King Kong may be spry for his age, but still he's lived a long time.
It's been more than 90 years since his birth in the mind of Merian C. Cooper to the release
of Godzilla vs. Kong — and he's stayed busy all that time, living a long and complicated life.
Many hands brought King Kong to life, but it all began with Merian C.
Cooper. As outlandish as the movie's story of lost islands and daring adventures may seem,
it's not too far from Cooper's own life.
In Kong: The History of a Movie Icon from Fay Wray to Peter Jackson,
author Ray Morton chronicles the director's career in what Cooper called "natural dramas,"
documentaries filmed all over the world, then reshot and recut into narrative form.
Even the seemingly inexplicable presence of a movie starlet on a documentary shoot
came from real life. Screenwriter Ruth Rose based the fictional filmmaker Carl Denham's
monologue about how every critic and exhibitor demands a love story on Cooper's own complaints.
The discovery of the Komodo dragon, a huge, primitive reptile that had long been thought
extinct, fired Cooper's imagination. He conceived a new natural drama about a war between komodo
dragons and a clan of gorillas, eventually whittled down to just one great ape. When Cooper
learned the dragons he'd shipped over from Komodo died in captivity, he found his tragic ending.
Cooper commissioned a script from mystery writer Edgar Wallace about a big game
hunter who meets a rowboat full of escaped convicts on a lost island.
James A. Creelman rewrote it, replacing the hunter with a Cooper-esque filmmaker.
But their studio, RKO, balked at the cost of filming live animals in their natural habitats.
Fortunately, they were also filming a never-finished movie called Creation,
featuring stop-motion dinosaurs created by the great Willis O'Brien,
and Cooper found the man to bring his Kong to life.
The original King Kong tells the story of Carl Denham, a filmmaker who journeys to a mysterious
island to document the legends of a godlike ape, with down-on-her-luck actress Ann Darrow in tow.
Upon landing, they interrupt a sacrifice to Kong, and Ann finds herself on the altar.
Denham's crew fights their way across the island and its prehistoric beasts, finally bringing Kong
back to New York. He escapes, of course, and drags Ann up the newly built Empire State Building,
then the tallest building on earth, until a fleet of fighter pilots shoots him down.
Co-director Ernest Shoedshack was horrified to discover he could see the ways Willis
O'Brien's team disturbed Kong's hair as it jumped around between frames.
Morton wrote that he "thought the whole project was sunk" until an RKO executive
enthusiastically responded, "Look! Kong is angry — his fur is bristling!"
As much as Cooper and O'Brien, the credit for Kong's success goes to Max
Steiner for his pulse-pounding music. But RKO were too cheap to commission a
score and only paid Steiner to patch together existing music.
Cooper paid him out of pocket for an original composition — money well spent.
King Kong was a monster hit. Even at the height of the Great Depression, it raked in more than $2
million — which may not sound like much after 90 years of inflation, but it adds up to over
$40 million in 2021 dollars. RKO was going to milk this cash cow for all it was worth,
and that meant rushing a sequel into production — just nine months from pitch to release.
Son of Kong is a lot better than you'd expect under the
circumstances — it can't live up to the original, but it's not bad.
Cooper and Rose came up with a surprisingly realistic take on the aftermath of Kong's rampage,
with Carl Denham confined to his apartment avoiding lawsuits and court summons.
Then again, they also seem to expect us to feel more sorry for Denham than
the hundreds of people who died as an all-but-direct result of his actions.
“I brought Kong back here. He got loose,
did a lot of damage, got killed and that's that. What can I do about it?"
"We can go to jail for ten years."
Denham flees the country, where he finds a fugitive who tricks him into helping
him escape by claiming there's a treasure on Skull Island — a fanciful claim which
improbably turns out to be true. With the movie already half over, they're off.
On Skull Island, they finally meet and befriend the titular Son of Kong,
a smaller, lighter colored baby ape.
"Well if it isn't a little Kong!"
"He's stuck in the quicksand! He can't get out!"
"Well I never knew old Kong had a son!"
Then the movie ends with the whole island falling apart right out of nowhere,
and Li'l Kong sacrifices himself to save Denham.
RKO rushed out Son of Kong to beat any knockoffs to market, but that didn't stop
them from coming out later. Mighty Joe Young at least has pedigree, with Shoedshack directing,
a starring role for Armstrong, a Cooper/Rose script, and animation by Willis O'Brien and
his young protegé Ray Harryhausen, who'd soon become Hollywood's go-to stop-motion man.
Konga, meanwhile, was a cheapie knockoff with next to no pedigree, about a chimp
taking a growth serum that turns him first into a killer gorilla and then into a Kong-size monster.
You could say the same about the cash-ins that followed news of the 1976 remake.
Legendary producers the Shaw Brothers took a break from kung fu to produce
a Hong Kong King Kong with The Mighty Peking Man, also known as Goliathon.
A collaboration between South Korea and a small American studio resulted
in a notoriously thrown-together picture called A*P*E . And if you don't believe it's a ripoff,
just know that they originally wanted to call it The New King Kong. It at least has one thing
no official Kong movie has — we doubt the Eighth Wonder of the World ever flipped anyone the bird.
Beyond the movies, we have Hanna-Barbera's plus-sized cartoon star Grape Ape,
DC Comics' Titano the Super-Ape, a chimp who goes monster-size thanks to the powers of kryptonite,
and Rampage, the video game that was later adapted into a movie starring Dwayne Johnson.
And we can't forget Donkey Kong, the arcade classic that introduced the world to Mario.
