting to the Captain as he calls John again.  

 

The score was preserved but wasn’t recorded for release on a phonagraph to sell to the public; that’s something no one did until “H.G. Wells’ Thing to Come” (1936). Still, the score lived on, parts of it reappearing in numerous others films: “The Son of Kong” (1933), “The Last Days of Pompeii,” “Becky Sharp” (both 1935), “The Last of the Mohicans” (1936), “The Soldier and the Lady,” “Fang and Claw” (both 1937), “Back to Bataan” (1945) and “White Heat” (1949), and some of it can even be heard in the best of the “King Kong” remakes (2004). Moreover, it continues to be frequently performed live. It is loved, the way the movie is loved.

 

Steiner went on to compose some of the most famous of all film scores including “Gone with the Wind” (1939) and “Casablanca” (1942). He was ultimately nominated for 24 Oscars, winning three.

 

Stiener’s score was composed to be played for the whole length of the film (actually, the full score is a bit longer than the film) and filled the theatre during long stretches that were dialogue-less. Composer Christopher Palmer said it "marked the real beginnings of Hollywood music.” But Sound Designer Murray Spivack made a number of thoughtful choices were made regarding application of that score.

 

After the opening credits, there’s no music until all of the main Characters are on the Ocean Voyage, because there was a wish to associate music and the film's Fantasy elements. After that, there are a few more, shorter, scenes where the score was silenced for dramatic effect. As full-length scores became more common, that latter insight was largely lost, then rediscovered with the Sound-and-Music Recording Revolution lead by American Zoetrope, founded by Directors Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas in the late 1970s.

 

All of the film's sounds were recorded onto three separate tracks: sound effects, dialogue, and music. Spivak did something groundbreaking, he matched the sound effects to the score, so they wouldn't compete or overwhelm each other, but exist in complement, so the screams and roars were attuned to the music. This was a first for RKO, and likely a World’s First.

 

And he knew when to cut sound. When Kong tossed Sailors into a ravine, we hear them scream, but there’s no sound at all when they hit the ground. The battle with the Tyrannosaurus Rex is rich with Sound Effects, but no Music (it’s the only Skull Island scene completely without music). Also, there’s no Music in the NYC scene when Kong drops an Innocent woman to her death, her screams fade into a Police siren below. The music disappears only a few seconds there, but is cut for a longer period when the bi-planes attack Kong on the Empire State Building.

 

Spivack created alien-sounding animal vocalizations by manipulating recording of real animals, like the vocalizations of lions and tigers, but played backwards at slow speed, lowering one octave. He was the voice of Kong’s "love grunts," made through a megaphone and played back at slow speed, an approach recommended by a Paleontologist. For Kong’s chest beating, Spivack beat one of the members of his team, Walter G. Elliott, with a drumstick.

 

Part ten: Release and Critical Response

 

At the time, Universal Studios basically owned the Horror/Monster Genres, so “King Kong” was a direct challenge to that. Though the film did grow out of a popular Jungle Craze, it had marketing challenges compared to the Universal outings, almost their film were based on Literary Classics (Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula” (1897, film 1931), Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein: the Modern Promethius” (1818, film 1931), H.G. Wells’ “The Invisible Man” (1897, film 1933), and many more). At the time, RKO desperately needed a big hit and “King Kong” was their most expensive production (though achieved at a far-lower cost that most could’ve predicted).

 

The promotional campaign pulled out all stops, hard-selling the Audience’s desire for the Exotic and Romantic ideals of Undiscovered Places. Cooper’s Press Kit carefully guided Critics regarding how to summarize the film and he flooded the marketplace with the “King Kong” novelization, "the last and the greatest creation of Edgar Wallace," even though Wallace was dead and the story radically rewritten more than a year before the typing of the novelization was begun. Plus, there were newspaper cartoons, radio plays, and advertising, all early in the evolution of what are now givens in the Marketing of Hollywood Block Busters. Echoing the surprise success of “Ingagi,” the Theater Owners further invested in the marketing on their own, some decorating their lobbies with jungle scenes and at least one renting a lion in a cage.

 

One tagline for the film read, "They said it couldn't be filmed -- but it was! See it and ask -- what if such a thing could happen?" Another, “Heaven help us all! King Kong, the ape as big as a battleship, is loose!”

 

“King Kong” enjoyed the first ever simultaneous opening at both of RKO's flagship theatres in NYC, Radio City Music Hall and the Roxy (across the street from each other) on March 2^nd, 1933. Both premieres including live-stage shows: The Roxy featured significant Stage Stars of the day, Art Frank, a dancing comedian, and Kent Harvey, a banjoist, and others. At Radio City there was a “Jungle Jamboree” which included the Rockettes dancing, an "Invitation to the Dance," and Patricia Bowman, Nicholas Daks, and others.

 

On the other side of the continent, “King Kong” premiered at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, and its Owner, Sid Grauman, wrote Cooper, "Never saw greater enthusiasm at any premiere in my past experience of presenting premieres as that of ‘King Kong’ ... Every person leaving the theatre tonight will be a human twenty-four sheet ... I believe it to be the greatest picture I have ever seen." Kong's giant head (I’m not sure if it was one built but O’Brien, but likely) was displayed in the Grauman lobby. Grauman, himself, acted as Producer for the "conceived and staged" live "prologue" which included "a scene in the jungle" Production Number, featuring popular performers like Pauline Loretta, Jimmy Savo, the Chorus of Dusky Maidens (a Native American troupe) and the African Choral Ensembles.

 

One of those who attended “King Kong” at Graumann’s was a teenage boy name Ray Harryhausen. The film changed his life. He would grow-up to pursue a career in FX, become a protégé of O’Brien, and will return to this story again-and-again. To quote Harryhausen, “O’Brien injected into a pile of rubber and metal joints far more sympathy and depth than was to be found in the real people on the screen.”

 

“King Kong” enjoyed strong Critical support when it first came out with various papers calling it, “one of the sensational pictures of the year," "no more thrilling climax ever was filmed," "imagination-stunning," “one of the most original, thrilling and mammoth novelties to emerge from a movie studio," and "one of the very best of all the screen thrillers, done with all the cinema's slickest camera tricks." That Critical praise has only grown in the generations since.

 

One thing that is striking is that almost all found Metaphoric Resonance in the film except for Producer/Director Cooper, who was alternately amused or disgusted with such talk. “‘Kong’ was never intended to be anything but the best damned adventure film ever made, which it is; and that’s all it is.” He was arguing against such Critical Luminaries as Bosley Crowther insisted that the “implications more profound than had ever before been generated in a mere monster or science fiction film.”

 

The French Surrealists praised it as an exceptional example of “L’amour Fou,” a mad, obsessive, self-destructive, love.

 

Later Generations of Critics continue along the same vein. Roger Ebert, “‘King Kong’ is more than a technical achievement. It is also a curiously touching fable in which the beast is seen, not as a monster of destruction, but as a creature that in its own way wants to do the right thing."

 

Dennis Schwartz, “Perhaps we have fallen in love with this movie because we distrust our civilization and feel betrayed that we have lost our sense of nature.”

 

The Lost World trope, specifically “King Kong” and “Conan the Barbarian” enjoyed a revival in the 1960s, when the embedded Racism of both sources was more disapproved of, but politely ignored by the fans, who were more interested in the Rebellion against a Modernistic, Conservative, Society. A popular button on College Campuses of the time was, "King Kong Died for Your Sins."

 

Novelist Robert Bloch would observe, “If Freud didn’t exist before ‘King Kong,’ it would be necessary to invent him.”

 

Filmmaker Fatimah Rony added, that the film, "ultimately celebrates cinema's tendency to create monsters which mirror the anxieties of any given age."

