King Kong Read online

  Introduction copyright © 2018 by Jack Thorne

  Foreword copyright © 2005 by Mark Cotta Vaz

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published in trade paperback in slightly different form in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, in 2005.

  ISBN 9780812974935

  Ebook ISBN 9781984854865

  modernlibrary.com

  randomhousebooks.com

  Cover art and design by Olly Moss: licensed courtesy of SpotCo

  v5.3.2

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  FOREWORD

  “A CREATURE OF NIGHTMARE HORROR AND DRAMA”: MERIAN C. COOPER AND THE CREATION OF KING KONG

  Mark Cotta Vaz

  Sometime in 1932, in an undated letter written on letterhead of New York’s The Sun newspaper, writer Delos W. Lovelace reported to Merian C. Cooper on his progress in the novelization of King Kong, Cooper’s epic film then in production at RKO studios. Lovelace confessed he’d been at the typewriter for long nights but now “the end of the job” was in sight as the gigantic gorilla, brought from distant Skull Island for public exhibition in Manhattan, had just busted out of the theater for his rampage through the city. “I need merely to kill him off now, and what a killing I am going to give him,” Lovelace wrote. “The death scene will be played all the way through tonight.”

  King Kong, the novelization, was released late in 1932, ahead of the movie’s triumphant 1933 release. Cooper and his longtime partner, Ernest Schoedsack, shared producing and directorial credits but Cooper, then an important RKO production executive, held the production reins. In a 1966 letter to a fan he noted, “My say was final in every department of the picture….I was the Creator and Boss.” Movies, however, are a collaborative medium and Cooper would always give credit where credit was due, from Schoedsack to executive producer David O. Selznick, screenwriter Ruth Rose, and the “genius” of stop motion, animator Willis O’Brien. But King Kong had burst forth from Cooper’s fevered imagination; he had developed the story, and he personally persevered in the face of studio opposition, which had considered the production an epic folly.

  King Kong was an intensely personal project for both Cooper and Schoedsack. The story featured a sea voyage to an uncharted island ruled by Kong, the giant gorilla worshipped as a virtual god by natives, and from where Kong is captured and brought back to civilization. Kong’s captors might have been fearless explorers or two-fisted naturalists, but instead it was a motion picture expedition that sailed to Skull Island, led by an adventurous, and reckless, movie producer named Carl Denham. It was an approach inspired by Cooper and Schoedsack’s own true-life movie expeditions, and Denham was largely modeled after Cooper himself.

  Cooper and Schoedsack had met in the aftermath of World War I, during which Schoedsack had been a motion picture cameraman documenting the war for the U.S. Signal Corps, and Cooper a bomber pilot who had been shot down in flames and survived. By 1920 Cooper, still hungry for combat, was fighting the Bolsheviks in Poland as a leader of the Kościuszko Squadron, an all-American group of battle-hardened flyers he’d helped organize, and was again shot down and captured, enduring the hell of Soviet prison camps before making a great escape to the freedom of the Latvian border. He reunited with Schoedsack in 1922 on the voyage of the Wisdom II, a ship that sailed the seas in search of adventure, and during which Schoedsack’s movie camera recorded the massing of the warriors of Ras Tafari—de facto ruler of Abyssinia and reputed heir to the throne of King Solomon—whom the world would come to know as Haile Selassie. Excited by the potential of capturing exploration on film, the duo almost single-handedly produced a trilogy of adventure movies which were released by Paramount studio. The first was Grass, a pioneering 1925 documentary film that followed a nomadic trek through Persia. The partners next plunged into the jungles of Siam to film man-eating tigers and rampaging elephant herds for Chang, released in 1927. They returned to Africa for location shooting to augment their dramatic 1929 adaptation of the adventure novel The Four Feathers.

  After the release of The Four Feathers, Cooper left Hollywood for New York at the urging of John Hambleton, a fellow air warrior from the Great War who had an exhilarating vision of the future of commercial aviation. Cooper became a prominent executive in that nascent field, played the stock market and social scene, and rubbed shoulders with New York’s wealthy and powerful—it seemed the wandering war hero and adventurer was settling down at last.

  But Cooper was restless in Manhattan—the challenges of big business couldn’t dim his memories of war and journeys to wild, savage places. All the thrills and death-defying terrors he had known began taking shape in his imagination in the form of a gigantic gorilla who ruled a prehistoric land. From 1929 to 1930, in his apartment on East 73rd, he began writing outlines for the evolving story. His tale also tapped into a childhood fascination with gorillas which had begun with the book that inspired him to become an explorer: Paul Du Chaillu’s Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, which featured Du Chaillu’s account of a hunt for a wild gorilla and told of the native superstitions of gigantic, spirit-possessed gorillas with licentious intent said to prey on native women.

