Ten Amazing Shots from King Kong

Kong-blogging, essay 14 of 15 blog entries on

Skull Island in King Kong (1933)

Ten Amazing Shots from King Kong

Amaze me.  Show me things I’ve never seen before.

Watching King Kong (1933), audiences were pummeled by image after image unlike anything they’d ever seen before.  Many of these images still appear startlingly original.

In order to achieve the following ten amazing shots, Willis O’Brien and his technicians, ably assisted by the set designers and cinematographers, used every trick known in the book.  These images include stop-motion animation, rear projection, matte paintings on glass, the Dunning process, traveling mattes, and various optical printer effects.  Often there are layers upon layers of visual effects combining to create the final composition.

1. Kong by the Stream

Kong quickly moves through this idyllic scene.  Willis O’Brien liked to incorporate water into his shots and so he matted a stream into the foreground.  It’s there simply to create a lovely composition.

2. The Dying Stegosaurus

As the ship’s crew walks past the dying Stegosaurus, the audience gets an opportunity to see Marcel Delgado’s awesome Stegosaurus model from close up.  Look at the wonderful textural details on the body!  For this shot, the crew is in the foreground (walking on a treadmill) and the dinosaur is rear-projected.  The easy way out for O’Brien would have been to track along the unmoving dead body of the Stegosaurus, but that’s not what he does.  O’Brien animates the final twinges of the dying animal, climaxing with the magnificent tail movements at the end.

3. Kong Approaches the Log

Here’s a wonderful choice for camera positioning, keeping the sailors fully visible as they panic at Kong’s approach. 

4. Kong Above, Lizard Below

Danger below and danger above, revealed through a tricky upward tilt of the camera.  Once again, Willis O’Brien sacrifices ease because he’s determined to go for the impressive effect.  Camera movements like this are exceedingly difficult to achieve when you’re essentially working with an animation sandwich—animated lizard below and animated Kong above with a live-action oval of film plugged in between.

5. Allosaurus in Close Proximity

Many monster movies since have shown dinosaur and human together, but this shot remains unrivaled.  The direction of the actors is fantastic in scenes like this, as their reactions maintain the conviction that humans and monsters are truly interacting.

6. The Fall

By this point, the viewer may subconsciously realize that the film employs these over-the-shoulder camera shots to draw us into the action.  But nobody could possibly expect that the camera would hold position as the tree falls, allowing us to share Ann Darrow’s dizzying vertiginous descent.

7. A Scavenger

Jack Driscoll walks by the dead Allosaurus and we’re treated to all sorts of bonus details.  Blood drips from the monster’s jaws and a giant bird perches vulture-like on his head, nervously flying off when Driscoll gets too close.  We assume he’ll be back.

8. Kong’s Lair

There’s movement going on all over the place in Kong’s lair, with lots of micro-images seamlessly pasted together to create the whole.  Ann Darrow is on the ledge on the left, Jack Driscoll is sneaking around a rock on the right, there’s bubbling lava in the foreground, steam rising from the lake in the middle, beautiful matte paintings on glass contributing to the illusion of depth, and, of course, Kong battling at the center of it all.

9. Skull Island Panorama

Our eyes are naturally focused on Ann and Driscoll making their getaway.  Who’s bothering to look at the background?  But check it out—in the distance, we can see the Great Wall of the native village, the peninsula where the natives live, the shore where the crew landed, and even the ship out in the water at far left.

10. Kong at the Gate

There’s an epic crowd scene in the foreground, panic everywhere, and then the magnificent reveal of Kong as he smashes the doors open.  I wonder if they switched to the 24-inch Kong at this point (the larger model that was built for use in the Manhattan scenes)?  Kong looks bigger, angrier, and more powerful than at any point before.  It’s a sight that must have made audiences gasp in 1933 and still remains powerful today.

Reference Sources

The Making of King Kong by Orville Goldner and George E. Turner

Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper by Mark Cotta Vaz

Willis O'Brien: Special Effects Genius by Steve Archer

Dinosaurs Past and Present, Volume 1, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Dinosaurs Past and Present, Volume 2, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time by Richard Milner

All in the Bones: A Biography of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins by Valerie Bramwell and Robert M. Peck
Special features on the two-disc special edition, King Kong (1933) by Warner Home Video Inc.

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

Watch King Kong...

Purchase a King Kong DVD or Blu-Ray set at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Rent King Kong at Netflix or other rental service.

© 2012 Lee Price

King Kong in Doré Land

Kong-blogging, essay 9 of 15 blog entries on

Skull Island in King Kong (1933)

Part One, The Backgrounds

 

Compare and contrast:  Gustav Dore's "Satan Walking in the Garden" from Paradise Lost on the left.  A detail of the jungle in King Kong (1933) on the right.

