King Kong (1933) Directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. Screenplay by James Creelman and Ruth Rose. Starring Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, and Bruce Cabot.
As I sat down to watch this week’s film, I realized a couple of things.
The first was that I had never actually seen King Kong (1933) in its entirety. I had seen clips from it—especially that famous last line—and I had watched Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake (which I found to be pretty boring, to be honest). But I’d never watched the whole movie beginning to end, which I realized around about the time the Stegosaurus was charging.
The second thing I realized was that I had absolutely no idea where King Kong had come from.
That is, I knew it was a Depression-era pre-Hays Code film from RKO Pictures with revolutionary stop-motion animation. But I didn’t know why it existed. And I wanted to. I wanted to know what peculiar alchemy of history and art combined such that the filmmakers looked around in the early 1930s and thought, “You know what the world needs? The world needs a giant gorilla to kidnap a pretty woman and fight dinosaurs and fall off the Empire State Building.”
The kernel of inspiration, it turns out, is very simple:
Once upon a time there was a boy who was really, really fascinated by apes.
We’ll get to him in a moment. First let’s take a little trip back to the early days of Hollywood.
In the 1920s, as film production became more and more centered in Los Angeles, a handful of large studios (MGM, Paramount, Universal, you know the names) began buying up the dozens of smaller production companies, theaters, and distributors, leading to the vertical integration of the studio system that would dominate Hollywood until the late ’40s. Feature-length films were becoming extremely popular, and they showcased movie stars that everybody loved: Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Greta Garbo, Rudolph Valentino.
Silent films were already beloved, but movies as a cultural force really exploded with the advent of “talkies” in the last few years of the ’20s. That’s generally cited as the start of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
It can be a bit difficult to conceptualize just how popular movies were during this time, but here are some numbers anyway. By the end of the ’20s, there were somewhere around 22,000-23,000 movie theaters in the U.S.; that’s about one for every 4,500 people. It’s estimated that in a U.S. with a total population of just over 120 million, about 85 to 100 million people were attending the movies each week. Movies were everything and everywhere, and everybody wanted to be a part of them.
That included the Radio Corporation of American (RCA), which looked around and thought, hey, movies with sound are all the rage, and we already have some relevant technology. We should find a way to use it! So they did what other companies were doing: they grabbed up some smaller theater, production, and distribution companies to form the movie studio RKO Radio Pictures, which launched in early 1929.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Hmm, it’s been a long time since I studied history in school, but didn’t something else happen in 1929? Something kind of important?”
Ah, yes. RKO was in business for less than a year when the U.S. financial markets crashed. The Great Depression began in the U.S. but soon spread around the world (in large part due to how badly the U.S. government handled it), and the film industry was affected along with everything else. Movie viewership dropped by almost half, and a third of American movie theaters closed. People turned to radio for their entertainment instead. People still wanted movies, but they couldn’t afford to see as many as they had before.
The newly-formed RKO spent a huge amount of money to churn out picture after picture. Some were successful, but most faded pretty quickly. In an attempt to establish more of a name for itself, RKO brought on producer David O. Selznick in 1931. Selznick is now one of those genuine Hollywood legends, one of the most influential and respected producers the movie business has even known. That legacy comes not just from the films he produced—including Gone with the Wind (1939)—but also from the changes he made to how movies were produced. During his brief time at RKO, Selznick developed the “unit” production system in which individual producers were given a great deal of freedom, rather than requiring everything to be developed under a single, central producer.
One of the men Selznick brought into RKO as part of this change was filmmaker Merian C. Cooper, who very much wanted a studio to take on a specific project he had in mind. A project that would be risky, expensive, and honestly a little bit bizarre.
A project involving a very large ape.
Cooper’s real life was pretty wild even before he made King Kong. He was a fighter pilot in World War I and later in the Polish-Soviet War, during which he was shot down and held in a Soviet POW camp for several months. He escaped, was recaptured, and escaped again. After he returned to the U.S., he became a reporter with The New York Times, but he was bored so he started traveling and writing exploration pieces for the magazine Asia.
