He was not a fan of New York. Anti-social though he might have been, after his unveiling in 1933, Kong quickly took his place as moviedom`s archetypal great ape. And, though it seems unlikely given how many scary monsters we`ve seen since, Kong Mark I produced plenty of sleepless nights for plenty of impressionable viewers.
One of them is Ray Morton, a writer and script consultant who admits to a happy lifelong obsession with Kong, introduced to the pleasures of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack`s creation as a child. "It was simultaneously the strangest, scariest, most exciting, and most touching thing I had seen in my young life, and I was completely bewitched by it," he writes in 'King Kong: The History of a Movie Icon, From Fay Wray to Peter Jackson.
' "I remain so to this day." To good effect, for Morton`s 'King Kong' is a solid contribution to the everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know genre. Its chief shortcoming is that it already needs revision, given Jackson`s brand-new, altogether excellent take on the mega-monkey.
Morton has plenty to say about the Jackson version, though, including its rather remarkable history. First, the original story. Cooper and Schoedsack, having made prize-winning nature documentaries, brought their storytelling skills to bear on a new kind of movie, one that would mix documentary techniques with drama, incorporating a sort of film within a film to boot.
Their Kong, which Cooper originally called 'Giant Terror Gorilla,' was a wonder of technology, using stop-motion photography pioneered by special effects wizard Willis O`Brien. Those afraid of the resulting Kong might be a touch chagrined to learn that the 18-foot-tall ape was in truth a model only 18 inches tall, but what a model he was. "Merian Cooper may have created Kong," writes Morton, "but Marcel Delgado is the man who actually made him.
" Delgado concocted an articulated aluminum skeleton that could be moved into any number of realistic forms. He created other Kongs as well, including a slightly taller double for use in the New York scenes. Each looked quite different from the other, but few filmgoers complained about continuity problems.
'King Kong,' starring Wray, was a hit, and it yielded a modest franchise. Morton gives a nearly scene-by-scene breakdown of the original, then does the same for 'Son of Kong' (1933) and two 1960s Japanese revivals, one of them the inestimably strange 'King Kong Vs. Godzilla.
' (It was beast killed the beast.) Morton grants similarly extensive treatment to Dino De Laurentiis` 1976 'King Kong,' made after considerable legal wrangling with Universal, the heirs of Republic, the original studio. The later film is scarcely mentioned in the same breath as the original, though Jessica Lange, Jeff Bridges and Charles Grodin did good work - and though, in the spirit of bigger is better, Kong grew to 42 feet.
Critics of the time held that, even supersized, he wasn`t scary. But Kong Mark II, which Morton holds in obvious affection, had at least one unintended effect: Though in glacial time, it inspired Universal to come up with a Kong of its own, the one in the theaters now, the one Jackson was first signed on to do 10 years ago. That`s an epic story all its own, and Morton tells it well.
His affectionate look at Kongs past and present is a pleasure for buffs and film historians alike. He was not a fan of New York.
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