In the history of monster movies, few franchises have had as big of an impact, or as strange
of a journey, as King Kong. Maybe the most famous movie monster ever made, Kong sprung out of the imaginations of Merian
C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, and Willis O’Brien and onto the silver screen in 1933
in a story of adventure, terror, and tragedy, becoming a pillar of blockbuster Hollywood
filmmaking. But what was once a story with a definitive end soon gained unending life.
Over nearly a century of film, King Kong has been reborn and reinterpreted again and again,
shifting from international reimaginings to cinematic universe ambitions. To date, King
Kong has been the star of 10 live action films, with massive gaps, changes in rights, and
vastly different films that, while reiterating on the same ideas over and over, have massively
different outlooks on both the meaning of the story of Kong and the technology used to bring him to life.
Here, we’ll explore the entirety of King Kong’s live action film history, spanning from his depression-era death to his kaiju hero’s journey and the many strange detours
in between. So join me as we journey through the never-ending rise, fall, and rise of the king.
— The story of King Kong begins with the larger than life story of Merian C Cooper.
Cooper, born in 1893, was an American adventurer who seemed to commit his life to being a pioneer
in every way imaginable. A bomber pilot in World War 1, a volunteer and prisoner of war in the Polish-Soviet War, a world-travelling researcher, Cooper was a documentarian making
travelogs with his friend and fellow filmmaker Ernest B Shoedsack before coming up with the idea for King Kong.
Cooper’s idea for Kong came from blending his many different passions and inspirations together for a story that typified a mythological approach to nature and exploration, realistic
in its travelog ideas but fantastical in its actual subject. The book “Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa” had inspired Cooper at
an early age to be an explorer, but also contained the fantastical story of massive apes carrying
off women from villages. A 1926 expedition to the East Indies funded by the American
Museum of Natural History brought back two Komodo Dragons to the Bronx Zoo, only for the animals to die in captivity. The film’s script would go through multiple evolutions,
with Edgar Wallace writing a draft based on Cooper’s ideas, which was then rewritten by James Creelman, and finally rewritten again by Ruth Rose, Schoedsack’s wife, who created
diaglouge including the film’s famous last words and turned Carl Denham and Jack Driscoll into essentially versions of Cooper and Schoedsact.
However, no studio wanted anything to do with Cooper’s ambitious and unclassifiable project
except for David O. Selznick, Head of Production at RKO Radio Pictures. "David played one vital part,” said Cooper. “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." At one point, Cooper imagined making Kong by capturing a gorilla in the wild and having
it fight a komodo dragon. For the sake of good film and animal rights, that idea was thankfully scrapped when RKO’s stop motion animator Willis O’Brien came on board. O’Brien
and previously worked on making a dinosaur film titled Creation, but this was scrapped after 20 minutes of footage were made, with multiple sequences making their way into King
Kong. Kong’s story is relatively simple, but it’s told with a massive scope that changes dramatically
across its 3 acts, starting with the assembling of our movie cast and boat crew and the journey
Skull Island, is a wild chase through the jungle, as the crew pursues Anne when she’s been taken by Kong. The pace here is absolutely relentless and its often easy to forget that
this film is nearly a century old as creature after creature are thrown at our rapidly dwindling
band of heroes, showing Kong to not be the only danger on this time capsule of the prehistoric
age. And finally, the film reaches its most iconic moments in the third act, as the captured
Kong is put on display on Broadway and quickly begins rampaging across New York.
With Cooper and Schoedsack both directing and O’Brien in charge of bringing it all to life, King Kong is a cavalcade of special effects. Of course, Kong, an 18-inch puppet,
is brought to life through stop motion animation, but so is every other fantastical creature and dinosaur, with Cooper acting out the scenes to help O’Brien overcome the massive challenges
of the production. These were blended together with actors through matte paintings and rear projection, timing movements in sync with pre-existing footage. And of course there’s