King Kong [1933]

PRODUCTION NOTES

The origins of King Kong can be traced back to an obscure book, Equatorial Africa and the Country of the Dwarfs by Paul Du Chaillu, given to a young Merian C. Cooper by his uncle. It's tales of the Dark Continent fascinated Cooper and began his fascination with the great apes, particularly gorillas. The story of Du Chaillu's expedition into the heart of the jungles and his hunt for a white gorilla stuck in the imagination of the adventure-minded Cooper and would later form much of the basis for the story of King Kong.

When he broke into the film industry, Cooper teamed up with Ernest Schoedsack to make a series of "action documentaries", frequently risking their lives to capture some amazing footage of nature in the wild. They were fearless adventurers, willing to go the extra mile to get the most exciting, exhilarating and astonishing footage ever seen. In many ways they were the templates from which the character of Carl Denham was drawn. Indeed much of the non-Kong material in King Kong was directly inspired by their own adventures in film-making.

Inspired by the tale of explorer W. Douglas Burden and his discovery of the Komodo Dragon on his trip to Komodo Island and of the exotic beast's death when returned to the civilised world, Cooper began dreaming up a new story in which giant gorillas fought against giant Komodo Dragons. He couldn't interest anyone in the idea but the notion of a giant gorilla refused to go away and kept nagging at Cooper - the idea of a beauty and the beast story in which a noble savage creature would be bested by his encounter with civilisation appealed to the adventurer and the romantic in Cooper.

In 1931, Cooper met Willis O'Brien, a young special effects man who had been experimenting with the then still new technique of stop-motion animation since silent era. One of his shorts, The Dinosaur and the Missing Link [1917] featured an ape-like creature which, when seen today, looks very much like a cruder, rather tattier version of the Kong we now all know and love.

O'Brien's masterpiece to that date had been The Lost World [1925], a brilliant piece of work that still looks amazing even today. O'Brien had struggled for years to get several ambitious projects off the ground, including the famous Creation, which went into production at RKO but was never finished due to the extraordinary cost involved.

RKO were in serious financial trouble at the time - this was the time of the Great Depression - and brought Cooper in to help manage the production slate. Cooper hated the script of Creation and the film was scrapped but Cooper was suitably impressed by the technical brilliance he saw in the footage that he decided to ask O'Brien to help him with his new film, then called The Beast.

The work on Creation wasn't wasted however - much of the design and technical work, and even some of the ideas, from the Creation script were recycled for The Beast. Many of the dinosaurs made for Creation were also used for the new film.

In 1932, Cooper and Schoedsack started work on The Most Dangerous Game [1932], starring Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong, and Cooper used the cast and existing sets to shoot a test reel for The Beast. The test reel, featuring Wray [who was allegedly working near 24 hour days during the shoot to complete her duties on The Most Dangerous Game] impressed the studio executives but they were horrified at the proposed cost of the film - fortunately studio owner David O. Selznick was most impressed of all and ignored the concerns of his advisors and green lit the project. In January 1932, Kong as it was now retitled, officially RKO Production 601, entered the production schedule.

The first thing the Cooper / Schoedsack team needed to do was come up with a script. In 1931, British novelist Edgar Wallace had penned a draft of The Beast, one which differed greatly from the finished product. But it was Wallace who came up with the famous Empire State Building climax, though in his version, Kong wasn't shot down by biplanes but struck by lightning during a fierce storm.

Unfortunately, before he could complete a second draft, Wallace died on 10 February 1932 from complications arising from a bout of pneumonia. Cooper hired scriptwriter James Creelman, who had already worked on The Most Dangerous Game, to come up with a second draft, entitled The Eighth Wonder but Cooper wasn't entirely happy with what he came up with.

Time was running out for Cooper and Schoedsack who had already started the casting process - Robert Armstrong and Fay Wray were brought in from The Most Dangerous Game, the later being told that she would appear opposite the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood. She assumed she would be appearing opposite Cary Grant! It was Wray, a natural brunette, who suggested that her character Ann Darrow should be a blonde, to contrast with the darkness of Kong himself.

The film's real star was also shaping up nicely. Willis O'Brien and his team had been hard at work on creating Kong himself, building the complex armature for the stop motion miniatures and also creating a full size bust of Kong for the close up scenes and a giant hand that would hold Fay Wray in several shots.