 

 

Part eleven: Profitability

 

“King Kong’s” opening pulled in at least $90,000, maybe more than $100,000, during its first week, the biggest movie opening of that time. Those wild numbers were because it was shown an un-heard of ten-times a day, and was sold out for every performance the first four days. Historian Jason Voiovich called it “The First Popcorn Movie," it offered the people of the USA relief through Fantasy of the era’s extreme economic stress. But though the escape was only in the darkness of the theatre; outside cold, harsh, light of the Great Depression ultimately cost “King Kong” dearly.

 

It’s taken as a matter of faith that during an Economic Crisis, the Banks must be protected. As Banks are often causative to the Crisis, and this generates resentment among the common people who receive the brunt of the Crisis. In 1933, the National Unemployment hovered around 25%, and a third of the nation was, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) would describe it, “ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed," and the Stock Market worth only 10% of its pre-Crash value, yet John D. Rockafeller, then controlling Chase Bank, never stopped being the Richest Man in the World.

 

Bank Runs, generally the result of mismanagement and fraud, but sometimes because of panicked rumors, were triggering a Nation-wide wave of Bank Failures (but not to Chase), and this was crippling all attempts to pull the USA out of the Great Depression. Four days after “King Kong” opened, FDR suddenly declared a four-day Bank Holiday, essentially suspending all Banking Activity including withdrawals by Depositors. This made it hard to pay the rent, buy food, or go to the movies.

 

When the Banks reopened on March 13, 1933, FDR tempted the public, which had already been hording money at home instead of depositing it, into not withdrawing anymore and even start depositing the hoarded money back into the banks, because he guaranteed that those monies would be insured by the Federal Government. This was promised in FDR’s first “Fireside Chat” the day before the Bank’s reopened, and was cornerstone of the purpose of the just created Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) perhaps FDR’s single most important reform.

 

Though the FIDC would eventually prove solid, when the Bank Holiday ended, there was no way FDR could’ve fulfilled that promise had the Bank Runs immediately resumed. This is among the riskiest gambles any USA President ever took, maybe even more risky than what President John F. Kennedy Jr. did during the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962). True, Kennedy was facing the possibility of a Nuclear WWIII, but he had reliable Secret Intelligence buttressing his gamble. FDR was looking at the possibility of Civil War, and had only his Faith in our Citizens to fall back on.

 

The gamble worked, the USA is still here generations later, but “King Kong” got knocked off the Top-of-the-World, in the Real World this time. After its landmark premiers and over-whelming Critical support, ticket sales halved in the second and third weeks, and this was even after ticket prices were cut from $5.50 to $3.30.

 

“King Kong” was a hit, but only a modest one. During its first run, “King Kong” brought in $2,847,000 world-wide, including $1,070,000 from the United States and Canada, creating a profit of $1,310,000. That did constitute a success, and that box-office was strong enough to save RKO from bankruptcy, but one must not ignore it brought in less money than the cheapie “Ingagi.” 

 

The modest success of “King Kong” would only become a Monster Hit only with the grand 1952 re-release, when it brought in about $2.5 million domestically, or about double of what earned first run in same market.

 

 

Part twelve: Kong and the Nazis

 

In the 1930s, International Distribution of motion pictures wasn’t nearly as important as it is today, but it was still significant. One might be surprised that the most important foreign market for USA films wasn’t England, but Germany, or was at least it was before WWI, when Germany was the World’s Second Largest Market for cinema. Moving into the Great Depression, even with Germany’s market share was shrinking, Hollywood expected it would bounce back, and was desperate to hold onto their place there.

 

But there was a problem, the Great Depression triggered a wave of Right- and Left-Wing Radicalism across the whole World. Free-Market Capitalism seemed to be failing, so Communism began expanding its Influence and Fascism was invented in 1919 by Alceste De Ambris and Benito Mussolini. Soon, Germany’s own Censorship- and Propaganda-Obsessed Fascists, the Nazi Party, of started dictating to Hollywood, and Hollywood responded to this challenge in a profoundly cowardly manner.

 

Nazi Censorship muscle was demonstrated as early as 1930, when the Party hadn’t even achieved full-power yet. They successfully managed to Censor scenes the American film based on German Novelist’s Erich Maria Remarque Masterpiece, “All Quiet on the Western Front” (published 1928).

 

Though Nazi Adolf Hitler lost the 1932 German National Elections (he came in third), he was appointed Chancellor of that Nation in 1933, the same year “King Kong” came out, and was able to secure Totalitarian Control over the Nation in 1934. During Hitler’s reign, but before the official outbreak of WWII in Europe in 1938, 250 USA films played in Germany, making for a vital revenue flow. When the Nazi’s threatened to Censor USA films, Hollywood capitulated, allowing Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels’ Agents in the USA to pre-screen completed films, sometimes even review scripts of up-coming productions, and demand cuts, not only in the Internationally released versions, but even the versions shown in the USA, and sometimes killing projects altogether. No major studio made an anti-Fascist film until “Confessions of a Nazi Spy” (1939) and, by then, Europe was already burning.

 

The same year “King Kong” was released, Studio Head Louis B. Mayer (one of the “Ms” in MGM) killed a film called, “The Mad Dog of Europe” scripted by one of his most talented and prolific Screenwriters Herman J. Mankiewicz (he’d done the first draft of “The Wizard of Oz” (1931) and would eventually win and Oscar for “Citizen Kane” (1941)) with these words, “We have interests in Germany; I represent the picture industry here in Hollywood; we have exchanges there; we have terrific income in Germany and, as far as I am concerned, this picture will never be made.”

 

Both Mayer and Mankiewicz were Jewish. Mayer was under pressure from Joseph Breen, Head of the Production Code Administration, related to the Hays Office (described in detail later), and a notorious Jew-Hater.

 

When “King Kong” made it to Germany it was retitled, “King Kong und die Weisse Frau” (“King Kong and the White Woman”) and immediately ran afoul of Censors, who called it an "attack on the nerves of the German people … [that violated] German racial feeling." Presumably, it could cause, "Indirect and permanent damage to the health of normal theatergoers."

 

But Kong proved to have a surprising Advocate: Hitler himself.

 

Members of the Inner Circle of the World Conquering, Genocidal, Monster had some surprisingly things to report about him. For example, Hitler was lazy. Though a Master of Propaganda, especially using it to manipulate Social Prejudice and Resentments for his own purposes, he also preferred to sleep late, procrastinated, didn’t keep regular work hours, skipped important meetings, and was bored with analysis, leading to impulsive decision making and confusion among his Staff who were tasked with carrying out his will as they often didn’t know what that will was. It seems odd that someone like that could’ve come as close to destroying the whole of Civilization as he did, and perhaps the lesson is much like that of Character Carl, that image was everything, and he can walk away a Hero, his unreasonable Power untouched, while behind him the corpse of Kidnapped Kong gets no word.

 

Hitler was also a Movie-Nut, watching multiple features nightly after dinner, as many as four, and forcing his guests to watch them with him. He was especially fond of Light Comedy and Sentimental Dramas and his favorite Directors and Actors were often made half-exempt from the absolutes of his Censorship Regime and Racial Laws, he even overlooked their Jewishness, well, at least before 1941, when the Final Solution officially began. According to Hitler confidant Ernst Hanfstaengl (who fled Germany in 1937 for the USA and joined the Allied efforts to bring Hitler down), "One of his favorite films was King Kong. A hideous story that fascinated Hitler. He often talked about it and had it shown to him several times."

 

Hitler lifted the Censorship restrictions on “King Kong” and suffering RKO benefited enormously.

 

Part thirteen: USA Censorship

 

“King Kong” was a landmark in so many ways that it’s hard to count them all. One of them is how it was released at the exact time to become one of the great milestones in the history of film Censorship in the USA.

