Word: cooperized
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...thought was to transport a film crew and a great ape to Komodo Island and somehow get the ape to fight a lizard on film. There were some logistical problems (I wonder what they could have been?) and the plan never got off the ground. A couple years later Cooper was asked by newly appointed RKO studio head David O. Selznick to compile an inventory of every piece of film in the library. Cooper came across some sequences from an unfinished stop-action animation film called "Creation," the pet project of animator Willis O'Brien (more...
Aside from the look and the music of "Kong," of course, are the shaping hands of producer-director Merian C. Cooper and his co-director Ernest Schoedsack. Cooper had been among other things a sailor, a newspaperman, and a combat aviator; while in Poland after his escape from a Bolshevik labor camp, he met veteran newsreel cameraman Schoedsack...
According to Fay Wray the characters of Denham and Driscoll are modeled on Cooper and Schoedsack, who as a documentary filmmakers would go anywhere for a picture. They scored big with "Grass" in 1925, its setting the wind-swept plains of Persia. They followed-up with the Siamese jungle picture "Chang" in 1927, their first foray into spectacle: a climactic (and staged) elephant charge decimates a native village. The more sensational scenes in the picture were projected in "Magnascope", a process which enlarged the size of the image to Imax proportions. (Cooper and Schoedsack went out the way they came...
...Kong" was Cooper's idea, although English mystery novelist Edgar Wallace gets a co-credit (he died of pnuemonia only three days into the script). In 1926 adventurer W. Douglas Burden traveled to a remote and legendary island in the South Seas at the behest of New York's Museum of Natural History to bring back a dragon. Two dragons, to be exact: Komodo dragons, 300 pounds heavy and 10 feet long, lizards that ended up in the Bronx Zoo and quickly pined away in the forbidding environs of New York. Burden told the story to his friend Cooper...
...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...