Around 1920, O'Brien's techniques were employed again for Herbert M. Dawley's The Ghost of Slumber Mountain, a sixteen-minute short film (-- cut down from 45 minutes because even way back then the producer was worried about the audience's short attention span --) about a couple of hikers who stumble upon an old, haunted cabin. When 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 spy several dinosaurs, including a brontosaurus, diving into a lake and a rutting battle between two triceratops; then an allosaurous stomps on scene and kills one of the triceratops and spots the observers. The monster gives chase, but luckily, for the hikers, it was all a dream inspired by a tall-tale a grandfather concocted for his grandchildren. (Eventually the excised scenes would appear in the sequel Along the Moonbeam Trail.)

An adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World was O'Brien's next showcase. The silent film from 1925 featured the tale of an English expedition up the Amazon that discovers a high plateau where all sorts of pre-historic creatures still exist. When the expedition brings a pterodactyl and a brontosaur back to England, 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.)

O'Brien was then commissioned to work his magic for RKO Production #601, a/k/a Creation. A similar story to Doyle's The Lost World, a group of sailors land their submarine on an uncharted tropical island populated by dinosaurs. Mayhem ensues. (Actually, the plot sounds eerily similar to E.R. Burroughs The Land that Time Forgot.) Unfortunately for Creation, the stock markets crashed, the Depression soon followed and the production was suspended. Though the miniature set-pieces were already built, as were most of the models, O'Brien only completed one scene: a sequence where a sailor shoots a baby triceratops then flees the wrath of its mother before the plug was pulled.

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 ready-made dinosaurs into his movie as well.

First, Cooper needed to get his script together. Collaborating via correspondence with famed mystery and adventure writer Edgar Wallace, the famed author would take Cooper's scenarios and translate them into script form. Drawing inspiration from the pulp adventure books and films of the time period, the story of King Kong is a dark, exotic and sordid affair and very, very gruesome. (Remember, the draconian Hayes Code wasn't in full effect yet.) Unfortunately, Wallace died before the script was completed so Cooper turned it over to James Creelman to finish it. But Cooper wasn't completely satisfied with it, and that's why the final script was penned (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. Cooper and Schoedsack 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 went to work and 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 allosaurous (-- one of the many dinosaurs meant for Creation) and a scene of Kong picking sailors off the log. Cooper showed the film to the RKO brass and the rest, as they say, is cinematic 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 and Delgado 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, and veteran composer Max Steiner provided Kong's memorable score. The films biggest set piece was the giant wall and gate on Skull Island. The impressive set was cannibalized from an old Cecil B. Demille biblical epic and 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.) The scene also required a ton of extras to play the natives.

I haven't timed it myself but it's been said that only about 16 to 17 minutes of 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 stuck to it for fear of jinxing his project. But 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.

Upon completion, the film opened in 1933 and proved 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 bona fide American monster, and he proved so profitable that RKO kept re-releasing the movie well into the 1950s where it helped ignite that decades resurgent atomic-age monster boom.

Audiences were captivated by what they saw on screen in '33. 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. Even an actor named Ken Roady claimed be Kong, saying 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, Schoedsack and Rose would all collaborate again almost 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. Eventually, 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, though. He had ideas for other fantastic films including Gwangi -- the tale of a band of ranch-hands who find a tyrannosaurus roaming 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.) And the climax was to feature the dinosaur battling a bunch of escaped lions and terrorizing the local town until it's pushed over a cliff by a truck. Originally, 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 with Mighty Joe Young. Schoedsack 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 a new apprentice on board to help with the animation. Who was this apprentice? It was Ray Harryhausen, and 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. Collaborating with Richard Landau on a script called The Valley of the Mists, it too was deemed too expensive to shoot and was scrapped. Later, Harryhausen would find this script that eventually became The Valley of Gwangi. Sadly, the closest O'Brien ever got to making Gwangi himself was The Beast of Hollow Mountain, where a rash of cattle-rustling turns out to be a tyrannosaurus feeding on the local herds. (Unfortunately, the monster doesn't appear until the very end after an excruciatingly long and plodding build up.)

When monster movies had their resurgence in the '50s, O'Brien was in demand again. Serving as technical supervisor on The Black Scorpion, despite the embarrassing sequence where the producers saved money by not compositing the creature into one extended sequence, the final battle in the stadium between the arachnid and a battalion of tanks is quite spectacular and I think is the best work the animator ever accomplished.

O'Brien also had an idea where 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. Then 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 and 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 Schoedsack) and he eventually passed away in 1972. O'Brien's last film work was animating the miniature people at the climax of Stanley Kramer's madcap comedy  It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. He passed away shortly after in 1962.

Both men made films before and after Kong, and 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, King Kong deserves its place as a pop culture icon. Cooper shared co-producing and co-directing credits with his friend Schoedsack on the film. 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 really 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."

Posted: 11/11/00. Copy and paste at your own legal risk.

Questions? Comments? Shoot me an e-mail. My dubbing policy.

How our Rating System works. Our Philosophy.