Even Godzilla himself owes a debt to Kong. He would have been an O'Brien-esque stop-motion
creation if money hadn't been tight, and the original Godzilla recreates Kong's elevated train
attack. So of course they had to meet eventually. Toho's 30th anniversary was a perfect opportunity
— how better to celebrate than to pit the studio's biggest star against his American equivalent?
King Kong vs. Godzilla was only the third Godzilla movie, the first in almost a decade,
and it ended up deciding the direction the franchise would take for decades to come.
The original movie had been a deadly serious allegory for atomic war,
but kids loved the big lizard anyway, and this new movie was designed to appeal to those young fans.
"Ah, I bet Kong has no chance."
"I'll toss you. Heads for King Kong."
Thanks to Godzilla's creator Ishiro Honda, there was still social commentary. But this time,
that meant a goofy satire of TV advertising with some of Japan's biggest comedy stars,
in a story about a drug company that captures Kong to be their mascot and stages a fight between
him and Godzilla by carrying him to the arena with giant balloons. Not everyone was happy:
according to the book Japan's Favorite Mon-star by Steve Ryfle, there were multiple effects artists
who were horrified at some of the goofy things coordinator Eiji Tsubaraya expected them to do.
As for Kong, he's literally big in Japan — he grew from small enough to comfortably
interact with the human characters to Godzilla size. That evened the odds, but also made the
obligatory building-climbing scene less dramatic, since the building's now smaller than Kong.
King Kong returned to stateside screens in 1976 thanks to Italian superproducer Dino
De Laurentiis and a script by Lorenzo Semple Jr., creator of TV's Batman.
After the runaway success of Jaws, monsters were big business,
and both De Laurentiis and Universal made their own deals with RKO for the
rights to the big ape, starting a tug-of-war that lasted for years.
When the rights situation was finally sorted out, De Laurentiis released a King Kong for
the '70s in which Carl Denham is replaced with a scummy oil executive who wants to
exploit Skull Island's mineral resources, while Jeff Bridges plays a hippie scientist.
Instead of the Empire State Building, Kong climbs the World Trade Center.
That's special effects legend Rick Baker in the ape suit,
but he wasn't too happy with the final product. He may have been thinking of the scene when
Kong bathes Jessica Lange's character in what looks like a mini-golf water feature,
and then blows her dry, his cheeks inflating like big, rubbery balloons.
"I was wrong when I called this thing a farce. It's a tragedy."
The crew had some even odder effects ideas to cut costs — at one point,
they considered casting a little person as Kong so they could build even more miniature miniatures.
The 1976 King Kong is often remembered as a flop since it failed in its stated goal of
outperforming Jaws, but by any other standards, it was a huge hit, making back triple its cost.
Even knowing that, it's hard to imagine anyone was clamoring for a sequel exactly
ten years and two days later, but that's when King Kong Lives debuted.
How does King Kong live, exactly? Because a university has kept him on life support
all this time and revived him with a ginormous artificial heart, apparently.
But he's still lost the will to live, so the scientists bring him a newly discovered female
Kong to jolt him awake. By the end, there's even a relatively little baby Kong too!
Dino De Laurentiis explained his rationale to American Cinematographer, saying,
"Steve McQueen made a picture in which he died at the end,
but they made another picture with Steve McQueen. Many stars die at the end of a picture and then
go on to the next picture. Kong is a star. We are going to have a new story, a new Kong."
Screenwriter Ron Shuset discussed with Fangoria the many other possibilities De Laurentiis
considered, which makes the plot they finally went with look downright realistic. He shared,
"They had King Kong in Russia and King Kong in outer space. Really, this is not an exaggeration."
Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson fell in love with King Kong the moment he saw it on TV
as a small child. The 2005 film is actually his second remake of the story — Morton's
book reveals Jackson had already recreated it with claymation and a camcorder at age 12.
Universal gave him the chance to mount a more professional remake on the set
of his first Hollywood movie, The Frighteners.
At first, he found the task too daunting to consider, but he changed his mind out of worry
Universal would offer the job to someone else who might do even worse with it. But the project
went on hold until he followed up Return of the King with the return of another king.
As you'd expect from such a devoted fan, Jackson's King Kong closely follows the original,
keeping the 1933 setting and casting Naomi Watts, Jack Black,
and Adrien Brody in the roles originated by Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, and Bruce Cabot.
Obviously stop-motion would never fly in the digital world of 2005,
so Jackson created a motion-capture Kong with the help of Andy Serkis,
who'd proven the technology's potential as Gollum in Lord of the Rings.
He and Jackson created a more literal, realistic gorilla, and whatever you think of that choice
creatively, you can't deny his crew put in the effort. Serkis, who pulls double duty as one
of the sailors in the movie, spent weeks in Rwanda, studying gorillas in the wild.
Legendary Pictures laid the groundwork for Godzilla vs. Kong by introducing yet another
version of the Eighth Wonder of the World in Kong: Skull Island. Like the last remake, it's
period piece, but it shifts the action forward to the '70s, as a motley crew of Vietnam vets,
a war photographer, and a government agent arrive on Skull Island to investigate
and get more than they bargain for when they meet Kong and he wrecks their helicopters.
The ape god's prehistoric world hasn't been this entrancing since the original,
thanks to all kinds of weird creatures.
But some of the wildest creatures are the human ones, like John C. Reilly's wonderfully unhinged
performance as a fighter pilot who's been stranded on the island since World War II.
"Iwis won't speak their name, but I call 'em skullcrawlers."
"Why?"
"Because it sounds neat."
Skull Island also gives Kong some of the best action sequences of his whole career,
building up to one in which a Skullcrawler tries to bite his arm off only for Kong to
reach all the way down its throat and pull its guts out. If this movie's anything to go by,
the king's in good hands at Legendary Pictures for his return to the screen.
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