It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Remake Pt. 2

It all started in the mind of a guy named Merian C. Cooper. By all accounts, Merian C. Cooper was a larger than life dude. Born in Florida in 1893, he joined the National Guard and pursued Pancho Villa across Mexico, trained as a pilot and flew with the U.S. Army Air Service in France during World War I, then flew against the Soviets in the Polish Air Force. It was then, during the Polish-Soviet Civil War, that he was shot down and taken prisoner. To pass the time in a Soviet POW camp, he wrote his autobiography, entitled Things Men Die For. Once he finished writing, he escaped over the border to Latvia. Okey doke!

He ended up in New York writing for The New York Times and eventually began working with a film director named Ernest Schoedsack. The two men worked on a documentary called Grass that told the story of a tribe in Persia making a long, dangerous migration with their cattle in search of grazing pastures. Cooper and Schoedsack then worked on another documentary called Chang, about a farmer in Thailand and his daily struggle to survive.

Filming documentary style in the jungle gave Cooper an idea. He wanted to make a move wherein a gorilla fights a Komodo dragon. Never mind that gorillas don’t actually fight Komodo dragons, it was the late 1920's and gorillas were still rare and mysterious creatures. Most people had yet to even see one.

Cooper had a production deal at RKO Pictures. He worked directly under the studio's president, David O’Selznick. O'Selznick had promised Cooper he could produce his own pictures. Immediately, Cooper went to work on a suspense thriller called The Most Dangerous Game., about a big game hunter who strands a group of people on a remote island so he can hunt them for sport. Ernest Schoedsack once again directed, working with actors Joel McCrea, Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong and Noble Johnson on a massive jungle set erected on an RKO sound stage.

With the Most Dangerous Game in production, Cooper turned it to his advantage to make his gorilla film, which had by now been transformed into the story we now recognize as King Kong.

In a cost-cutting maneuver, Kong would film on the sets already built for The Most Dangerous Game, along with large sections of that film’s cast and crew, including Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Noble Johnson and director Ernest Schoedsack. Additionally, special effects technician Willis O’Brien would, along with creature designer Marcel Delgado, use stop motion animation to populate the film’s Skull Island with not only a giant gorilla, but also a host of prehistoric sparring partners.

And then there’s the thing nobody wants to talk about. The film that had a not- dissimilar concept, and was released two years previously by the same studio, RKO. In 2006, Andrew Erish of The Los Angeles Times covered the film in an extended piece titled The Illegitimate Dad Of Kong. Even a casual glance at the facts make this claim hard to dispute. The film was called Ingagi, which stems from the Belgian Congo's Kinyarwandan language. It means “gorilla.”

The film, made in 1930 by director William S Campbell ,is a faux documentary about an expedition into the Belgian Congo that finds a pygmy tribe who sacrifice their women to a nearby race of giant gorillas. The reason for the sacrifice is somewhat unsavory, and implied pretty strongly in the poster.

This was before the production code, and the “gorilla sex movie” as it was called, cleaned up. According to the LA Times, the film broke box office records in every theater in which it played.

With the memory pf Ingagi's profits still fresh in their mind, the RKO board gave King Kong a green light despite serious reservations. British adventure writer Edgar Wallace was hired to write a screenplay and a novel (this is important and will come in handy later when we discuss the blizzard of lawsuits relating to the film’s inevitable remake). Wallace died after completing the first draft and several different writers were brought in to work with Cooper to complete the script.

King Kong was released on March 2, 1933 and was an immediate critical and box office smash. Over time, King Kong’s influence only grew. The American Film Institute cited it as one of the 50 best American Films and has been selected for restoration in the National Film Registry. It is, in short, a classic.

So who? Who would have the audacity to make it again? Who would look at this magical, mysterious, universally loved and respected film and think, “Yeah. We can do it better.”

Dino DeLaurentis, that’s who.

Why? He has hi$ rea$on$.

Ingagi. Seeing is believing.