Around 1920 O'Brien's techniques were employed again for Herbert M. Dawley's The Ghost of Slumber Mountain. It was a sixteen minute short film (cut down from 45 minutes because even then the producer was worried about the audience's short attention span) about a couple of hikers who stumble upon and old cabin. 

The ghost of the cabin's owner, a hermit named Mad Dick (O'Brien), appears and instructs them to go to a nearby cliff and look through his telescope. They do and spy several dinosaurs including a brontosaurus diving into a lake and a rutting battle between two triceratops. An allosaurus stomps on scene and kills one of the triceratops but then spots the observers and gives chase. Luckily, for the hikers, it was all a dream and a tall tale a grandfather concocted for his grandchildren. (Eventually the excised scenes would appear in the sequel Along the Moonbeam Trail.)

The 1925 silent film adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World was O'Brien's next showcase. It's the tale of an English expedition up the Amazon that discovers a high plateau where all sorts of pre-historic creatures still exist. The expedition brings a pterodactyl and a brontosaur back to England where the brontosaur promptly breaks loose and runs amok. After a lot of property damage the beast finally falls into the Thames River and swims for home. (Is the brontosaur rampage the inspiration for Cooper and Shoedsack's story? Who knows for sure.)

A scene from the 1925 version of The Lost World.

O'Brien was then commissioned to work his magic for RKO Production #601, aka Creation. It had a similar story to The Lost World. A group of sailors land their submarine on an uncharted tropical island populated by dinosaurs. Mayhem ensues. (The plot sounds eerily similar to The Land that Time Forgot.)

It was this sequence that Cooper saw that fateful day. By this time O'Brien had mastered the art of rear projection and compositing two separate pieces of film together into one. This allowed for more interaction between the protagonists and O'Brien's creatures and the results were stunning. You have to remember; This is the 1930's and no one had ever seen anything like this before. Cooper realized that O'Brien's technique was just what he needed to pull his Kong project off and decided to incorporate the dinosaurs into his movie as well.

First, Cooper needed to get his script together. He collaborated via correspondence with famed mystery and adventure writer Edgar Wallace. Wallace would take Cooper's scenarios and translate them into script form. 

Drawing inspiration form the pulp adventure books and films of the time the story of King Kong is a dark, exotic and sordid affair and very, very gruesome. (The draconian Hayes Code wasn't in full effect yet.) Unfortunately, Wallace died before the script was completed. Cooper turned it over to James Creelman to finish it but wasn't completely satisfied with it. The final script was penned by (or better yet pieced together by) Ruth Rose, Shoedsack's wife. 

So Cooper had his script but money was still tight at RKO and they had to get Selznick and the board's approval before green-lighting the film. Cooper and Shoedsack decided that the best way to convince them that the film was feasible and a guaranteed hit was to provide a demo reel of O'Brien's work for the sales pitch. 

Delgado created the Kong model and the (twenty? forty?) fifty-foot ape was a mere 18-inches tall metal and rubber armature covered in rabbit fur. O'Brien went to work and completed a sequence of Kong fighting the allosaurus (one of the many dinosaurs meant for Creation) and a scene of Kong picking sailors off the log. Cooper showed the film to RKOs brass and the rest, as they say, is history.

Well, almost history, if they could pull it off.

Cooper promised leading lady Fay Wray that she would be playing with the tallest, darkest leading man in movie history. The cast was rounded out with RKO stock players Robert Armstrong and Bruce Cabot. The character of ship's cook was changed from the script. It originally called for a salty old sea dog but was changed to an oriental, I assume, for some bad (and slightly distasteful) comedy relief.

To save money the film would share a jungle set with another Cooper production, The Most Dangerous Game. Cooper and Rose also changed the script a bit to match some of the miniature set-pieces already built for Creation including the chasm spanned by the log that's a centerpiece in the finished film.

Along with the miniature work Kong also required a life-size mock-up of his head for extreme close-ups, an arm and hand that had to grab and hold Fay Wray and a foot to squash some natives. O'Brien oversaw the production of these giant props as well. The hand and foot hold up okay. The giant head?

Well...

Kong's roar was created by mixing the roars of a lion and tiger then played backwards. Veteran composer Max Steiner provided Kong's memorable score.

The films biggest set piece was the giant wall and gate on Skull Island. The scene also required a ton of extras to play the natives. The impressive set was destined to be burned down in another Selznick production - Gone With the Wind. (That's what's burning behind Rhett and Scarlett as they escape Atlanta.)

I haven't timed it myself but it's been said that only about 16-17 minutes of King Kong's running time actually showcases O'Brien's stop-motion creatures. Still the meticulous process of animating the models was painstakingly slow and the film took almost a year to complete. Cooper managed to kick his drinking habit because he swore he wouldn't have a drink until the film was completed and didn't for fear of jinxing his project

Despite all the cuts and recycling the production's budget blossomed to an eye-popping $650000. (Again, remember, this is 1932 and the depression was on.) One of the biggest production snags was deciding which building Kong would climb for the climax: The Empire State Building or The Chrysler Building. The Empire State Building was the tallest so it got the nod.