Exploration was a big deal among white men at the beginning of the 20th century. Yes, the very concept of “exploration”is fraught with colonialist and racist assumptions, but at the time Europeans and Americans were very much enamored of the idea that there were places in the world they could go out and discover, places that had been lost or forgotten or never visited. The fact that people already lived in many of these places was not seen as terribly relevant, because the people and their cultures were also viewed as something to discover and showcase. Central Asia and Tibet, the North and South Poles, the Amazon basin, Egyptian tombs, the Himalayan peaks—breathless reports from these places filled American and European newspapers.
It was during his work as a travel and exploration writer that Cooper got into filmmaking. He met cinematographer Ernest Schoedsack during his travels, and together with reporter (and spy!) Marguerite Harrison the two men would make the film Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life (1925), a documentary about nomadic tribes in Persia. Ethnographic documentaries were a new thing at the time; Robert J. Flaherty’s extremely popular Nanook of the North (1922) was the first. Grass was a film in a similar vein: a feature-length look at a people and culture that most 1920s Americans would never encounter, blending genuine documentary film practices with staged pseudo-documentary scenarios.
Cooper and Schoedsack went on to make Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927), a documentary about a farmer in northern Thailand, which was also very well-received by critics. It has the honor of being one of only three movies in existence to have been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Unique and Artistic Picture, an award that existed for the very first Academy Awards in 1929 but was immediately discontinued afterward. (Chang didn’t win; the prize went to F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise.)
For their next film, Cooper and Schoedsack ventured into fiction with The Four Feathers (1929), a silent war movie that takes place during the Madhist War in Sudan. What little information I’ve found about the filming of The Four Feathers is honestly pretty disturbing. Parts of the movie were filmed in Tanzania and Sudan, and it seems like Cooper and the rest of the crew treated both the local actors and the animals very poorly.
In addition to footage for the film, Cooper brought something else back from Africa: a rekindled interest in large apes. He had been fascinated by these animals since childhood, when he had read Paul Du Chaillu’s Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, which includes descriptions of massive gorillas who will carry away unlucky women. During the filming of The Four Feathers, he apparently spent so much time observing a family of baboons that he filled hundreds of pages of notes and came up with a shiny new idea.
I don’t lie to you in these columns. I try very hard to make sure that everything I write about is sourced properly. And I promise you I am not making this up: Merian C. Cooper’s shiny new idea was to make a film about a gorilla fighting a Komodo dragon.
Cooper, like so many other Hollywood men, had a tendency to mythologize his own genius when he looked back on his life, so it’s hard to accurately trace the genesis of the idea. But it’s maybe not quite as random as it sounds. Jungle movies, and in particular jungle adventure movies, were very popular at the time. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1912 novel Tarzan of the Apes had been adapted in an extremely popular series of silent films that filled movie theaters from 1918 until 1929. Silent film icon Lon Chaney starred in West of Zanzibar (1928), a brutal revenge movie set in what is now Tanzania; the film was considered so shocking it played a large part in the push to enforce the Hays Code. Even Mickey Mouse went to the jungle.
We’re getting closer to an answer to my question of where King Kong came from. The final detail to bring it all home is fact that King Kong is a movie about making a movie, and more specifically about making the very sort of film that Cooper and Schoedsack had made before. Cooper apparently went so far as to tell screenwriter Ruth Rose (also Schoedsack’s wife) to “Give it the spirit of a real Cooper-Schoedsack expedition.” The character of Carl Denham is meant to be a version of Cooper, and Jack Driscoll a version of Schoedsack, and I am valiantly not drawing any conclusions about what Ruth Rose thought about the men in her life.
So we’ve finally arrived at King Kong, a movie about an filmmaker’s expedition to explore a faraway place inhabited by mysterious natives and magnificent creatures.