 

The story of the Censorship began more than a decade before “King Kong” was conceived. The USA was (and still is) a Conservative Nation in love with its own Decadence, a fundamental Hypocrisy that has always stalked our National Character: We overlook what we personally do, and what those closest to us do, while happily lynching (metaphorically or actually) others who do the exact same thing.

 

The legal frame-work for the Censorship of mass media can be found in the Federal Supreme Court Case “Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio” (1915) that decided that motion pictures were not covered by the First Amendment of the USA Constitution, and therefore subject to Official Censorship in ways the more “legitimate” speech was not. Very little came of this initially though, because naughty films were so beloved.

 

Then we move into the 1920s, an era remembered now for its Wealth and Decadence, but also a time when many in the USA were feeling profound financial pressures, not as bad as the Great Depression to come, but certainly anticipating it. The Economic Injustice and the Moral Decadence became synonymous, and Hollywood was the greatest symbol of both. Not-for-nothing, the major studios controlled that town like it was their own private Banana Republic, and a series of Scandals exposed the Rot, Hypocrisy, and Official Corruption that the USA’s own Land of Dreams was wallowing in.

 

Especially notable was the 1921 Rape and Murder of Actress Virginia Rappe while she was attending a wild party at the home of Actor Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, and though it is likely Rabbe was neither Raped nor Murdered, and number of careers were ruined with the exposure of the over-all sordidness of the circumstances.

 

Then there was the seemingly deliberately bungled Police Investigation of the 1922 Murder of Actor William Desmond Taylor, which also ruined a lot of careers because (to borrow a phrase from the Watergate Scandal of the 1970s) "cover-up is worse than the crime."

 

These Scandals, and the Sleazy Sensationalism surrounding these very real Tragedies, created intense Political Pressure on the Studio Heads/Generalissimos of Tinseltown. Soon the same entitled few that encouraged the Decadence of their Talents (read “underlings”) were bending-over-backwards to protect their power by embracing the Oppression and Censorship of outside forces. The State Legislators of 37 of the 48 States (Alaska and Hawaii hadn’t entered the Union yet) passed almost 100 Film Censorship Laws in 1921. Then in 1922, one of the most influential Political Figures in the USA, Presbyterian Elder, former head of the Republican National Committee, and then-Postmaster General, William Harrison Hays Sr, resigned from the Cabinet of the President of the USA to become the first Chairman of the newly-created Motion Picture and Distributors of America, more often referred to as the “Hays’ Office.” That organization campaigned for the creation of, and later enforcement of, Motion Picture Production Code, better known as the “Hays’ Code,” a set of Moralistic Guidelines of Self-Censorship of content.

 

The Hays’ Code was introduced in 1924, but not really accepted until 1930, and not rigorously enforced until 1934 with the establishment of the Production Code Administration. Film-buffs now refer to everything from the rise of the “Talkies” in the earliest 1920s to the enforcement of the Code in 1934 as “Pre-Code” and Hollywood’s “Golden Age.”

 

“King Kong” was released a year before enforcement. It had self-censored to a degree, removing a now-famously lost scene wherein Sailors tossed into a ravine by Kong as attacked by Crab Monsters because it screen-tested badly and Director Cooper declared it a “stopped the picture in its tracks.” (One of these spider models was employed many years later in FX Artist O'Brien's the film “The Black Scorpion” (1957))

 

But over the course of its several re-releases (1938, 1942, 1946 and most importantly 1952), greater Censorship emerged with demands that 29 scenes from the original version be re-cut or removed before the film could be granted a seal of approval. Among the scenes Hays cut:

 

When a Brontosaurus attacks a raft carrying sailors, it originally killed five, but the two most gruesome of these deaths were cut.

 

A battle between Kong and a Tyrannosaurus Rex was a remarkable achievement, but was also too brutal and was heavily cut.

 

Kong holding captured and unconscious Ann in the palm of his hand and partially stripping her. She wakes and responds negatively, so he stops, but suggestively sniffs his fingers.

 

During Kong’s rampage in the Native Village, the deaths were more, and more gruesome, in the original.

 

During Kong’s rampage in NYC the deaths were more, and more gruesome. Especially notable was a woman Kong plucked out of a window, thinking it was Ann. Seeing that it was the wrong woman, he casually drops her to her death.

 

The studio, RKO, failed to preserve it negatives or prints of the excised footage, to these scenes were considered lost. Then, 1969, an uncensored version was found in Philadelphia. The cut scenes were added back, restoring the original theatrical running time of 100 minutes.

 

Even so, if you grew up watching “King Kong” only TV as I did, the sanitized version was the only one available for a couple more decades. This may have, paradoxically, helped the sustained popularity of the Monster. Kong was a mixture of Savagery and Innocence, Villian and Victim. The sanitized Kong was a bit less Savage, less Villian, and a lot more appropriate for a younger audience.

 

Part fourteen: legacy

 

“King Kong” became a Franchise, later multiple non-overlapping Franchises, as well as inspiring scores of other films, many of them blunt Rip-Offs. It shaped our Popular Culture. This is a list of key events covering the next almost-century:

 

1933: The success of “King Kong” made a sequel all-but inevitable, but these were the days when such things were disreputable, expecting only diminishing returns, and granted lesser budgets and rushed production schedules. “Son of Kong” was an extreme case of this, released only nine months after “King Kong,” which had been a multi-year project and the production itself took more-than a year. The sequel is remarkable only because of the indifference on display in its execution. The team was largely the same, including the Producers/Directors Cooper & Schoedsack, Scriptwriter Rose, FX Artist O’Brien, and Actor Armstrong. Rose admitted there was no point in trying to attempt to surpass the first, "If you can't make it bigger, make it funnier." It received lukewarm reviews and barely made a profit.

 

The same year, and perhaps more interesting, was “Wasei Kingu Kongu” (“Japanese-made King Kong”). It’s not part pf the “King Kong” franchise, nor a Rip-Off, but a Comedy commenting on the immense popularity of the film in Japan. A famous Comedic Dou, Isamu Yamaguchi and Nagamasa Yamada, star as down-on-their-luck Actors who find some success in staging a live-action version of “King Kong;” but one night Santa (Yamaguchi) sees his girl, Omitsu (Yasuko Koizumi) in the audience with another man. Enraged, he jumps off the stage and causes chaos. After causing the ruckus, Santa can’t unzipper the Ape suit, and word gets out a dangerous, escaped Ape is rampaging through Tokyo and Santa is chased by Police and Firemen. In the end, he gets the suit off and wins the girl. It was a popular film but was unfortunately lost in the fires of WWII. (For Japan, WWII essentially started in 1937 with its renewed aggression in China that was tied to a Fascist Coupe that followed almost immediately thereafter, but newly-Fascist Japan it didn’t officially join the Axis Powers until 1939, which was the same year the WWII officially started in Europe. The USA entered the war in 1941, and it ended for everyone in 1945).

 

1938: Also from Japan was “Edo ni Arawareta Kingu Kongu” (“The King Kong That Appeared in Edo”) also bears little relationship to “King Kong” beyond riding on its coat-tails. The Ape is normal sized, the minion of Villian Magonojyō Gō (Eizaburo Matsumoto). It was also lost in the fire-bombings of WWII, but is of special note because of the Actor playing the Ape (Ryūnosuke Kabayama AKA Fuminori Ohashi) designed the costume and later designed the costume for the original “Godzilla” (1954, discussed below).

 

1939 – 1945: The official years of WWII were terrible for SF film in the English-speaking World except for Juvenile Serials, generally made on extreme low-budgets. As WWII ended in Atomic Fire, when SF’s quick post-War resurgence would reflect that.