But Creelman was finding working on the script with the demanding Cooper hard going. Cooper kept coming up with fanciful new ideas for the story and Creelman was finding it increasingly difficult to incorporate everything that his producer / director was dreaming up. Eventually he bailed out and in desperation, Cooper turned to Schoedsack's wife, Ruth Rose for help. She'd never written a script in her life but accepted the challenge of reworking Creelman's script, adding the elements of adventure and danger that she'd seen at first hand while working in the jungles with her husband and Cooper. Finally, the script was finished and the new title settled on - King Kong.

Filming took place mostly on sound stages at RKO, with the scenes of the unveiling of a manacled Kong to an astonished public being shot at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. During the famous climax of the film, Cooper and Schoedsack decided that as they had created Kong, it was only right that they should kill him off so took cameo roles as the pilot and gunner of the aircraft that fires the fatal shots!

During production, Cooper and Schoedsack kept their leading man under the tightest of wraps. Misinformation was fed to the public about how Kong was created [it was 'leaked' that the shot of Kong climbing the Empire State Building was actually a man in a gorilla suit!] and no behind the scenes footage was allowed in Willis O'Brien's studio. Sadly, O'Brien didn't even have the chance to talk to the press about what he was doing. It was gruelling work - it took seven weeks just to shoot Kong's battle with the Tyrannosaurus, a sequence which drew heavily on O'Brien's background as a boxer and wrestler.

Many of the techniques that O'Brien was using had been perfected over twenty years of experimentation, but some, especially the innovative use of rear projection and the still impressive blending of live action elements and stop motion footage were being developed here for the very first time. The sequence in which Kong returns Ann to his cavernous lair and battles a serpent like creature in particular involved so many techniques and was so astonishingly complex that it still impresses today.

When filming was completed, it was found that the finished assembly came to 13 reels and a superstitious Cooper was unhappy about releasing it in that state. The popular legend is that Cooper decided that an extra sequence needed to be shot so that the film could be brought up to 14 reels and so came up with the scene in which Kong attacks and destroys the elevated train.

But now that the film was boosted up from the dreaded 13 reels, Cooper and Schoedsack found that the pacing was all wrong and that some drastic surgery was required. They whittled away at the film, eventually bringing it down to just 11 reels. Of the excised footage, by far and away the most famous is the infamous "spider-pit" sequence. At first, the story was that the sequence, in which the sailors who are pitched off the log bridge by Kong, are attacked by a variety of hideous insect and crab like monsters, was simply too horrific though later it was revealed that Cooper felt that it slowed down the pace too much at a crucial moment in the film.

Sadly, Cooper had a habit of destroying footage that he felt wasn't needed for his films and the original spider-pit sequence is now probably lost forever, though fans still hold out hopes that it might still exist. The sequence remained largely unknown to critics, fans and general audiences alike until the mid-1960s when Forrest J. Ackerman unearthed a still of the giant spider and printed it in his influential Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Since then, it's become something of a holy grail for film fans and historians everywhere.

In 2005, while producing his remake, Kong fan Peter Jackson and his team decided to try to recreate the sequence from the shooting script, storyboards and existing stills. It's an extraordinary piece of work that in no way makes up for the loss of the original footage but it does give a tantalising glimpse of what might have been.

Further cuts to the film were made in 1938 when the film was reissued. The Production Code Administration insisted on cutting several shots, including the scene where Kong removes Ann's clothes and several shots of Kong eating, crushing and pounding his victims. Around 5 minutes of footage was removed and for many years wasn't seen again until the 1960s when the footage turned up at the home of the man who actually made the cuts. Astonishingly, the British Board of Film Censors never cut the film and an intact print was found and restored for the DVD releases in the mid 00s.

King Kong was released to cinemas on 2 March 1933 following a massive publicity campaign and had a two-theatre premiere [one in New York and one in Los Angeles], something rare in those days, particularly at the depths of the Great Depression. Despite the hardships, people flocked to see this quite extraordinary film - at the Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, crowds were wowed by a gigantic Kong bust towering over the entrance. The film was a massive hit - some cinemas ran the film continuously for 24 hours to meet the overwhelming demand to see the Eighth Wonder of the World.

Kong was more than just a monster movie - it was the source of inspiration for several generations of film-makers, from Ray Harryhausen to Joe Dante, from John Landis to Peter Jackson, all of them falling under the spell of the mighty Kong. A quickie sequel followed in the shape of Son of Kong [1933] and O'Brien made the wonderful Kong inspired Mighty Joe Young [1949]. Remakes, rip-offs, spin-offs and look-alikes proliferated over the years as the film passed into movie legend.
KEVIN LYONS

Last Updated: 6 March, 2007