Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (74 page)

Stop-Motion Animation

As a feature film,
Creation
didn’t work because the footage was boring—Cooper called it “just a lot of animals walking around”—and there wasn’t much of a plot. But Cooper was still amazed by what he saw: the dinosaurs were lifelike and huge, and the backdrops were incredibly realistic.

It turned out that the creatures were less than eight inches tall. O’Brien had made the footage with miniature models on a tabletop in his garage, using a procedure called “animation in depth” (now known as
stop-motion animation).
O’Brien filmed the animation frame by frame: he took pictures of his models, then moved them slightly and photographed them again. He repeated this painstaking process again and again, 24 times for each second of animation. When played back at ordinary speed, the models appeared to move by themselves.

O’Brien also knew how to combine the footage with human action sequences, making it appear as if dinosaurs and humans were in the same scenes.

Cooper had stumbled onto someone who could actually make his
Kong
movie work. With animation in depth, he wouldn’t need a real ape, and he wouldn’t need to film on location—he could film all of the ape sequences right on O’Brien’s workbench for a fraction of the original cost.

PART IV: GOING APE

RKO agreed to pay for a test reel of animation footage showing Kong in action, and O’Brien’s assistant, Marcel Delgado, was assigned the task of designing the ape model that would make or break the film. Cooper told him to make it look somewhat human, so audiences would feel sorry for it at the end of the movie.

The first model was apelike, but still too human; so was the second model. So Cooper changed his instructions. “I want Kong to be the fiercest, most brutal, monstrous damned thing that has ever been seen.” O’Brien argued that if the ape was too apelike, no one would sympathize with it, but Cooper disagreed. “I’ll have women crying over him before I’m through, and the more brutal he is, the more they’ll cry at the end.”

What a Doll!

The test Kong was 18 inches high and covered with sponge rubber muscles and trimmed rabbit fur. “I never was satisfied with the fur,” Delgado later recalled, “because I knew it would show the fingerprints of the animators.” (He was right—even in the finished film, Kong’s fur “bristles” as if it is being blown by the wind; an unintentional effect caused by the animators’ fingers disturbing the fur as they move the model between shots.)

RKO executives watched the footage…and immediately commissioned the film. Cooper called Schoedsack in, and the two became partners again.

PART V: WRITE ON

Finding someone to write a satisfactory script proved as hard as building a good ape: The first writer died of pneumonia before he could start work, and the second couldn’t figure out how to make some of the key parts of the plot seem believable, such as how Kong gets to New York.

Finally Schoedsack turned to a real adventurer to write the story: his wife Ruth Rose. She had never written a screenplay in her life, but her travel experiences as an explorer made her perfect for the job. “Put
us
in it,” Cooper and Schoedsack told her. “Give it the spirit of a real Cooper-Schoedsack expedition.”

The Story

The finished version of the story did just that: it featured a crazed documentary filmmaker named Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) who learns of Skull Island from a Norwegian skipper and plans an expedition to the island to make the ultimate travel-adventure film. With him on the voyage is Ann Darrow (Fay Wray), a beautiful but desperate young woman he rescues from the mean streets of New York City only hours before the ship sets sail. Hired to add “love interest” to the documentary, Darrow delivers more than expected when she capture’s Kong’s heart.

PART VI: SPECIAL EFFECTS

Like the
Star Wars
films that would follow four decades later,
King Kong
was a milestone in special effects filmmaking. Willis O’Brien and his crew performed camera miracles the like of which no one had ever seen.

Making the Monkey

All
of the ape sequences were made using models. There isn’t a single man-in-an-ape-suit scene in the entire film (although at least two actors would later claim to have been the “man inside Kong”).

O’Brien and Delgado made the ape footage in total secrecy, with only Cooper, Schoedsack, and top RKO executives allowed to monitor their progress. The secret was kept for several years after the film was released, and few people had any idea at all how the ape scenes had been created. One rumor had it that RKO had built a full-sized, walking robot ape that was controlled by several men who rode inside. The reality was much different.

Kong was billed as a 50-foot-tall ape. Actually, he was portrayed as much smaller than that in the film.

• The ape model used in the jungle scenes was only 18 inches tall; the one used in the Empire State Building scenes was 24 inches tall.

• Since the modelers were working on a scale of 1 inch as equaling 1 foot, that means Kong was 18 feet tall in the jungle and 24 feet tall in the city.

Why the difference in sizes? Cooper wanted Kong large enough to be terrifying, yet small enough to take a believable love interest in tiny Fay Wray. Eighteen feet was initially set as the standard…but when work began on the Empire State Building scenes, he and Schoedsack saw that Kong looked too small against the skyscrapers. “We realized we’d never get much drama out of a fly crawling up the tallest building in the world,” Schoedsack said later.

You Big Ape

There were no full-scale models of the complete ape, although the studio did make full-size models of the body parts that had contact with human actors. A huge hand suspended from a crane was made to lift Fay Wray aloft; and a huge foot and lower leg were made for the scenes in which Kong stomps natives to death.

The most complicated piece of all was the full-sized head-and-shoulders model, which was made of a wood and metal skeleton covered with rubber and carefully trimmed bearskins. The plaster and balsa wood eyeballs were as large as bowling balls, and the mouth, complete with a full set of huge balsa wood teeth, opened wide enough for Kong to chew on the natives.