 

1945: The low-budget “White Pongo” was a shameless and inept “King Kong” rip-off, borrowing a host of plot points: Interruption of a Native human Sacrifice Ceremony to and Ape God; White Hunters chasing down the remarkable Beast that would prefer to be left alone; the Beast kidnapping the only Blonde female in sight; the Beast defending the Blonde from other Beasts. But here the Ape is normal sized, an Albino Gorilla, played by Ray “Crash” Corrigan, who after Actor Gemora was second most important of Hollywood’s “Gorilla Men,” and like Gemora before him, was his own Costume Designer and remained uncredited in the film. The Los Angeles Botanical Gardens pretended to be the Congo.

 

1949: As stated above, “King Kong” had been snubbed in the 1934 Academy Awards, in part because the two Oscars it most deserved, Best FX and Musical Score, didn’t exist yet (other snubs are harder to explain). Much of the original creative team returned with “Mighty Joe Young,” Producers/Directors Cooper & Schoedsack, Scriptwriter Rose, FX Artist O’Brien and Actor Armstong. This film was outside the “King Kong” Franchise, but only barely, it was essentially a better version of “Son of Kong,” benefiting greatly from more time, care, and improved FX technology. O’Brien was, again, assisted by Delgado, but also a very young Ray Harryhausen. Though it can’t compare to the original “King Kong,” it was a fine film, finally earning O’Brien his Oscar. It also started Harryhausen’s career in FX, and he would eventually eclipse his Mentor O’Brien. Unfortunately, it was an expensive film to make, so though it brought in more that $1 million, it still was a financial failure and hurt O’Brien’s career badly.

 

1951: With WWII over, the public’s thirst for SF,F&H was again wettened, but the failure of “Mighty Joe Young” might have delayed the studios to embrace this resurgence in Cinema. A wholly unrelated film, but a hugely successful one, “Destination Moon,” opened the gates for a SF,F&H that has continued, largely unabated, until today. This trend would shape the fate of Kong.

 

1952: The year of “King Kong’s” grand re-release. It made double the money then than during the 1933 original release.

 

1953: “The Beast from 20.000 Fathoms” wore its “King Kong” influences on its sleeve, even having its giant Rhedosaurus (a species of Dinosaur that never actually existed) attacking NYC. It was a landmark in several ways:

 

It was the first production that FX Artist Harryhausen was fully in-charge of, and made his career.

 

It was the first feature film based on a story by Autor Ray Bradbury, except it really wasn’t. Bradbury and Harryhausen were friends and as the production of this film was gearing up, Harryhausen showed Bradbury the script. The Monster was similar to, and there was one remarkably similar scene to, a just-published Bradbury short-story, “The Beast from 20.000 Fathoms” (that was adopted as the film title and the short story is now better known as “The Foghorn”). Bradbury was already a popular Author, so the studio, Warner Brothers, bought the rights to the story that was similar only-by-accident, and this played no small part in Bradbury securing the job on another film “It Came from Outer Space” (released the same year) which was actually based on a story he submitted to Universal.

 

It was Directed by Eugène Lourié. While in France, Lourié was a Protégé Director Jean Renoir and expected to have a leading career in Hollywood, but the success of this film trapped him a Director’s version of Typecasting, and in the years to come could only get financing for Giant Monster Movies. He eventually quit Directing and focused on other aspects of the production of other Directors’ films.

 

It was a very early expression of the public’s fear and ignorance of the Atomic Weapons that ended WWII and featured a Monster was released from hibernation by Nuclear Weapons Testing. That basic plot-out line would prove the foundational to our understanding of an entire sub-Genre, the “Kaiju” literally meaning “strange beast” but is most common associated with Giant Monsters; but Kaiju is a bit more specific than even that: The term is generally not applied to things like Medieval Dragons or Dinosaurs that make even a half-hearted attempt at realism. To clarify the distinction, O’Brien’s first great feature, “The Lost World” was not Kaiju because the Dinosaurs were all based on Real, Extinct, Dinosaurs, but his greater achievement, “King Kong” was Kaiju because nothing like Kong ever existed. Also, Kaiju is a Japanese word, leading us to …

 

1954: “Godzilla,” easily the second greatest of all Kaiju. “King Kong” had been a hit in Japan before WWII, and Japanese Distributor Daiei Film brought it back in 1952 with great success, it was reported the first post-War Monster Movie offered to Japanese Audiences. Daiei also distributed “The Beast from …” in 1954, and would later be distributing Japanese films to the rest of the world, bringing more Kaiju to the USA than anyone else.

 

Enter Tomoyuki Tanaka and Toho Studios, struggling to rebuild the Japanese film industry in the wake of the devastation of WWII and the USA occupation of that Nation that ended only two years prior. Tanaka was not shy about the “King Kong” inspiration, “I felt like doing something big. That was my motivation. I thought of different ideas. I like monster movies, and I was influenced by King Kong." But “Godzilla’s” plot was closer to, in fact almost identical, to “The Beast from …” Afterwards, the Radiation as Alchemy Theme would be part of most Kaijus in Japan, the USA, and other countries even up to today, though other rationales for the Giant Monsters would emerge, including Alien Invasion, Pollution, Genetic Engineering, etc. As Tanaka put it, “Japanese people back then had a great fear of radiation, which is what gave Godzilla his enormous size. He has always stood for nature's retaliation against humanity.”

 

Above I made it clear, “King Kong” has Political Messaging, but that messaging was largely unintended. “Godzilla” was unapologetically Political, a walking-on-eggshells criticism of USA involvement in Japan. Tanaka himself, the film’s Authors, Shigeru Kayama and Takeo Murata, Director Ishirō Honda, and FX Artist, Eiji Tsuburaya, have all been explicit about this. “Godzilla” was born of the trauma of the Atomic Bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945) as well as the Daigo Fukuryū Maru Incident (1954) where fallout from USA Nuclear Weapons Testing sickened the entire 23-man crew of a Japanese Fishing Boat; one man died soon after, and several others suffered long-term health issues/shortened life-spans, as a result.

 

With “King Kong” Cooper had successfully resisted pressure to have Kong played by a man in a Gorilla suit, but Stop-Motion was time-consuming and expensive, and as the dates listed above suggest, “Godzilla” was a bit of a rush-job, allowing only for In-Camera, Practical, FX. FX Artist Tsuburaya made a historic contribution, providing high-quality FX with Godzilla being played by a man in a rubber suit (designed by the above-mentioned Kabayama/Ohashi, played by Stunt Man/Actor Haruo Nakajima). As Kaiju and other SF films became Japanese cinema’s most important export, SF films that overwhelming relied on In-Camera, Practical, FX, and developed a moniker, “Tokusatsu.”

 

“Godzilla” became a stronger franchise than “King Kong,” and more Japanese Kaiju quickly appeared, some creating their own franchises. In time, the separate Japanese Kaiju Franchises started to overlap. Soon enough, both USA and Japan’s Kaijus became too numerous to list, and the influence of “King Kong” merged with that of “Godzilla,” so I’ll skip a lot of what follows, but there’s still several more I want to note.

 

1955: I have to step outside SF,F&H cinema for the moment, because this was the year USA involvement in the Vietnam War began, though most in the USA date its start as 1963. Over the following decades, the Imperialistic Attitudes that “King Kong” celebrated would be viewed with greater cynicism, but “King Kong” was a more complex film than it often got credit for, and it expressed as much cynicism, maybe more cynicism, towards Imperialism than it did celebration. In the films that would follow, none would celebrate the Imperial Spirit again, but it was not until 2017 that anti-Imperialist themes be advanced even an iota beyond the original film (I’ll get to that). Kong retained his Innocence as the USA grew bitter and dark, or as the kids on the College Campus’ proclaimed, “King Kong Died for Your Sins.”