  Cooper shared his fantastic dream with fellow adventurer and filmmaker W. Douglas Burden, whose book documenting his own expedition in search of the fabled “dragons” of Komodo Island further stoked the creative fires. Cooper himself had seen gigantic lizard creatures on a remote island during the voyage of the Wisdom, but the species Varanus komodensis Burden encountered were particularly inspirational to Cooper. Burden, a trustee of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, had undertaken his 1926 expedition on behalf of the museum with a crew that included his young bride, Katharine. In addition to bringing back live specimens of the giant carnivorous lizards, an important goal had been to document the work on film. Thus, Burden’s adventure had key elements Cooper would incorporate into his story, notably the beautiful young girl who joins a movie expedition to a remote island ruled by primordial creatures. Burden’s live specimens, put on display at the Bronx Zoo, quickly died in captivity—“destroyed by civilization,” as Burden would put it—another major note in the narrative music Cooper was orchestrating. Even the title of the final film might have been inspired by Burden’s adventure, as crew member and big-game hunter F. J. Defosse fell under the island’s spell and proclaimed to Burden that one day he might return and be “King of Komodo.” At one point, Cooper even contemplated a battle between “his” giant gorilla and Burden’s giant lizard
s, and considered capturing and filming live gorillas and Komodo dragons, just as he and Schoedack had captured man-eating tigers and rounded up elephants to film for Chang.

  Hollywood, in the form of David O. Selznick, finally lured Cooper back in late 1931. By then John Hambleton had died in an airplane crash and, with the tragic loss of his visionary friend, the appeal of a career in commercial aviation had faded for Cooper. Selznick, who had first met Cooper when Paramount assigned him as associate producer on The Four Feathers, had left that studio and had come to New York in hopes that the well-connected Cooper might steer him to financial backers for an independent production company Selznick envisioned. Instead, Selznick would land the job of vice president in charge of production at RKO, whose profit margins had vanished, with the studio in the red, due to the Great Depression and expensive productions that turned out to be box-office failures. Cooper, along with Pandro Berman, was installed as Selznick’s executive assistant, but Cooper returned to Hollywood with a plan—to make his giant gorilla picture.

  One of Cooper’s tasks was to consider the pending pictures initiated by the old production regime and help Selznick decide which should continue. One was Creation, a fantasy-adventure featuring dinosaurs created through the stop-motion animation of Willis O’Brien and his crew. By early 1931, that production’s budget stood at $1,201,000, a financial threshold rarely crossed before. Cooper viewed the Creation animation test footage and hated it, but realized O’Brien’s animation could bring Kong to life and recommended to Selznick that O’Brien’s talents be used in creating his “Giant Terror Gorilla.” In an historic December 18, 1931, memo to Selznick, Cooper rung the curtain down on Creation but proposed that stop-motion animation be used instead to make his gorilla picture. Cooper’s memo remains an intriguing examination of the problems and possibilities of animation. Despite some technical drawbacks, he saw the medium as the best chance for getting Kong out of his imagination and onto the screen. “I suggest,” Cooper proposed in his memo to Selznick, “a prehistoric Giant Gorilla, fifty times as strong as man—a creature of nightmare horror and drama.” Cooper would always praise Selznick’s unflagging support of his dream project.

  Cooper had already prepared a treatment for his story, which he handed to Edgar Wallace, a famous and prolific English novelist Selznick had brought to the studio from London. Wallace had arrived on December 5, 1931, and by early January delivered the first screenplay to Cooper. By January 23 their joint contract for the story, which went by the working titles of “The Beast” and “Kong,” was notarized in Los Angeles. Cooper’s assistant, Zoe Porter, later recalled that both Cooper and Wallace had, early on, agreed on the final title of King Kong.

  In many ways, Wallace’s initial screenplay forms a parallel version of the King Kong story. Instead of the bigger-than-life Carl Denham of the final film, there’s a fifty-year-old eccentric named Danby G. Denham who dreams of finding something to wow audiences at such New York venues as Madison Square Garden. John Driscoll and Ann Darrow, the shy hero and virginal heroine of the final story, had an earlier incarnation as the worldly John Lanson and Shirley Redman. The place that would become known as Skull Island was called Vapour Island in Wallace’s script, for its volcanic steam. Also, there was no sacrificial ceremony at which the heroine was put in peril; the intruders upon Vapour Island included a gang of convicts; and Kong is subdued by gas bombs tossed by a virile Captain Englehorn, who would be remade in the final story as a sage veteran of the seas.

  Along the way, Cooper had provided Wallace with advice on plot twists and turns. One suggestion, which came in the form of an RKO interdepartment memo and which Wallace seems to have ignored, proposed that the hero, John Lanson, keep police from shooting the ape because of danger to the girl. “Please see if you consider it practical to work out theme that John attempts single handed rescue on top of Empire State Building if police will let off shooting for a minute,” Cooper’s memo concluded. “Then when he fails, air plane attack, or something along this line.” The ending Wallace wrote featured Kong climbing to the top of the Empire State Building with Shirley Redman during a raging storm, where he is electrocuted by a bolt of lightning.

  A month after Wallace delivered the first draft, the writer suddenly died of pneumonia. Cooper, who lived by a code of honor, had promised story co-billing to Wallace and felt duty bound to extend the credit. There was also more than largesse involved—Cooper and Selznick both felt Wallace’s famous name would add prestige and bring attention to the picture.

