And Cooper had several conversations with Wallace about the project. When it came time to do a screenplay, when he was at RKO, Selznick asked him to please use Edgar Wallace, who was a very famous British mystery writer, who was under contract to the studio. I know from my conversations with Cooper and checking the through the RKO files that the outline of the film was done by Cooper. Wallace, which has always raised a lot of controversy amongst people who studied the film. The credits say from an idea by Merian C. The following is from the audio commentary by Ronald Haver on the Crierion LaserDisc:The idea for Kong was of course Cooper's. But it was something that stayed with him all of his life and did profoundly influence King Kong. He was never sure, as he said to me, whether or not he had seen a drawing in the book or whether the description itself was just so vivid that he had a mental picture of an ape carrying off a woman into the jungle. And, of course, as you know, when you're young, certain things do stick in your mind. Now he was, Cooper was six when he read this and he remarked to me that the thing that fascinated him was the description of the tribes of giant apes that lived somewhere in Africa and sometimes raided the native villages and carried off screaming native women into the jungle. Peter Jackson's remake depicted Kong as 25 feet tall, as does the Universal Studios ride "King Kong 360 3D," although its predecessor, "King Kong Encounter," featured a 30 foot animatronic.įrom the Criterion LaserDisc audio commentary by Ronald Haver:This stemmed from something that happened to him, when he was about six years old: an uncle gave him a book called Adventures and Explorations in Equatorial Africa by Paul Du Chaillu, who was one of the first people to ever explore the dark continent, as it was known to him. In that film's sequel, King Kong Lives, he rose to about 60 feet. In the 1976 remake a character estimates him to be 50 feet tall, but the actual life-size Kong animatronic used for the film stood exactly 40 feet and the Kong suit was usually made to look that height compared to the miniature sets. Godzilla so that he'd be large enough to properly battle the 164 foot Godzilla, and he was reduced to about 66 feet for King Kong Escapes, but neither of these films take place within the same continuity as each other or the original. Kong's size in later movies is also not consistent. Meanwhile, the full-sized Kong hand, foot, and head were constructed for a 40-foot monster's stature. However, due to the inconsistent and imprecise nature of composite shots (shots containing stop-motion and live action at once), the models vary greatly in size and regularly appear both larger and smaller than the 18-to-24-foot range. A third model, built to appear 24 feet tall, was built to be used in the New York scenes so Kong would appear more imposing next to the cars and trains. Two stop-motion models were used for the scenes of Kong on the island, and both of these were built to appear 18 feet tall compared to the miniature sets. RKO officially listed him as being 50 feet tall in the film's publicity materials, but he never appears quite that large in the film itself. Kong's size changes throughout the movie.
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