 

1956: “King Kong” had already gone from Modest Hit to Monster Hit with the 1952 re-lease, and finally came the year that his immortality was truly secured: This was the year when “King Kong” first appeared on TV.

 

A Local TV station in NYC, WOR-TV, was owned by General Tire; General Tire had also bought RKO and its library in 1951. The corporation recognized that local TV stations couldn’t compete with National Networks regarding Original Programing so they started showing Classic Movies to compete for Market Share. The most successful of WOR-TV movie programs was Million Dollar Movie, which aired “King Kong” for the first time on March 5, 1956, and was watched by an estimated 80% of the households within their reach.  “King Kong” soon became an annual family event, everyone sitting in the living room watching the same movie over-and-over as a Holiday Tradition (other examples: “The Wizard of Oz” (1939), “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946), “The Sound of Music” (1965)). “King Kong” owned Thanksgiving and this would lead to a revival of the Kong Character, and though most of the products that followed were unfortunate, they kept our Monster alive in the Public Imagination.

 

1959: “King Kong: the Musical,” is a legendary live stage-show but, like “Wasei Kingu Kongu” it’s not part of the Kong Franchise or even a Rip-Off, but references Kong’s huge Cultural Impact by telling a barely related, and in this case, totally unrelated tale. It was, of all things, a Biography of South African Boxer Ezekiel Dlamini, known as "King Kong." In posters his image towers over the multi-racial suburb of Sophiatown like the RKO “King Kong.” This was a deliberate irony as the town was then-being destroyed by the Apartheid Government (years of Apartheid were 1948-1991) to be replaced by the all-White conclave of Triomf ("Triumph"). The play was an attack on the Apartheid system but needed by to be to be conscious of Censorship restrictions (at the time, Alan Paxton’s classic novel of Apartheid, “Cry Beloved Country” (1948) was illegal in that Nation, but widely read). The play took an un-Ideological approach to tell the story of the Character’s Corruption and Self-Destruction under the Corrupt System. Real-World Dlamini was a phenomenally popular Athlete, but destroyed himself with alcohol and Gang Associates, eventually murdered his girlfriend, was sentenced to 14 years in prison, and then died while Incarcerated of an apparent Suicide. Little seen outside its own Nation, it was a hit there and considered the maturation of South African live-theatre. Its songs are broadly available.

 

1961: Of the shameless and inept “King Kong” rip-offs, “Konga” is probably the most entertaining. Borrowing plot-points from a couple of the titles mentioned above regarding Human Villains with normal-sized Ape Henchman (played by some uncredited Actor in an Ape costume), here the Villain proved to be a Mad Scientist, Dr. Charles Decker (Michael Gough), who develops serums that increase both the Beast’s intellect and size. Noted Critic James Lowder, "The film is ... very clearly a British production. What does Konga do to prove his serum-improved intellect? Make tea, of course.” And the best line in the film is uttered by Police Superintendent Brown (Jack Watson), “Fantastic... there's a huge monster gorilla that's constantly growing to outlandish proportions loose in the streets!”

 

1962: “King Kong Vs. Godzilla” was a result of the above “King Kong” revival. The problem was that General Tire ended all RKO film productions in 1957 (the year before “King Kong” made it to TV), leaving the company in a poor position to take advantage. The decision was made to license the rights to Toho Studios in Japan, which pissed-off Producer Cooper, who thought he had exclusive rights to “King Kong” and the Law Suits dragged on for more than a decade.

 

It also reflected the inevitable fate of Great Monsters; they seemingly must degenerate into Juvenilia. The original “King Kong” was a conscious challenge to the Classic-Era Universal Monsters (1913-1941) but Universal eventually allowed their Classic Monsters to be reduced to Self-Parody after the USA entered WWII. With RKO, “Son of Kong” presented us a Beast less Monstrous than in the first film, and Toho’s Godzilla was similarly shifting its target audience from adults to children. While Kong was a sympathetic Monster from the beginning, Godzilla’s first incarnation was unrelentingly venial; in time, Godzilla would soften, becoming a Defender of Earth, but that hadn’t happened yet, so in this, both the third Godzilla film and third Kong film, Kong is the Good-Guy, though still disrespectful to Urban Architecture and Commuter Trains, while Godzilla is the Bad-Guy. The initial idea came from FX Artist O’Brien, who wanted a third film where Kong battled a Giant Frankenstein Monster. Like Cooper, he attempted to sue, but abandoned the idea because of the costs involved and the fact that he was nearing death. Reportedly, O’Brien’s widow stayed home after being invited to the USA Premier.

 

The Fight Between Titans required doubling Kong’s size, which Film Historian Michlig argued dehumanized Kong. I have a different objection, this film wasn’t Stop-Motion but a guy in an Ape costume (Shoichi Hirose), and it was costume was terrible, worse than “Konga.” But I shouldn’t be too harsh here, despite its obvious flaws, it is superior to “Konga” and other films so far spoken of in this section except the original, “Mighty Joe Young,” and the first “Godzilla,” and better than much of what will follow. Its terrible dialogue supported a clever script with some Satirical elements that managed to translate even to a USA audience (the human Villains are Corporate PR guys who work for a Cosmetics Company). Other than the Kong costume, the Tokusatsu FX are quite good, and the final battle between Kong and Godzilla (Stuntman/Actor Nakajima again) on the slopes of Mt. Fugi is legitimately epic. Critic John Cutts put it well, "Sublime stuff. Richly comic, briskly paced, oddly touching, and thoroughly irresistible. Outrageous of course, and deplorably acted and atrociously dubbed to boot. But what matters most is the sheer invention of its exemplary trick work."

 

1965: Furankenshutain tai chitei kaijû Baragon” (“Frankenstein vs. Baragon”) AKA “Frankenstein Conquers the World” was a co-production between USA-based United Production of America and Toho in Japan. It also drew from FX Artist O’Brien idea of having Kong Battle a Giant Frankenstein Monster. In this wildly ornate story, Nazis steal the heart of the Frankenstein Monster, provide it for Human Experiments conducted by Japanese Fascists, but these experiments are interrupted by the USA Bombing of Hiroshima. The product of those experiments, a Feral boy (Sumio Nakao and later Koji Furuhata), grows into a Giant. He is captured by Authorities and named “Frankenstein.” Though kindly Scientist (Nick Adams and Kumi Mizuno) try to act as surrogate parents, a wicked Scientist (Tadao Takashima, he was also in “King Kong vs Godzilla”) continue with cruel Experimentation. Frankenstein escapes captivity and is soon blamed for the devastation caused by another Kaiju, Baragon (Nakajima, yet again). Finally, Frankenstein and Baragon, both hated by Humanity, battle over the fate of that same Humanity, so it is very much the same story as “King Kong vs Godzilla.” Critics consider among the weakest Toho Kaiju’s, but the kids (like me) loved it, and it earned a sequel, “Furankenshutain no kaijû: Sanda tai Gaira,” the USA version purged the Frankenstein references and was titled “The War of the Gargantuas” (1966). The later film lacked Baragon, featuring a much different Frankenstein who faced whole new Kaijus. This sequel was less Kong-influenced, but a better film, and became a key-influence on the mega-budget, USA Kaiju, “Pacific Rim” (2013). Separately, Baragon would make a few more Toho appearances.

 

1966: “The King Kong Show” was another USA/Japan co-production, not from Toho but by Videocraft International and Toei Animation. It completed the transition of Kong’s Monstrousness into Juvenilia. It was a Saturday Morning Kid’s Show, relying on hand-drawn animation throughout, the first example of that in the official Kong Franchises. I’ve never seen it, and it was not much loved.  But it changed the course of the “Godzilla” series, because an aborted follow-up film for this series mutated into the Toho film, “Ebirah, Horror of the Deep” (same year) in which Godzilla started displaying Kong’s sweeter nature. The series also provided the source of the story for the next Toho Kong film …

                                                                             

1967: The story idea for the Sequel to “King Kong Verus Godzilla” came directly out of “The King Kong Show.” Titled, “King Kong Escapes,” it pitted Kong against a robot version of himself. If possible, it was dumber than its predecessor, not as well-photographed, and not nearly as much loved.