The head-and-shoulders unit was large enough to hold the three men who controlled Kong’s facial expressions using levers and compressed-air hoses connected to the movable mouth, lips, nostrils, eyes, eyelids, and eyebrows.

PART VII: THE VOICE

Sound effects were also a challenge: in some scenes Kong roared for as long 30 seconds, and though RKO had a sound effects library with more than 500,000 different animal sounds, even the longest elephant roars only lasted 8 seconds.

RKO sound man Murray Spivack went to the zoo at feeding time to get his own sounds. He got Kong’s sounds from the lion and tiger cages, as he later recounted:

      
The handlers would make gestures like they were going to take the food away from them and we got some pretty wild sounds. Then I took some of these roars back to the studio and put them together and played them backward. I slowed them down, sort of like playing a 78-rpm record at 33, until the tone was lowered one octave, then I re-recorded it. From this we took the peaks and pieced them together. We had to put several of these together in turn to sustain the sound until Kong shut his mouth, because Kong’s roars were many times longer than those of any living animal.

For the affectionate sounds Kong makes when he’s with Ann Darrow, Spivack grunted into a megaphone, then slowed the recording down until he thought it sounded like a big ape.

PART VIII: THE SCENERY

Their revolutionary approach to special effects included innovation with scenery. The “location” sequences were filmed on miniature sets that used a combination of special effects:

• The background details were painted on glass.

• Objects in the foreground, such as trees, rocks, and logs, were modeled in miniature using clay, wire, and even toilet paper.

• Sometimes the human footage (a person crouching in a cave, for example) was shot in advance. Then, in a process known as “miniature projection,” a tiny screen would be set up in the tabletop jungle set where the ape animation was filmed. The human footage was then projected onto the screen frame by frame, making it seem as if the cave was part of the jungle. In the finished film, Kong appears to be towering over someone hiding in a cave.

PART IX: KONG ON THE RAMPAGE!

Cooper and Schoedsack wanted a powerful, one-word title for their film, so they named it
Kong
. But David Selznick was afraid that
Kong
would be mistaken for just another travel film (like
Grass
or
Chang).
So just before the film was released, he changed the name to
King Kong.

When work on the film began, everyone in Hollywood thought it would fail. But when RKO showed the finished film to theater owners, the response was so enthusiastic that the studio launched the biggest promotional campaign in its history. “THE PICTURE DESTINED TO STARTLE THE WORLD!,” advertisements blared in national magazines.

The promotions paid off—in New York City,
King Kong
was booked at both the Radio City Music Hall and the New Roxy, the city’s two largest theaters, with a total of more than 10,000 seats.

Even that wasn’t enough. It made no difference that the Depression was on—as Goldner and Turner write in
The Making of King Kong,
“in the first four days of its run,
King Kong
set a new all-time world attendance record for any indoor attraction, bringing in $89,931….To accommodate the crowds it was necessary to run ten shows daily.”

The movie made so much money that it lifted RKO out of debt for the first time in its history.

PART X: CENSORING KONG

By the time
King Kong
was re-released in 1938, the Hays Office and its infamous Production Code controlled Hollywood, and the film had to be re-edited before it could be shown in theaters. Censors removed all of the scenes of Kong stomping the natives to death, chewing them in his teeth, and dropping a woman (played by 19-year-old Sandra Shaw, Gary Cooper’s future wife) off the side of a hotel building after he mistakes her for Fay Wray.

The censors also removed a scene of Kong “accidentally” removing Fay Wray’s clothing. All of the remaining violent scenes were darkened, so that it would be harder to see what Kong was doing. (Some of the cut scenes were rediscovered decades later and reinserted into the film.)

PART XI: KONG FACTS

• Many of the sets used in
King Kong
were hand-me-downs from earlier films, and were in turn used in later films when
Kong
was finished. The Great Wall on Skull Island was made with remnants from the 1927 Cecil B. DeMille epic
The King of Kings
(after
King Kong
it was used in a film called
She,
and
The Return of Chandu,
a Bela Lugosi serial. It was ultimately set on fire during the burning-of-Atlanta scene in
Gone With the Wind).

• Fay Wray provided all of her own screams in
King Kong,
spending an entire day at the sound studio screaming herself hoarse.

• The finished film was 13 reels long. A superstitious man, Cooper refused to let it go out at that length. He wanted it longer. So O’Brien went back to work…and created one of the most elaborate sequences in the entire film, one in which Kong attacks an elevated train just before he climbs the Empire State Building. (The film was later edited down to 11 reels, keeping the train scene but losing many jungle scenes using prehistoric creatures that had been recycled from
Creation,
O’Brien’s unfinished dinosaur film.)

PART XII: KONG-SPLOITATION

Like every other classic Hollywood movie monster, King Kong was the inspiration for dozens of sequels and imitations—most of them terrible—over the next 60 years. Here are some of the real stinkers:

Son of Kong
(1933)

Carl Denham returns to Skull Island and finds Kong’s albino son trapped in quicksand. He rescues the young ape, and it becomes his protector for the rest of the film. The film did modestly well in the United States, but was much more successful overseas…particularly in Malaysia, the area where King King and son were supposedly captured.

The Ape Man
(1943)

When horror films went out of vogue in 1935, Bela Lugosi found himself out of work. When they came back in 1939, Lugosi was so desperate that he took any job that came along…including this one. In the film, he plays a mad scientist-turned-ape as a result of “attempting to harness the physical power of apes for man.” One critic called it “a prime example of the kind of film that destroyed Lugosi’s career.”