Bring 'Em Back Alive: Notes On The Origins of King Kong
And yet, Kong is one of the most important – I would say perhaps among the top three ever created – pieces of Lost World media ever created (the others being … ohhh, let’s say King Solomon’s Mines, and Conan Doyle’s Lost World). And so I must wade in.
Welcome back to the Explorer’s Club. It’s been a while. Find yourself a spot by the bar, grab a gin perhaps. I’ll be having a drop of Tullamore Dew to get through this one.
My excuse for tackling Kong in this post is that I have acquired The Making of King Kong by George E Turner and Orville Goldner. This 1975 tome was, for many years, the last word in Kong history – very few people having attempted to write a proper history of the film before this. Its publication was probably prompted by the resurgence of interest in Kong in the mid 70s due to the tussle over the film’s rights, and the planned competing versions of the remake, with Universal, Paramount, and my man Dino De Laurentiis all feuding over who was legally able to craft their own new Kong. Though long supplanted by more recent books with more up-to-date info, I thought I would see what I could learn from The Making Of King Kong. Being a rather large, chunky book, I read this one around the Club over Christmas rather than anywhere more exotic. A trip through this book - surely the first time that much of this Kong history and images was made available for casual fans - should allow us to pursue some of the elements which combined to create the idea of King Kong.
Author George E Turner was a special effects artist, and wrote quite a few books on genre film. He could be considered one of the early historians of horror movies and other genre films, and his career lasted long enough to be doing storyboards for Friends in the 90s. His co-author Goldner actually worked on King Kong, as part of the team making miniatures such as the trains and buildings Kong tears up during his visit to New York.
Funny Business: Literal Interpretations
The book opens with a rundown of the various interpretations commentators have put on King Kong: that the film is a metaphor for slavery, or a parable about the Great Depression, or a Freudian nightmare played out by Carl Denham’s subconscious. I’ve had my own stab at tackling these ideas in podcast form once upon a time. But our current authors have no truck with any of these – and they’re probably right. They describe Kong’s creators – directors/producers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack – as bluff, straightforward men who say what they mean, and mean what they say – and unlikely chaps to intend any subtext in an adventure movie such as Kong.
Cooper and Schoedsack were adventurers and filmmakers whose motto was ‘keep it distant, difficult, and dangerous.’ The primary elements of Kong – a team that travels to a faraway, unknown land, searching for marvels, intending to shoot a movie and only half certain about exactly what they’re going to shoot until they get there – is pretty much a dead ringer for the duo’s previous movie-making adventures. While making Grass and Chang, they travelled across the mountains and plains of Iran with nomadic tribes, and tangled with charging elephants and tigers in Thailand. The book uses some decent lost world-type language to describe the latter trip, which I appreciated:
Here, separated from the rest of the country by mountains, jungles and sixty-seven river crossings, he found a tropical forest that no white hunter had ever penetrated. From the only white inhabitants, a Presbyterian missionary and his assistants, he learned that nearly four hundred area villagers had been killed by tigers and leopards during the preceding five years.
Much of Carl Denham’s character in Kong is an amalgam of Cooper and Schoedsach. Denham mentions that he’s taken to filming dangerous animals himself, as he can’t be sure of the cameraman not running away. He grumbles that the critics pan his movies because they don’t have any female characters or any love element. These are all things which were taken directly from happenings in C&S’s career. And they were put into the script by someone who knew them both well: Ernest Schoedsack’s wife, broadway actress (and adventurer in her own right) Ruth Rose.
Cooper said, years later, that he wanted Kong to be no more than ‘the best damn adventure picture’ anyone had ever made. Something to amuse the audience, and to amuse himself. An inveterate storyteller and self-promoter, Cooper said a lot of things in interviews over the years which have muddied the waters when it comes to Kong history. But I see no reason to doubt his memory here. Carl Denham’s adventures on Skull Island are but a natural (if fantastical) extension of Cooper’s own life. Kong was his first foray into fantasy and the true artifice of cinema; his first time making a film on soundstages instead of out in the wild. And while it’s fun and valid to hunt for subtext in Kong in a kind of 'leaving certificate English' way (it’s an extremely rich text, and some of the interpretations are shockingly well-supported by the actions of the movie), the fact is that neither Cooper nor Schodsack meant any of them. A least, not consciously…
With that said, something that came into my mind during my recent Christmas rewatch was whether Cooper intended Denham to be a villain or a hero. I’d always assumed the latter, as Denham is such an obvious standin for Cooper himself. And Cooper lived in an era where a man who travels to faraway countries to shoot or capture exotic animals was, generally, to be admired. I didn’t think he’d have thought twice about it, really. This has, however, always played against the fact that we are obviously supposed to have some sympathy for Kong. This may have come more from animator Willis O’Brien than from Cooper. O’Brien has always been famous for giving his creations real characters. It’s what elevates Kong about most movie monsters. And behind the scenes, Cooper and O’Brien sometimes clashed over whether Kong was to be a terrible monster or a more sympathetic, human-like characters.
A Rose By Any Other Name
I learned quite a bit about Ruth Rose from this book. Coming from a theatre family, her mentor growing up was William Gillette, who was the stage’s most famous Sherlock Holmes. Before the advent of film, Gillette was one of the most important sources for how the public thought of Holmes, how we dressed, what his mannerisms were like. I’d say, beyond Conan Doyle himself, Gillette and artist Strand magazine Sidney Paget probably did the most to shape the Holmes of the public imagination (both popularising the now-stereotypical deerstalker and pipe image).