1968: “King of Kong Island” was an Italian cheapie that uses the name more than the premise, a patchwork of decades-old Jungle Craze tropes with normal-sized Apes (men in costumes) under the Mind-Control of a Mad Scientist (Marc Lawrence) who is opposed by a female Taran-type Character (Adriana Allen). It is universally dismissed as dull.

 

1969: “The Mighty Gorga” (1969) is considered the most shameless and inept of all “King Kong” rip-offs, a film so bad that even Bad Movie fans don’t bother with it. It takes most of the plot points of “King Kong” and adds nothing to it. The guy in the Ape costume looks terrible and the Dinosaur he battles may have been the worst in the history of cinema. The matte shots were inferior to even the Dinosaur. Lines fubbed by the talent-free Cast were left in rather than wasting the time reshooting scenes. Poorly plotted, slowly paced, etc, etc.

 

1974: Quick homages, even cameo appearances, by Kong in later film and TV are too numerous to detail, but one deserves a paragraph’s attention, “Flesh Gordon,” a Parody of “Buck Rogers” (Newspaper Comic Strip first published 1934, first Serial Film 1936, other media later) which contains n elaborate Kong Spoofing scene. It really isn’t very good, an appallingly badly acted Acted X-rated film, sloppily cut to acquire an R-rating, and desperately lacking in funny jokes BUT! the FX were remarkable, among the best of the pre-“Star Wars” (1976) era. It featured the work of two of the FX Artists who will come up in the essay again, FX-Make-Up Artist Rick Baker and Harryhausen Protégé Jim Danforth. Danforth did the Stop-Motion for the Kong Spoof Scene; as he was already twice Oscar-Nominated, so he preferred the spelling of his name be scrambled on the credits, “Mij Htrofnad.”

 

1975: The American Film Institute listed “King Kong” as one of the Fifty Best Films of All Time for the first time.

 

1976: The time was clearly ripe for a “King Kong” remake, bringing us to Producer Dino DeLaurentis’ justly maligned “King Kong.” This production, by Universal studios, also revived of Cooper’s claim it owned Kong (Universal City Studios, Inc. v. RKO General, Inc). The suit was settled in Universal’s favor and Cooper lamented, “It seems my hassle over King Kong is destined to be a protracted one. They'd make me sorry I ever invented the beast, if I weren't so fond of him! Makes me feel like Macbeth: ‘Bloody instructions which being taught return to plague the inventor.’” But Universal’s win also placed much of Kong in Public Domain, so though Universal got the green light, it also encouraged a lot coat-tail riders in the same gesture. DeLaurentis’ and Universal used their muscle to kill a many, but now the flood-gates were wide open.

 

To create a Giant Monster in a live-action film, the FX options were limited. There was Stop-Motion, which had only modestly technically advanced over the forty-years, and matching O’Brien’s craftmanship would’ve been staggeringly challenging. Then there was a guy in an Ape suit, which had been repeatedly embarrassing over those same decades. There was Animatronics, which was increasingly impressive (The Hall of Presidents in Disneyland, California, opened in 1971), but it was simply not up to this task yet. And don’t even think of CGI, the first feature film to utilized any kind of Computer Animation was “Westworld” (1971) and it was extremely limited and primitive; the creation of believable, apparently 3D, creatures, would have to wait for “Jurassic Park” (1993, and I’ll get to that). But DeLaurentis promised an incredible, full sized, Robotic Kong (so Animatronics) that would be the absolute cutting edge of FX technology.

 

And he totally didn’t deliver.

 

Italian FX Artist Carlo Rambaldi designed and built the mechanical Kong, which was forty-feet tall and weighed 6 ½ tons at a cost of £500,000 (I’m having trouble figuring the exchange rate from fifty years ago). But it didn’t work, in fact O’Brien’s full-size Kong head and shoulders from four-decades earlier was vastly superior. The Robot Kong was seen on film for less-than 15 seconds so, this was just another guy in the Ape suit movie. In fairness, it was a pretty good Ape suit, designed and worn by the above-mentioned and soon-to-be Legendary Rick Baker.

 

The real problem was the script. There seemed to be a loss in faith in the power of myth that had held our attention for generations. Only two years later “Superman: the Movie” (1978), proved a Masterpiece largely because it resisted descending into Camp, but DeLaurentis hired Scriptwriter Lorenzo Elliott Semple III, best known for the Comedic TV series “Batman” (first aired 1966), and Semple went head-first into Camp and never looked back. Semple would write other Campy and/or Cheesy exercises for DeLaurentis, many based on films or comic books from the 1930s, none very successful, and a few were major bombs: “Hurricane” (1979), “Flash Gordon” (1980, I actually like this one), “Sheena,” “Rearview Mirror” (both 1984), and “Never Too Young to Die” (1986). Producer DeLaurentis’ career was long, and there were a large handful of Masterpieces among the films he made, but he was often treated as a laughingstock, and it is remarkable how many of his most maligned films came from the same Scriptwriter.

 

The Director was John Guillermin, who had a reputation as a meticulous craftsman and had a few blockbusters under his belt. “King Kong” couldn’t be called a Career-Killer for him, he had a few fine and successful films following, but in a few years he was in obvious decline and the worst of the rest of his Career were mostly other DeLaurentis projects.

 

Here, Character Carl, now Fred S. Wilson, is not a Narcissistic Movie Producer/Director, but a Ruthless Oil Company Executive (Charles Grodin) and John, now Jack Prescott, is a Radical Environmentalist (Jeff Bridges), but these plot points are treated with such utter indifference that one couldn’t call it Commentary or Satire. Film Historian Michlig complained that screenwriter Semple, “was all about parody. That was just shorthand. We were in the ‘70s. Oil prices. Who are the bad guys? The oil companies because they’re squeezing us to get as much as they can out of us. It was just kind of easy.”

 

Worse still was Character Ann, now Dwan (Jessica Lange). Though this film was made during the height of the Feminist Era, she was made an utter Bimbo. This was Actress Lange’s first movie role, perhaps her career worst performance, and though now she’s now one of the USA’s most respected Actresses, I can remember that at the time the attitude seemed to be, “You’ll never eat lunch in this town again.”

 

So, the film was more Sexist than the original, while the treatment of the Natives was no less Racist.

 

The film's won an Oscar for Best FX even though it was never Nominated by the FX Committee, the Academy merely bent to DeLaurentis muscle. That became a huge scandal and Harryhausen’s Protégé Danforth, who had rejected this project because of the bad script, and then found his own film “The Legend of King Kong,” canceled because of DeLaurentis’ muscle, quit the Academy in protest.

 

DeLaurentis’ “King Kong” was a Legendary Bomb, except it wasn’t, people just misremember. They seem to have forgotten going to see it like they forget they voted for President Richard Nixion, who’d resigned in disgrace just the prior year. It actually was the year’s fifth highest-grossing film, earning $80 million against a $24 million investment. That money guaranteed an even worse sequel (I’ll get to that later).

Overall, 1976 proved a really a big year for Kong. There was also “A*P*E” a USA/South Korea co-production, a truly atrocious, extreme-low-budget ($23,000), rip-off (it’s Trailer was obligated to include the message, “Not to be confused with ‘King Kong’”). Wrote Critic John Wilson, the Ape costume "looks more like your grandmother's lamb's wool coat collar than an actual simian." Though far worse than “Konga,” it didn’t offend the sensibilities the way the DeLaurentis with his bloated-budget Epic. There was also “Queen Kong” a British/West German Parody of the original “King Kong” but almost no one got to see it because DeLaurentis crippled the distribution with Law Suits.

