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Born in Greenwich, he started life selling newspapers in Ludgate Circus in central London, but relocated to South Africa, where he became a war correspondent so adept at finding scoops that Lord Kitchener banned him from attending press conferences out of pique. It was probably also Burden who told him the Malay word for gorilla: kong.Įnter Edgar Wallace, the British writer and plot-factory. The latter was set in Malaya and it was about this time that Cooper met W Douglas Burden, an explorer, who regaled him with the tale of his 1926 trip to Malaysia to capture the giant "dragon" lizards of Komodo.
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As David Thomson notes in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film, "The standard photograph of Schoedsack might have been submitted for casting Allan Quatermain : a lean-faced man with a long jaw and direct gaze, open-necked shirt, pipe in mouth and pith helmet on head." When he and Cooper graduated to making feature films, they were precisely the all-action, manly-heroics-in-tropical-climate stuff the Denham character supposedly makes: The Four Feathers, set in Sudan, and The Most Dangerous Game. When that worked out they were contracted to make Grass (in 1926) about obscure tribes in Iran, then Chang (1927), set in Thailand, then Rango (1931), set in Sumatra. They were hired by Paramount and sent to Abyssinia to film Haile Selassie. Both men were keen on travel, adventure and authenticity, and decided to make documentaries together. The idea of an imprisoned monster on display in the city was given topical force by the presence, in Barnum & Bailey's Circus, of "the largest ape in captivity", christened Gargantua.ĭuring the war he'd filmed battle scenes, but had, like Cooper, drifted into journalism. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, in which the intrepid Victorian explorer Professor Challenger discovers prehistoric monsters still living in the South American jungle and brings a dinosaur back to London, was filmed (silently) in 1925 it featured stop-animation effects by the great Willis O'Brien, who was to animate King Kong. The dangerous sea voyage in Dracula, the flaming torches in the night at the end of Frankenstein - you see echoes of them in the passage of the trusty ship Venture as she conveys the film crew to Skull Island, and in the flaming brands of the natives as they wait for Kong's arrival. Tod Browning's Dracula and James Whale's Frankenstein were both released in 1931, setting a template for the iconic Monster who terrorises innocent humans, especially young women. For reasons possibly connected to the Depression, the early 1930s were the cradle of the classic horror movie.
ORIGINAL KING KONG MOVIE
It represents the coming together of several elements - not just people in the movie business, but themes, straws in the Zeitgeist wind.