Skull Island is one of the greatest imaginary landscapes ever to grace the movies.  The quality of the production design and set decoration in this section of King Kong (1933) is phenomenal. 

As many have remarked, the backgrounds look like the work of Gustav Doré, the popular 19th century French illustrator and master engraver.  The impression is intentional.  Chief technician Willis O’Brien asked artists Mario Larrinaga and Byron Crabbe to come up with backgrounds in the style of Doré to set the scene on Skull Island.

With his choice of Doré, O’Brien embraced a wild, mysterious, romantic approach.  Doré’s backgrounds often achieve a semblance of great depth through their stylistic use of differently lit planes to give the impression of receding distance.  This contributes to their other-worldly, even primeval, appearance.

Mario Larrinaga and Byron Crabbe sketched hundreds of drawings, marrying O’Brien’s visual ideas with Doré’s style.  O’Brien selected his favorite sketches and worked with Larrinaga and Crabbe to capture them on glass paintings and painted canvas backings.  For a complex scene, the camera might be set up to peer through up to three mounted panes of painted glass and then a final opaque painted canvas.  Between the mounts, the technicians would place additional prop foliage to create even more layers of receding depth.  Like a Doré engraving, the film image presents sharp detail in the foreground then subtly transitions to more impressionistic shapes in the distance.

Log crossing in Gustav Dore's "The Two Goats" from
The Fables of La Fontaine, 1867.

Log crossing in King Kong (1933).

Cave entrance in Gustav Dore's "Daniel in the
Lion's Den," one of his Bible illustrations, 1866.

Cave entrance in King Kong.

A high ledge in Dore's "Satan Overlooking Mt. Nephrates"
from Paradise Lost, 1866.

A high ledge in King Kong.

Part Two, The Foreground

 

Compare and contrast:  Fay Wray and Joel McCrae chased through the jungle in The Most Dangerous Game (1932) on the left.  Fay Wray and Bruce Cabot chased through the jungle in King Kong (1933) on the right.

To keep costs appearing reasonable on the studio balance books, co-producer Merian C. Cooper borrowed much of Skull Island’s foreground from sets prepared for—and charged to the account of—other RKO movies.

The Great Wall that separates the native village from the wilds of Skull Island is a redressed Jerusalem wall from The King of Kings (1927).  Some of the native village huts are leftovers from Bird of Paradise (1932).  But Cooper’s biggest steals of all were from The Most Dangerous Game.

Still in production during Kong’s early shooting days, The Most Dangerous Game was being filmed by Kong co-director Ernest Schoedsack and happened to co-star Kong actors Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong.  Since The Most Dangerous Game took place on a remote jungle island, Cooper realized their settings could be virtually interchangeable.  He looked for serendipitous opportunities to piggy-back his complex ape movie on Schoedsack’s simpler adventure-romance.

Thanks to the combined skills of RKO’s set designers and Willis O’Brien’s technicians,  Kong’s visual mix of borrowed sets and original glass paintings works nearly seamlessly.  It’s so effective, in fact, that it’s now hard to watch The Most Dangerous Game without expecting a Brontosaurus to appear in the misty swamp or for an enraged Kong to appear on the other side of the log that Fay Wray and lead actor Joel McCrae must cross.

A chase through the swamp in The Most Dangerous Game (1932).

A chase through the swamp in King Kong (1933).

Fay Wray and Joel McCrae on the log in The Most Dangerous Game.

Sailors cross the log in King Kong.

Reference Sources

The Making of King Kong by Orville Goldner and George E. Turner

Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper by Mark Cotta Vaz

Willis O'Brien: Special Effects Genius by Steve Archer

Dinosaurs Past and Present, Volume 1, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Dinosaurs Past and Present, Volume 2, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time by Richard Milner

All in the Bones: A Biography of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins by Valerie Bramwell and Robert M. Peck
Special features on the two-disc special edition, King Kong (1933) by Warner Home Video Inc.

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

Watch King Kong...

Purchase a King Kong DVD or Blu-Ray set at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Rent King Kong at Netflix or other rental service.

© 2012 Lee Price

Willis O'Brien and Marcel Delgado

Kong-blogging, essay 8 of 15 blog entries on

Skull Island in King Kong (1933)

Part One, A Stampede of Dinosaurs

Closeup of the Allosaurus from The Lost World (1925).

The Brontosaurus in The Lost World.

Allosaurus attacks Styracosaurus in The Lost World.

Styracosaurus and Stegosaurus in an out-take from The Lost World.

Baby Allosaurs feast on dinosaur remains in The Lost World.

Part Two, Willis O’Brien and Marcel Delgado

Willis O’Brien wanted to make dinosaur movies.  When film was still in its infancy, O’Brien figured out the mechanics of stop-motion animation, fashioned some clay models, and made a short test reel.  The result was good enough to obtain financing for his first short, The Dinosaur and the Missing Link (1915).