1977: “The Mighty Peking Man” from Tiawan, another shameless and inept “King Kong” rip-off, but highly energetic, benefiting from a Shaw Brother’s Studio production team with long experience in doing things fast, cheap, and dirty. It’s terrible, but fun, and the leopard was a better Actor than any human Cast member. It has developed a Cult Following greater than “Konga’s.”

 

1980: Kong had been dragged to the Broadway theatre district in the original film, so I guess it was inevitable he would return. “King Kong’s” first return to Broadway was a true oddity, “Censored Scenes from King Kong” was a Musical-Comedy which addressed the above-described Censorship without many touch-stones in Reality. In it, an Investigative Reporter goes to Japan to track down the missing scenes that might’ve contained Secret Messages to Enemy Agents. It had notable Cast: Stephen Collins, Carrie Fisher, Peter Riegert, and Chris Sarandon. To quote the Critical responses: “a lousy evening”, “the worst,” “If this is what wowed 'em in London, then London should be arrested on drug charges,” “a sure cure for insomnia,” and most viciously, Clive Barnes suggested The Princess Theatre should change its name because “no theatre is quite the same after an experience like 'Censored Scenes from King Kong'.” (The theatre did change its name a few years later). The show closed after only three days and five performances.

 

1981: The popular video game “Donkey Kong” borrowed heavily from “King Kong” so Universal sued (Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Nintendo Co., Ltd). Universal was then scolded by the Judge because five years before they managed to get their “King Kong” made only because they succeeded in placing the Character mostly in Public Domain.   

 

There were also two films, not Kong Franchise nor Rip-Offs, that must be mentioned here because of the FX. “Clash of Titans” is recorded in many sources reported as being the first Oscar win for FX Artist Harryhausen and his Protégé Danforth, but I checked, neither was even Nominated. Let me be clear, that was an unforgivable snub, but not a surprise, Harryhausen had been unforgivably snubbed throughout his working career; he finally got an Honorary Oscar in 1992. This was Harryhausen’s last film before semi-retirement and one of his finest. Over the decades, the technology of Stop-Motion had only incrementally advanced since the days of O’Brien, most improvements were born of skill and experience. This year saw the next significantly leap forward, and it came from a film “Clah of Titans” beat in the box-office, “Dragonslayer,” which proved the coming-out party for a bold Stop-Motion variation, “Go-Motion.” Go-Motion was first created in 1920s Ladislas Starevich but soon forgotten, then perfected by Phil Tippett for a very short scene in “Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back” (1981 and FX Oscar Nominated) and then displayed to its fullest glory here. Go-Motion allowed for more fluid motion of the Monsters on-screen because its metal-aperture models were in subtle motion as the incremental Stop-Motion shots were recorded. For the Art of Stop-Motion, both films were landmarks, it may have been the single best year for the process since the original “King Kong” was released.

 

1983: On April 14, 1983, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the film's release (yeah, they were off by about a month), an 84-foot, inflatable "Kong" was attached to the top of the Empire State Building and was "attacked" by vintage biplanes. Also, a NYC theater held a Fay Wray Scream-a-Thon Contest in its lobby.

 

1986: “King Kong Lives” was DeLaurentis’ delayed Sequel to his risible “King Kong,” again Directed by Guillermin, and its only Major Star being the up-and-coming Linda Hamilton. She plays a sympathetic Scientist who saves Kong (Peter Elliott in an Ape-suit) with a giant mechanical heart. There’s also a Lady Kong (George Yiasoumi, that’s right, the lady is a man) held in captivity that Kong must repeatedly rescue, and a Baby Kong (Benjamin Kechley) at the end.  This would be the last time Ape costumes would be used within any of the official Kong Franchises. It was savaged by the Critics, Ebert stating, "The problem with everyone in ‘King Kong Lives’ is that they're in a boring movie, and they know they're in a boring movie, and they just can't stir themselves to make an effort." Ebert noted that the children at the premiere audience were bored so they left their seats and played with the theatre’s doors.

 

Faced with hostile Critical response, DeLaurentis tried to throw his muscle around, and got humiliated. Both Ebert and his TV-Show co-Host Gene Siskel went public with DeLaurentis refusal to show snippets of the film unless the Critics promised to give a good review. The film didn’t bomb, but profited unimpressively. When Veteran Character Actor Peter Goetz, who had a small part, received a residual check of three cents; he didn’t cash it, he framed it and hung it on his wall.

 

1986: Universal added a "King Kong" exhibit/ride to its studio tour.

 

1988: The original “King Kong” became the first film to be colorized by Turner Entertainment.

1991: The Library of Congress selected “King Kong” for preservation in the National Film Registry.

 

1993: “Jurassic Park” was an undeniable SF,F&H film landmark. Neither part of any of the Kong Franchises, nor a Rip-Off, its relationship to “King Kong” was both significant and tenuous: Significant in that all involved admitted the Kong inspiration, Director Steven Spielberg grew up with Kong on TV much as I did. More tenuous a connection was the story, about Dinosaurs resurrected to populate a Disney-styled Theme-Park, it shared Giant Monsters and the theme of an Entrepreneur’s out-of-control Narcissism leading to chaos, but there were no other over-lapping plot-points. Of greater importance here the triumph of the CGI animation, the illusion of realism of the 3-D appearing Dinosaurs created by Dennis Murren. After seeing a test-reel, Go-Motion FX Artist Tippett told Director Spielberg, “I’m extinct.” This proved not to be true, Tippett became Murren’s Boss, but the industries of both Stop- and Go-Motion ended virtually over-night.

 

1998 The American Film Institute nominate “King Kong” as one of the Fifty Best Films of All Time for a second time. There was also a second official remake of “King Kong” that few know exist, and fewer still have seen. The low-budget, Hand-Draw Animation, “The Mighty Kong,” was a Hong Kong/South Korea co-production, that turns the original story into a Musical Comedy for Children. It doesn’t appear much loved. Also, that same year, and more importantly, was a live-action remake of “Mighty Joe Young” which was not at all bad, but unfortunately wasn’t great, and now stands forgotten, but it was, in-fact, a FX landmark. CGI Animation came into its own with “Jurassic Park” but had limitations. CGI could do lizard-like skin marvelously, but couldn’t do hair yet. The “Mighty Joe Young” remake combined and Ape costume (FX-Make-Up Artist Baker from the DeLaurentis “King Kong” led this team) with a CGI Ape flawlessly. That set us up for the next great film (not till 2005, I get to that).

 

2001: “Kong: The Animated Series” was a German/French coproduction that drew directly from the 1933 original and seemingly influenced by the much later, “King Kong Lives.” After his fall from the Empire State Building, Kong is resurrected (this time by Cloning) and returns to Kong Island (meaning Skull Island) and has adventures. It was a Children’s Animated TV show, mostly, or entirely, Hand-Drawn at a time the CGI was taking over the industry. It was successful enough to last two seasons and generate two feature-length films, but I know of no one who actually saw it.

 

2005: Director Peter Jackson’s “King Kong” remake, is usually referred to as the second official remake even though it was, in fact, the third. Kong was a magnificent, hairy, CGI creation, relying on Motion Capture work of Actor Andy Serkis, who did the same for Character Gollum in Jackon’s other super-epic, “Lord of the Rings” films (first movie 2001), and for this film Serkis studied Ape movements just as Charles Gemora had two generations before.