From The Making of King Kong
During a writers’ strike in 1919, Rose took an astonishing detour into science and adventure, taking off with the New York Zoological Society on a research trip to British Guiana. This must have been an extraordinary move, especially for a woman at that time, and one wonders what kind of prejudice she must have come up against. Regardless, she became a valued member of the expedition, braving snakes, spiders, earthquakes, and tropical storms. When she later came to write of such an expedition in King Kong, she was drawing on personal experience, right down to the dialogue from a ship full of salty characters.
Primal Urges
Cooper gave many versions of how he came up with the basic concept for King Kong over the years. The book which started my obsession with Kong, Willis O’Brien and stop-motion animation as a young fellow, Hot-Blooded Dinosaur Movies by James Van Hise, states that Cooper and Schoedsack had an argument about whether man or nature was stronger. They came up with a giant ape to represent nature, and an aeroplane to represent the power and ingenuity of man. Cooper looked out his New York office window at the then-newly-completed Empire State Building, and there it was: the climax of the tale.
Anyone else have this?
I suppose we’ll never know how it really shook out. But there are some things we do know.
Firstly: as a nipper, Cooper grew up reading about Africa, and about gorillas. Specifically, he read Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa by Paul Du Chaillu. During the 1850s, Du Chaillu sighted gorillas (the first white man to do so and properly document them) and sent dead specimens to the Natural History Museum in London.
And having here bestowed the women – who have a lively fear of the terrible gorilla, in consequence of various stories current among the tribes, of women having been carried off into the woods by the fierce animal –
Perhaps this image stuck with him. In coming up with Kong, Cooper would also recall working on the film The Four Feathers (based on the book by A.E.W. Mason, who also wrote the occult thriller The Prisoner In The Opal) in east Africa, and his experiences with baboons there.
The Four Feathers is set during the 1880s Sudan war.
Wouldn't mind having this edition, TBH.
Dragon’s Den
What is better documented, however, is the inspiration Cooper took from explorer and naturalist W. Douglas Burden. What I didn’t know, before reading The Making of King Kong, was that the two were actually friends, and wrote to one another for years. Burden was sent by the American Museum of Natural History to the Lesser Sunda Islands of Malaysia, where he visited the island of Komodo, home of the fabled Komodo dragons.
Komodo itself was something of a story-book ‘lost world,’ a weird, volcanic jungle-land inhabited by only a handful of Malay convicts exiled there by the Rajah of Sumbawa. The Komodo lizards were first reported in 1912 by P. A. Ouwens, a Dutch scientist from Java, who followed native legends of living dragons to their source. Burden was the first to bring the great reptiles to the New World … two dragons were brought back alive and exhibited at the Bronx Zoo but they languished and died in a short time.
‘Komodo was relatively unexplored, only a few white men having landed there,’ Burden wrote in the National Geographic magazine. ‘With its fantastic skyline, its sentinel palms, its volcanic chimneys bared to the stars, it was a fitting abode for the great saurians we had come to seek.’
On a break from making movies, Cooper took a role on the boards of several airlines, including Pan-Am. Bored, he began dreaming of a movie story – one involving Burden’s great dragons. A dragon that would fight an ape. Perhaps he was thinking of his days in east Africa, filming The Four Feathers (based on the book written by A.E.W. Mason, who also wrote the occult novel The Prisoner In The Opal).
Skull Island Emerges From The Fog
Some while back, I recorded a podcast on Son Of Kong, during which I spent far too long wondering why the inhabitants of Skull Island (it’s never referred to as this in the original 1933 movie, as happens) look like black people instead of South East-Asian people, especially as Cooper and Schoedsack knew that part of the world quite well, and were generally happy to add real-life anthropological notes into their work. A listener kindly suggested that I consider whether Skull Islanders were in fact more likely to represent peoples from Papua New Guinea, whom they resemble slightly better. The Making of King Kong provides a little more background, again from W. Douglas Burden:
Burden’s description of the nearby island of Wetar also suggests an ideal setting for mystery and the discovery of prehistoric survivals:
Komodo itself was something of a story-book ‘lost world,’ a weird, volcanic jungle-land inhabited by only a handful of Malay convicts exiled there by the Rajah of Sumbawa. The Komodo lizards were first reported in 1912 by P. A. Ouwens, a Dutch scientist from Java, who followed native legends of living dragons to their source. Burden was the first to bring the great reptiles to the New World … two dragons were brought back alive and exhibited at the Bronx Zoo but they languished and died in a short time.
‘Komodo was relatively unexplored, only a few white men having landed there,’ Burden wrote in the National Geographic magazine. ‘With its fantastic skyline, its sentinel palms, its volcanic chimneys bared to the stars, it was a fitting abode for the great saurians we had come to seek.’
Burden also used some rather dated language to refer to this group of people, as you might probably guess.
The Great Animator
The final element of what would become King Kong comes from the great Willis O'Brien, a hard-drinking craftsman who was one of the pioneers of what we now call stop-motion animation. He's a man who needs no introduction to monster movie fans. Years before he met Cooper and Shoedsack, he had been making stop-motion animated shorts featuring dinosaurs, cavemen, and other prehistoric critters. At the time Cooper was sent to RKO to ruthlessly cut spending and shut down projects that looked unprofitable, O'Brien and his team had already spent an entire year (and an ungodly amount of money) on a lost-world type film called Creation. They had already built a slew of miniature creatures to animate, they had miniature jungle sets, and they had worked out technical tricks to pull off sophisticated and new techniques to create incredible fantasy scenes. Cooper shut them down, thinking the plot was boring and the project too expensive. But he saw, in O'Brien and his technique, a possible way to realise his nascent giant gorilla film.
The rest is movie history.
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