The film’s version of Cooper, Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong), is a famous filmmaker who wants to make an adventure movie about a massive, mythical beast named Kong, said to live on a remote island somewhere in the Indian Ocean. The ship Venture, under the command of Captain Englehorn (Frank Reicher), is going to take him there; the captain and crew are curiously blasé about the fact that they have no idea where they’re going. Before they set sail, Denham hires Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) to play a beauty opposite the mysterious beast. The film’s only acknowledgement of the Great Depression is the fact the Denham finds Darrow by wandering around New York shelters at night looking for a young woman desperate enough to sail around the word on a whim. Along the way, Darrow develops a romance with the ship’s first mate, Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot).
When they arrive at the island, which has a prominent mountain that looks like a skull but is never actually named Skull Island, they find the islanders performing some sort of ceremony as they prepare to gift a young woman to the mysterious Kong.
And, look, this is something we all know and acknowledge, but it must be said anyway: this movie is super racist. There’s the painful caricature of the ship’s cook Charlie (played by Chinese-American actor Victor Wong), the dismissive way Denham and the ship’s crew insist the islanders could never have built the protective wall, the offer the islanders make to trade six of their women for Darrow, and of course the deeply unfortunate imagery of a huge black gorilla obsessing over a petite blonde woman while flinging her around like a ragdoll—it’s all so outrageously racist that there are moments when the only reasonable reaction is to just stare at the screen blankly.
Critics, film scholars, and audiences have always talked about race in King Kong and the entire Kong franchise; it’s been widely discussed and studied for decades. I’m not going to get into it in depth, because I don’t have anything to say that far smarter and more knowledgeable people haven’t already said.
But I do want to draw attention to Noble Johnson, the actor who plays the unnamed island chief, who was an incredibly prolific and successful character actor with roles in over a hundred films. Many of those small parts were uncredited, but not all of them; he shows up in some of the biggest films from the silent film area, including Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1923) and Raoul Walsh’s The Thief of Baghdad (1924), and he worked alongside Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney (who was a good friend of Johnson’s; they went to school together in my hometown).
Before his Hollywood career got too busy, Johnson and his brother, George, founded the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, which was the first Black-owned film studio in the country. Their goal was to make films about Black characters who weren’t stereotypes or caricatures, specifically for Black audiences, telling the kind of stories that were ignored or suppressed by Hollywood studios, segregated theaters, and white audiences. The Lincoln studio only lasted for a few years and made a handful of films, and very little of what they filmed still survives. You can watch a few minutes from By Right of Birth (1921) on YouTube.
I share this because it’s an interesting part of film history, but also because I think it’s important to remind ourselves that when we see something egregiously racist in old movies, it’s almost never true that nobody was thinking about or concerned about such problems. The white guys at the top might not have been thinking about it, but sometimes there are people right there on the screen who were very aware, very concerned, and very much involved in trying to change things for the better.
That being said, we all know the real reasons we’re still talking about King Kong more than 90 years after its release, and those reasons have nothing to do with its politics or even the story itself. It’s all about the spectacle of the production, which becomes apparent when Kong finally makes his appearance.
The villagers kidnap Darrow to offer her to Kong, Kong accepts their offer and steals Darrow away into the woods, and Driscoll and the others race to rescue her. What follows is a breathtaking, relentless series of action sequences that showcase a wide range of complex, innovative, and impressive special effects that forever expanded people’s ideas about what kind of stories could be told in the movies.
Because the movie really is stunning to look at. It was filmed at the RKO studios, often using the same sets, crew, and cast as The Most Dangerous Game (1932), which was being filmed concurrently with much of the same cast and crew. Those dense, layered jungle scenes are a result of life-size sets made of plaster, wood, and live plants, miniature sets, and matte paintings.
One of my favorite uses of matte paintings in the film, which is usually credited to Mario Larrinaga and Byron L. Crabbe (art credits are a bit hazy; it’s not always apparent who did what), is the iconic, memorable scene where the men are crossing the fallen log over the ravine. The layers of light and dark, the depth of perspective, the claustrophobic feel of the trees leaning inward—it’s a stunning sequence that combines several layers of paintings on glass to create a wonderfully immersive scene.
