Word: merian
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KING KONG, SON OF KONG AND MIGHTY JOE YOUNG MERIAN C. COOPER AND ERNEST B. SCHOEDSACK "Why, the whole world'll pay to see this!" exclaims the man who brings Kong from Skull Island to Manhattan. The world got its money's worth in 1933, as you will with this set that collects the three Cooper-Schoedsack simian sensations (Kong and its less fearsome offspring), all animated by stop-motion ace Willis O'Brien. Among the invaluable extras: a splendid documentary on Cooper by Kevin Brownlow and Christopher Bird, and a making-of feature on the original Kong--still...
...just been too scary to include in the finished film, most notably something about giant spiders at the bottom of a ravine. There was actually a shot of the spiders, which indeed do not appear in the release version of "Kong." (Later I heard the story: producer-director Merian C. Cooper had cut the sequence after the first preview. It seemed to him that it had stopped the picture cold.) Like Welles' cut of "Ambersons" or the original release print of Cukor's "A Star Is Born," the spider sequence has passed into the Missing Cinema Hall of Fame...
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...
...lifelike feel O'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...
...interesting discussion of Merian C. Cooper: http://www.cineramaadventure.com/cooper.htm...