 

The film chose to set itself in the 1930s, and celebrated the triumphs of the original while trying to address those aspects that should be looked upon now with a cold eye. The Racism is still there; it would be hard to tell “King Kong” without denigrating the Natives. Jackson (who co-Wrote the screenplay with Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens) attempted to address that with the inclusion of Black Character, Ben Hayes (Evan Parke), a Sailor who dies Heroically fighting for his White Crewmates on Skull Island, but that’s just another over-common Racial Trope.

 

The film also attempted to address the original’s Sexism, which I’ve already argued was exaggerated by many Critics. Though there is no doubt that in this version of Character Ann, Actress Naomi Watts presented us with a more nuanced performance than that of Actress Wray, but I’d also argue most of us still prefer Wray; it’s a toss-up, and childhood memories count. Actor Adrian Brody’s take on Character John towers over Bruce Cabot’s. Regarding Character Carl, it gets more complicated, Actor Jack Black is very funny in the part, but this new version is one-dimensional; Actor Armstrong played a Carl who was equal parts Hero and Villain and he had some reason to self-delude himself regarding his Virtue (in “Son of Kong” and “Mighty Joe Young” Armstrong’s Characters slowly realize how wrong he was). Actor Black’s Carl was an irredeemable buffoon, wholly contemptable, and Black plays it to a “T.”

 

Though this new “King Kong” couldn’t have exceeded the 1933 original, it was a hellofa try, and certainly better that everything else in the intervening five-decades. One can’t deny Jackson’s grasp of the epic and the FX work was done by remarkable team so large I don’t even know who I should credit here. The main flaw, something that one could note in “Lord of the …” but much more pronounced, was giant bloat. The original “King Kong” was an amazingly tight 100 minutes while Jackson’s was, depending on which cut you saw, 187 to 200 minutes. I don’t want complain too much, Jackson’s film is spectacular and breathe-taking, but still there is this one, marvelously executed scene, that symbolized all the film’s flaws. Jackson chose to restore the lost Crab-Monsters scene, and it’s scary as Hell, but completely exhausting. Cooper was right, it “stopped the picture in its tracks,” and threw off the pacing badly. It was made for a record $207 million and then grossed well over $500 million.

Director Jackson was an extreme “King Kong” devotee, and had been trying to major this film for decades. He first envisioned it as low-budget and set in his native New Zealand. As the film was released, Collector Bob Burns sold the only surviving Armature Skeleton of the original Kong to Jackson.   That same year saw, “Kong: King of Atlantis” which was a resurrection of the already-canceled “Kong: The Animated Series” to take advantage of Jackson’s big, new, “King Kong” film. It returned to the story-telling of Jungle Craze of the 1930s, borrowing some plot points from above-mentioned Author H. Rider Haggard’s novel, “She: A History of Adventure” (serialized 1886, published as a novel 1887, and filmed at least eleven times, even by Producer Cooper in 1935). In it, the half-human Atlanteans return, and their Evil Queen wants to manipulate Kong into marrying her. It was Direct-to-DVD, kept its budget low, and though mostly ignored, earned enough to justify a sequel.   And still the same year was “King of the Lost World” by Asylum Pictures, a studio which built its entire business plan around “Mockbusters,” low-budget movies created around the publicity of major motion picture with a similar title or subject. Asylum has been frequently been sued because of the coat-tail-riding, so even with Kong mostly being in Public Domian they decided  to avoid headaches, and claimed it was an adaptation of Autor Doyle’s novel “The Lost World” which at this point was also in Public Domain. Fuggetaboutit, it’s just another shameless and inept “King Kong” rip-off. Though generally called better-than-average for Asylum, but that’s damning it with faint praise, and the FX, also better-than-average for Asylum, sadly demonstrated an emerging truth: Low-budget Hand-Drawn and Stop-Motion Animation has challenges, but is often fun, even beautiful, while low-budget CGI is just plain terrible looking.   2006: “Kong: Return to the Jungle” was another extension of “Kong: The Animated Series.” Still quite low-budget, it tried to embraced the ever-more-prevalent CGI Animation and most Critics deemed that as a mistake. There were also complaints that even though it was within-Franchise, it straying even more from the Kong Mythos. The plot-outline concerned Kong and other Monsters battling to escape a Mind-Controlling Mad Scientist’s Zoo, and though I haven’t seen it, it sounds more like the Godzilla film, “Destroy All Monsters” (1968).   The same year saw a film inevitable, but so long time coming because it was so improbable, “King Kong” Porn-Parody, “Kinky Kong.” It more-or-less followed the plot of the 1933 original, but its Low Comedy didn’t have enough funny lines (but more than “Flesh Gordon”), featured terrible Acting (but not as bad as “Flesh Gordon”), and the effects were sub-par (OK, “Flesh Gordon” beats it there).   2008: The original “King Kong was ranked it as the Fourth Best Fantasy Film ever made by the American Film Institute.   2013: “King Kong: the Musical” which had no connection to the above mentioned South African show but was, instead, the fourth official remake of the original “King Kong.” First staged in Australia, it received mixed reviews but had some success, a nine-month run. Arriving on Broadway in NYC it faced overwhelming hostility from Critics for everything except the impressive, multi-award-winning, 20-foot-tall Animatronic Kong. To quote some of the bad reviews, "stupefyingly banal," “forgettable lyrics", and "shrill, one-note performances." Though not a hit, it wasn’t a bomb either, it had a three-month run.   2017: “Kong: Skull Island” was the second film in a new Franchise called the “Monsterverse” which, though being a USA production by Warner Bros, was closely tied to the Godzilla films of the 1960s. (At the same time, Japan’s Toho studios were building a separate, independent, revived, Godzilla Franchise, that didn’t include Kong). Here, Kong as a venial and aggressive as the original Godzilla, he representing chaos, but he’s also on his island and not bothering Western Civilization until that Civilization, in the form of Lieutenant Cornel Preston Packard (Samuel L. Jackson) shows up and disturbs his Eden of Monsters (there are also Corporate Villains, but they’re not important).   The Original “King Kong” had pro- and anti-Imperialist themes colliding with each other, though perhaps unintentionally. Since then, not a single film that followed tried to advance those ideas one-iota, but this film did. It was set during the Vietnam War, and Preston is the Trespasser and the Villian, but even with his greater violence and blind rage, his Villian is arguably more sympathetic than the original film’s Character Carl. The human Good Guys recognize that they don’t belong and struggle to Escape, but Preston becomes an Captain Ahab Character (from Herman Melville’s novel “Moby Dick” (1851)) thinking of nothing but avenging his fallen Comrades, also Trespassers, so his ignoring that Kong’s (and other Monsters’) Violence is essentially Defensive, he only cares about his Pound-of-Flesh. This can be seen as both an echo, and a reversal, of the attitudes displayed towards the Hadendoa people in Cooper and Schoedsack’s “The Four Feathers.” Actor Jackson said in an interview, "does have to exact some measure of revenge for the people he's lost. That's just the nature of how we operate—eye for an eye!”   2021: “Godzilla vs. Kong,” the fourth film in the Monsterverse Franchise, obviously based on the fifty-years older “King Kong vs Godzilla.” Undeniably spectacular, it still underlined the trouble in keeping Classic Monsters from descending into a rut, especially the Kaiju. Critic John Nugent expressed it well, “‘Godzilla vs. Kong’ mostly delivers on its promise of a big monster fighting another big monster. It just depends whether you're willing to sit through the toe-curlingly bad set-up that surrounds it." Not nearly as dark in tone as “Kong: Skull Island” it offered even better FX, but less of everything else.   2024: “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” is the fifth entry in the Monsterverse Franchise, received the same mixed critical response as the previous one, maybe a little harsher because it added even less to what’s supposed to be an evolving story. But like all the other Monsterverse films, it made boat-loads on money.   Expect more to come.