And then there are the monsters, whose appearance and fights are so very exciting, frightening, and sometimes shockingly violent. So violent, in fact, that after the Hays Code began to be earnestly enforced in Hollywood in 1934, King Kong had to be edited and cut several times over the years to remove some of the more violent scenes. (Those scenes were put back in; the movie was fully restored over the years and a complete version is what’s now available online. Another cut-and-restored scene is the one in which Kong removed Darrow’s clothes and sniffs her, which… honestly, it’s technically impressive, but they could have left that one out.) One scene—in which the men who fall into the chasm were torn apart by giant spiders—was deemed too violent even before the film’s release and is now lost.
Now, you might be wondering: So… why are there dinosaurs in this movie?
Aside from the obvious answer, which is that every movie is improved by the inclusion of dinosaurs, it’s a fair question. Nothing about a film crew traveling to an island where a giant gorilla kidnaps a pretty lady suggests dinosaurs.
Once again: I cannot stress to you enough how so many of Cooper’s decisions were driven by his cherished goal of making a giant gorilla fight a Komodo dragon. So he looked around for a way to make that happen, and what he found was a man hard at work in the RKO studios on an unrelated project. A man who loved dinosaurs even more than Cooper loved apes.
That man was Willis O’Brien, the artist who pioneered the use of stop-motion animation in live-action films.
O’Brien also had a pretty exciting life that could (and should) be its own Hollywood film. He spent his youth as a cowboy, fur trapper, and mountain guide. It was while guiding a group of paleontologists around Crater Lake that he fell in love with dinosaurs—a love that never faded. He was also a talented artist who worked as a sculptor and draftsmen (and briefly a professional boxer, because why not). He began using his sculpting skills to create animation, and that’s how he got the attention of people who wanted to make short, animated dinosaur films—including Thomas Edison, who at the time was also trying to sue the rest of the nascent film industry into oblivion, but that’s a whole other topic.
Those short dinosaur films landed O’Brien a job on the production of Harry O. Hoyt’s The Lost World (1925), an adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel of the same name. For the next few years O’Brien worked on some more dinosaur-themed projects that were never finished. That included an RKO production called Creation, which was going to be another movie about discovering dinosaurs alive in the modern world. But Creation was taking too long and costing too much money, so Selznick and Cooper scrapped it.
The suddenly-unemployed stop-motion dinosaurs weren’t Komodo dragons, but they offered a chance for Cooper to finally make his gorilla-fighting dreams come true. Cooper folded the island of dinosaurs and several other ideas from O’Brien’s Creation into his own giant gorilla project. That’s why King Kong has dinosaurs.
Kong, the dinosaurs, and the other creatures are all animation models; they are articulated metal skeletons covered with fabric to soften the lines, containing air bladders to allow the appearance of breathing, and finally encased in rubber or fur. There are two 18-inch Kongs in the film; you can actually tell their cute little faces apart if you look closely. As with all stop-motion animation, filming the creature sequences involved painstakingly moving the models step by step while carefully controlling the lighting; the fight between Kong and the Tyrannosaurus reportedly took seven weeks to film.
The miniature animation model Kongs weren’t all the film needed. The crew also created an enormous head, hand, arm, and foot for certain scenes; the head would have a few men inside it of it, operating its different moving parts. The arm was designed to grip Wray and lift her up while she struggled and screamed; it’s also used in the scene in which she is snatched from the hotel room. (Throughout her life, Wray was charmingly baffled by how beloved she was for her role in King Kong and being Hollywood’s first scream queen. She could, in fact, do a lot more than scream; it’s just that her most famous role doesn’t show much else.)
The real cleverness in King Kong’s special effects come from the combination of the stop-motion animation with the live action scenes. The movie uses several techniques to achieve this; this is a good video explaining them. The simplest one is rear-screen projection, in which the actors are filmed in front of a screen onto which the animated sequence is projected; examples of this in the film are the scenes involved the Stegosaurus and the scene in which Darrow is watching the Kong vs. T. Rex fight from a tree.