  Cooper, who had been a newspaperman before World War I and had authored numerous articles and books on his various adventures, including a diary book of the movie expedition of Grass, seems to have always wanted to likewise “document” the fantasy movie expedition to Skull Island of his alter ego, Carl Denham. The contract signed by both Cooper and Wallace had reserved for themselves publication rights for the work “in book and/or serial form,” as RKO’s Gordon Youngman advised Cooper in a February 13, 1932, memo. Youngman noted that with Wallace’s death, Cooper had the right to prepare a novelization but suggested the credit be “By Merian C. Cooper Based upon (or transcribed from or adapted from) original scenario by EDGAR WALLACE.”

  It was a sticky issue, sharing story credit, since Cooper was disappointed with Wallace’s work. In a July 20, 1932, memo to Selznick headed “Authorship of Kong,” Cooper opened: “The present script of KONG, as far as I can remember, hasn’t one single idea suggested by Edgar Wallace. If there are any, they are of the slightest.” Cooper proposed the studio should market a novelization as “based on a story by Edgar Wallace and Merian C. Cooper, if you want to use Wallace’s name. I don’t think it fair to say this is based on a story by Wallace alone, when he did not write it, though I recognize the value of his name, and want to use it.”

  Meanwhile, under Cooper’s guidance, development of the King Kong screenplay continued in the hands of screenwriter James Creelman, who was also busy with the 1932 Cooper-Schoedsack RKO production The Most Dangerous Game. It was during this stage of story development that Cooper came up with the inspiration that Kong be a godlike figure to the natives, who perform rituals and human sacrifices to appease him, with fair-haired Ann Darrow herself becoming a golden offering. The fantastical elements—an expedition to a lost island of prehistoric creatures and what Creelman called the “human sacrifice angle”—proved too much for the harried screenwriter. But Creelman did produce the first real script.

  Cooper had the pick of RKO’s stable of in-house writers, but his selection to bring the screenplay to completion was a surprise—Ruth Rose, wife of Ernest Schoedsack. Rose had only dabbled in writing and had never written a screenplay, but she was a naturalist and adventurer who had met her future husband during an expedition to the Galápagos Islands, for which she had served as naturalist and Schoedsack as cameraman. Cooper instructed Rose to give Carl Denham’s adventure the flavor of a real Cooper-Schoedsack expedition. Rose not only brought an authentic quality to the fantastical tale—echoes of true-life adventure that many point to as one of the key elements of the film’s enduring appeal—but the dialogue sparkled and kept the story moving. A grateful Cooper always hailed Rose’s contribution, noting that ninety percent of the final dialogue was hers.

  The King Kong novelization would be based upon the final screenplay credited to James Creelman and Ruth Rose. Cooper was too busy to write the novelization himself—in addition to leading the creative charge on Kong, he had to supervise numerous other studio projects—so he assigned it to Delos Lovelace. The two had met in 1916, when both were young newspapermen on The Minneapolis Daily News, and had remained lifelong friends—Cooper was even godfather to Lovelace’s daughter.

  There had been discussions within the studio that the novelization would “herald” the film, but there were times when Cooper and Selznick weighed the wisdom of that approach. Cooper’s great fear throughout 1932 was that a rival studio might learn of their produc
tion and rush to theaters a gorilla picture featuring a man in a gorilla suit, the typical “gag” Cooper was scrupulously avoiding by investing in Willis O’Brien’s laborious, time-consuming stop-motion animation. But even with these concerns, there was interest in letting Kong rampage through mass media—in August of 1932, Selznick contacted Famous Artists Syndicate to pitch the notion of a King Kong comic strip.

  The proposed comic strip didn’t happen, but the novelization did. King Kong was published by Grosset & Dunlap with the wordy byline “conceived by Edgar Wallace and Merian C. Cooper, screen play by James A. Creelman and Ruth Rose, novelized from the Radio Picture by Delos W. Lovelace.”

  RKO registered its copyright on the King Kong film on February 24, 1933. In the final film, when Kong is shot off the Empire State Building, the camera shows a glimpse of one of the fighter planes—it’s Cooper at the controls and Schoedsack in the rear cockpit, a cameo appearance that made good on Cooper’s famous declaration, “We should kill the sonofabitch ourselves.” But, in truth, Cooper and his primal creation were kindred spirits. Neither had much use for civilization, each always longed for the wilds.

  The ensuing theatrical release was a huge hit and the legend of King Kong would grow with the theatrical rereleases, which began in 1938.

  Cooper would go on to continued success as a filmmaker, including pushing the film industry to color filmmaking and briefly heading production at RKO when Selznick moved on to MGM. After World War II, during which Cooper’s exploits included helping to open aerial supply and transport over the “Hump” of the Himalayas and being chief of staff to Flying Tigers leader General Claire Chennault in China, Cooper produced many of director John Ford’s most famous films and championed the widescreen breakthrough of Cinerama.