O’Brien held to his vision and leveraged upward, convincing the Edison Company to let him make more prehistoric shorts.  R.F.D. 10,000 B.C. (1917) and Prehistoric Poultry (1917) followed.  Then O’Brien cut a deal with another producer to make a longer and more serious dinosaur movie, The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1918).

While O’Brien had a genius for understanding film’s technical potential to capture fantasy, he realized that his sculptural skills fell short of his vision.  He went looking for a collaborator.  In 1923, he found Marcel Delgado, a young Mexican-American student studying at the Otis Art Institute.  O’Brien became convinced that Delgado had the right combination of skills needed to make his dinosaurs.

Allosaurus on the prowl
from The Lost World.

For O’Brien’s upcoming project, a big-budget feature film of The Lost World, Delgado constructed approximately 50 detailed dinosaur models, drawing inspiration from both Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s descriptions of dinosaurs on an Amazon plateau and from Charles R. Knight’s acclaimed paintings of prehistoric life.  Unlike O’Brien’s rather crude wood-and-clay models, Delgado’s sophisticated puppets were made with an articulated aluminum armature, ball-and-socket joints, foam rubber musculature, and latex skin.  They averaged 18 inches in length and some of them were fitted with interior rubber bellows to achieve realistic breathing effects.

O’Brien supervised the animation of Delgado’s models, painstaking moving them bit by bit, shooting a frame or two at a time.  When projected at normal speed, the dinosaurs came to life on the screen.

A pterodactyl from
The Lost World.

The Lost World (1925) is a solid adventure film, highlighted by many delightful dinosaur scenes.  However, unlike the later King Kong (1933), The Lost World seems to suffer from some clumsy scripting (although it may be presumptuous to be too critical since 30 minutes of the original two-hour release print are missing in the currently available 90-minute restoration).  King Kong always carefully integrates its dinosaur scenes into the narrative; The Lost World doesn’t.  Its dinosaur scenes sometimes appear to be arbitrarily dropped in and they are often filmed from perspectives not available to any of the characters.  Kong would correct these faults.

After The Lost World, director Harry Hoyt, O’Brien, and Delgado invested considerable time in the development of a follow-up which was to be called Creation.  Delgado sculpted the dinosaur models and O’Brien shot a small amount of footage only to have their production shut down on the recommendation of Merian C. Cooper.  Although fascinated by O’Brien’s special effects, Cooper thought Creation lacked a compelling story.  Cooper decided that O’Brien and Delgado should be working on a giant ape picture instead—a movie that could even use some of those Creation models that Delgado had already completed.  Kong moved into production and even got the Creation hand-me-downs.

Brontosaurus seen through binoculars in
The Lost World.

Reference Sources

The Making of King Kong by Orville Goldner and George E. Turner

Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper by Mark Cotta Vaz

Willis O'Brien: Special Effects Genius by Steve Archer

Dinosaurs Past and Present, Volume 1, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Dinosaurs Past and Present, Volume 2, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time by Richard Milner

All in the Bones: A Biography of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins by Valerie Bramwell and Robert M. Peck
Special features on the two-disc special edition, King Kong (1933) by Warner Home Video Inc.

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

Watch King Kong...

Purchase a King Kong DVD or Blu-Ray set at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Rent King Kong at Netflix or other rental service.

© 2012 Lee Price

Kong's Debt to Charles R. Knight

Kong-blogging, essay 6 of 15 blog entries on

Skull Island in King Kong (1933)

Part One, A Charles R. Knight Dinosaur Gallery

Tyrannosaurus confronts a family of Triceratops
by Charles R. Knight, circa 1919.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Trachodons by Charles R. Knight, circa 1905.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Nesting Protoceratops from Charles R. Knight's murals for the
Field Museum of Natural History, circa 1925.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Jurassic scene with Archaeopteryx, Compsognathus,
and Rhamphorynchus from Charles R. Knight's murals for the
Field Museum of Natural History.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Allosaurus eating a Brontosaurus by Charles R. Knight, circa 1904.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Part Two, Knight Paintings in Motion

At this point, we reach an artist whose work had a profound impact upon King Kong (1933) and whom I view with awe.  Charles R. Knight’s dinosaurs look like real animals, fully alive in the moment and informed by individual personalities.  Many great paleoartists have followed the path blazed by Knight, but this isn’t a case where they could see further for standing on the shoulders of a giant.  In certain important respects, Knight remains the unsurpassed master.

As a boy, Charles R. Knight (1874-1953) had special access through his father to the backrooms of the American Museum of Natural History where he had the privilege of watching the taxidermists and exhibition preparators at their work.  He learned animals inside and out, observing their muscular construction and skeletal structure.  He obsessively studied nature and drew the animals he saw with a rare talent—and it wasn't long before his special skills were noticed.