The film also uses a reverse version of rear-screen projection with the miniatures. In this technique, it was the filmed live-action scenes that would be projected behind the stop-motion animation. This would be done frame by frame, because stop-motion animation requires that sort of pacing. And, in some cases, two separate live-action scenes were projected at the same time, such as when Darrow and Driscoll are both on screen while Kong fights a creature inside the cave.
A couple of the other techniques they employed were the Dunning process and the Williams process, both of which involve using lighting to separate the live-action foreground before “bipacking” that film with the background, or loading two strips of film into the camera to create an in-camera overlap.
It’s the combination of all these different techniques, and the filmmakers’ willingness to use anything they could, that makes those battles in the jungle and that climb up the Empire State Building so fantastic. The painstaking work that went into creating Kong, his dinosaur neighbors, his island home, and his eventual demise only gets more impressive the more you dig into it.
King Kong is very much a labor of love, one where a truly incredible amount of work went into bringing these impossible scenarios to life. Yes, it’s a dated movie with a lot of very serious problems. And, yes, it can look jerky and awkward to our modern eyes (although, truth be told, I have very little patience for those who dismiss it on those grounds). It’s still a marvelous sight to behold.
Even though it’s been 91 years, it’s not that hard to imagine going to watch this movie in 1933. Times are tough, wonders are hard to come by, and who can blame Ann Darrow for seizing a chance at adventure? Because that’s what it is. It’s an hour and a half of tension, action, danger, and romance. It was never meant to be realistic; verisimilitude is not necessarily the goal of special effects, then or now. The film’s goal is to transport us and take us on adventure. What King Kong was always meant to be was astounding.
The world didn’t need a movie about a giant gorilla fighting dinosaurs. It is, in truth, a very silly premise. (I say that with love.) But the world got that movie anyway, and when it did it also got proof that movies can show us anything, tell any kind of story, take us on any kind of journey. Movies can be anything at all—and some of the very best things they can be are fun, imaginative, and willing to carry us away into the impossible for a little while. That’s why King Kong is still so beloved after all this time.
This brings our giant monster month to a close! What do you think about King Kong? Thoughts on its special effects, its development, its place in film history? Did anybody else feel really sorry for the Stegosaurus? I just felt really sorry for that fellow.
I can’t believe it’s August already, but that means it’s time for something new.
Let’s Skip Ahead to the End (of the World)
August always makes me want to fast-forward to autumn, so how about some time travel? There are many types of time travel movies (time loops, fixing or fouling up history, solving crimes across time, etc.) but the ones we’re watching this month all involve glimpsing some version of a future in which things have gone a little bit awry for humanity.
August 7 — The Time Machine (1960), directed by George Pal
Let’s jump into our Victorian contraption and visit the distant future to see how humans have evolved.
Watch: Amazon, Apple, Vudu, Microsoft, Spectrum.
View the trailer.
August 14 — Aditya 369 (1991), directed by Singeetam Srinivasa Rao
Let’s jump into our early ’90s contraption and visit both the past and the future to chase an art thief in India’s first time travel film.
Watch: Amazon looks like the only subtitled source. It seems both the Telugu-language original and the Hindi dub are floating around on YouTube or other upload sites, but I don’t think any have English subtitles.
View the trailer, which also doesn’t have English subtitles.
August 21 — La Jetée (1962), directed by Chris Marker
We’re simulating the psychological whiplash of time travel by following up a madcap Tollywood adventure with a bleak, experimental, French arthouse film that is only 28 minutes long.
Watch: Criterion, Amazon, Apple.
View the trailer.
August 28 — Twelve Monkeys (1995), directed by Terry Gilliam
This is what you get when Terry Gilliam and Chris Marker reinterpret La Jetée in the ’90s.
Watch: Apple, Vudu, Microsoft, YouTube, Google.
View the trailer.