The film opened in 1933. It was a smash hit and a marketing bonanza that saved RKO from bankruptcy. More importantly, though, a national phenomenon was born. Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy and even the Wolfman, these were all European monsters. Kong might have been captured on a remote island but he was the first bonafide American monster.

Audiences were captivated by what they saw on screen. Were the dinosaurs real? Where did they find the giant ape to film? Controversy brewed as national publications and newspapers argued and conjectured as to how the film was made. Some claimed the studio used giant robots while others said it was all done with real apes and trick photography. An actor named Ken Roady even claimed be Kong. He said he got paid $150 a week to wear a monkey suit and they animated Wray into his hand.

Regardless, the public clamored for more so Cooper, O'Brien, Shoedsack and Rose would all collaborate again immediately on the rushed sequel Son of Kong. Sure it pales when compared to his daddy's picture but I still find it enjoyable. 

Cooper went on to produce more exotic adventures yarns for RKO most notably SHE. He left RKO with Selznick and after serving another stint in the Air Corps during World War II formed Argosy Productions with John Ford and together made several John Wayne classics including Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Quiet Man and The Searchers.

Success after Kong was harder to come by for O'Brien. He had ideas for other fantastic films including Gwangi; the tale of a band of ranch hands who find a tyrannosaurus in the Grand Canyon. After a wild rodeo roping sequence they capture and display the beast in a wild west show. (Yeah, it's sounding familiar to me too.) The climax was to feature the dinosaur battling escaped lions and terrorizing the local town until it's pushed over a cliff by a truck. RKO planned to film it around 1942 but it never got made for budgetary reasons.

Cooper and O'Brien teamed up again in 1949 for another, not quite as big, ape on the loose film Mighty Joe Young. Shoedsack was set to direct it and Rose provided the script incorporating some of O'Brien's ideas including the lion attack. When production began O'Brien also had an apprentice on board to help with the animation. Who was this apprentice? It was Ray Harryhausen. The picture won O'Brien an Academy Award for special effects. 

After Mighty Joe Young's success, O'Brien tried to get Gwangi filmed again. He collaborated with Richard Landau on a script called The Valley of the Mists but it to was deemed too expensive to shoot and was scrapped. Later Harryhausen would find this script that eventually became The Valley of Gwangi. The closest O'Brien ever got to making Gwangi himself was The Beast of Hollow Mountain where perceived cattle rustlers turns out to be a tyrannosaurus feeding on the local herds. (Unfortunately the monster doesn't appear until the very end after a long and plodding build up.)

The Beast of Hollow Mountain.

When monster movies had a resurgence in the '50s O'Brien was in demand again. He served as technical supervisor on The Black Scorpion and despite the embarrassing sequence where the producers saved money by not compositing the creature into one extended sequence the final battle in the stadium is quite spectacular.

O'Brien also had an idea where King Kong would battle the Frankenstein monster. He had several production sketches and even had a tentative agreement from a Japanese picture company to film it but again the deal fell through. Needless to say O'Brien was a little miffed when similar monsters from his sketches starting battling Godzilla and showing up in films like Frankenstein Conquers the World and War of the Gargantuas.

O'Brien's career basically came full circle in 1959 with The Giant Behemoth: the story of a radioactive dinosaur that surfaces in London and runs amok. I think the film is really underrated and an overlooked gem of the genre. I'll argue with anybody that it's a better film than Harryhausen's The Beast form 20000 Fathoms. (Script-wise folks, calm down.)

Cooper's last project was This Is Cinerama (and sure enough it was a co-production with his now ailing and nearly blind friend Shoedsack) and he eventually passed away in 1972. O'Brien's last film work was animating the miniature people at the climax of It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. He passed away shortly after in 1962. Both men made films before and after Kong. Some of them were probably better films but none have had a bigger impact or been imbedded into the public consciousness the way this film did. (With the only possible exception being The Searchers, a truly great film, but I'll bet a lot more people know who King Kong is as opposed to Ethan Edwards.)

Often imitated but seldom bettered Kong does deserve its place as a pop culture icon. Cooper shared co-producing and co-directing credits with his friend Shoedsack on King Kong. He also shared script credits with Wallace, Creelman and Rose but, make no mistake, Kong was really his baby but it was O'Brien and his technicians that brought his baby to life for all the world to enjoy. So, on behalf of the entire world, I would like to say, "Thank you, gentlemen."

- - - -

Our Kong Tribute Continues!  The History The Film Deleted Scenes Bibliography Knock-Offs Kong Index