Word: cooperating
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Cooper (L) and Schoedsack (R) Thus "Kong" was born from Cooper-Schoedsack's own experience as documentary filmmakers, Willis O'Brien's test reels, a fairy tale plot line conceived by Hollywood veteran James Creelman and Schoedsack spouse Ruth Rose, and a naïve '30s view of the great ape as nature's ultimate killing machine. Like the dragons, the displaced ape would die in the city; even better, he would die on the just-completed Empire State Building, the ultimate expression of human technical achievement, and he would be killed by airplanes, the ultimate engine of destruction. Cooper...
...charming autobiography, "On the Other Hand," Fay Wray says Cooper handled the more technical sequences - Fay screaming from the top of a tree as Kong and the Tyrannosaur battle in the background, for instance - while Schoedsack helmed the human-to-human passages. She remembers Cooper telling her to "Scream! Scream for your life, Fay!" just as Denham instructs Ann in the memorable scene on shipboard. He later bragged to a friend at the Brown Derby, "I just finished making Fay Wray work for 22 hours...
...Cooper had a motto, his "three D's": keep it distant, difficult and dangerous. He and Schoedsack forged a style of storytelling that simply doesn't exist anymore, a style that is hard to define yet quite distinct. It is evident in all of all their productions together. What distinguishes the style? For one thing, speed. Denham meets Ann Darrow; seconds later she is on her way to Skull Island. Kong escapes in New York; within five minutes Ann is in his hand as he climbs the Empire State Building. Her love affair with Driscoll is sketched...
...fast pace of "Kong" reminds me of other films from the '30s that have the same breakneck speed, most particularly the work of W. S. Van Dyke in "Tarzan and His Mate," "Trader Horn" and my favorite, "San Francisco." Certainly influenced by Cooper-Schoedsack (some of their jungle footage turns up in both "Horn" and "Tarzan"), Van Dyke sets up the plot and gets us involved in the characters with an economy that is unimaginable today...
...Brien achieved in "King Kong." The only other man who came close was Ray Harryhausen. But as Paul Jensen notes, "[Harryhausen] worked hard to make good, imaginative pictures, but he never worked with a person who could take him further than he might go alone, as Merian C. Cooper did for Willis O'Brien." Harryhausen was the aging animator's apprentice on his last great picture, "Mighty Joe Young," for which O'Brien won the Oscar. One of the lessons he learned was not to do things with prohibitively big budgets ("Young" was a bomb at the box office). Consequently...