In 1894 when Knight was still a very young man, a friend at the American Museum of Natural History recommended him for an assignment to depict an Elotherium, an extinct pig-like animal.  Knight’s painting was exactly what the museum wanted.  It was scientifically accurate and artistically exciting.  Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the museum, took Knight under his wing, convinced that his artwork could communicate the wonder of prehistoric life to the museum’s public.

By the time that Willis O’Brien and Marcel Delgado teamed up in 1924 to create the dinosaur models for the movie of The Lost World, Charles R. Knight had achieved a high reputation for his depictions of prehistoric life both at the American Museum of Natural History and in published illustrations.  O’Brien and Delgado elected to use Knight’s work as their guide in creating approximately 50 dinosaur models for the movie.

There was an interesting symmetry in the complementary work of Knight and Delgado.  When working on a figure, Knight would often begin by determining the skeletal and muscular form of the animal and then he would sculpt a three-dimensional model.  He said this was important to see how shadows would naturally fall.  Only after gaining a thorough understanding of the sculpture would Knight embark on his painting.  Now… reversing this process, Delgado began with Knight's paintings, studying them to identify what the skeletal and muscular forms must have been.  In a way, Delgado's three-dimensional models returned the paintings back to their sculptural beginnings.

In the eight years between The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933), Knight received one of his greatest commissions, enabling him to paint a spectacular series of murals for the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.  As O’Brien and Delgado worked on the (ultimately abandoned) Creation project and then King Kong, Knight’s evolving artwork continued to be their primary inspiration in creating their dinosaur models.

Many decades later, Willis O’Brien’s protégé Ray Harryhausen (who went on to become the greatest stop-motion animator of his generation) expressed his own feelings about Knight’s legacy.  “His dinosaur and prehistoric animal paintings and sculptures had more than just a realistic surface quality; they also possessed scientific reality and natural beauty.  He was the first to reconstruct prehistoric life in a romantic form and the first to work in close collaboration with paleontologists to attempt to achieve scientifically accurate anatomy.  His long experience in drawing and painting live animals in zoos, together with his romantic and vivid imagination, helped to instill his prehistoric reconstructions with a ‘charisma’ only found in living creatures...”

Equally miraculous, Marcel Delgado and Willis O’Brien somehow caught that ‘charisma’ and transferred it to film, creating magical images of Knight’s dinosaurs in motion.

Part Three, Comparisons

Charles R. Knight's 1897 painting of an Agathaumus (based on
bones later identified as Triceratops).
Source: Wikimedia Commons

A dinosaur cut from the final release of King Kong.
A Styracosaurus, looking very similar to Knight's Agathaumus,
chases sailors onto the log.

A detail of Charles R. Knight's Tyrannosaurus painting
from the gallery above, showing the family of Triceratops.

Marcel Delgado's models of a parent and baby Triceratops
from The Lost World (1925).

Charles R. Knight with his working model of a Stegosaurus.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Willis O'Brien with Marcel Delgado's model of a Styracosaurus
(ultimately not seen in the final cut) for King Kong.

Reference Sources

The Making of King Kong by Orville Goldner and George E. Turner

Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper by Mark Cotta Vaz

Willis O'Brien: Special Effects Genius by Steve Archer

Dinosaurs Past and Present, Volume 1, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Dinosaurs Past and Present, Volume 2, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time by Richard Milner

All in the Bones: A Biography of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins by Valerie Bramwell and Robert M. Peck
Special features on the two-disc special edition, King Kong (1933) by Warner Home Video Inc.

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

Watch King Kong...

Purchase a King Kong DVD or Blu-Ray set at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Rent King Kong at Netflix or other rental service.

© 2012 Lee Price

Dawn on Skull Island

Kong-blogging, essay 1 of 15 blog entries on

Skull Island in King Kong (1933)

Part One, Dawn on Skull Island

Happy anniversary to King Kong, which premiered in New York City 79 years ago on this date:  March 2, 1933.

Skull Island at dawn, before the wild things come out to play:

The fog lifts in the early morning for our first view of Skull Island.
Retouched image from King Kong (1933).

The misty Skull Island jungle at dawn.
Retouched image from King Kong (1933).

Deep shadows still dominate the entrance to Kong's lair.
Retouched image from King Kong (1933).  

Mists and steam inside Kong's cavern on Skull Mountain.
Retouched image from King Kong (1933).

Kong's world, still quiet at dawn.
Retouched image from King Kong (1933).

Shameful confession: Yes, I’ve fiddled with the tones on today’s screen captures and feel very sheepish about my audacity in doing so.  I’ve added touches of color, sharpened some images, and increased some contrasts.  I promise to be more respectful of the original’s integrity for the remainder of this 15-part series.

Part Two, Island Builders

We’ll start in 1932, the year that Skull Island moved from imagination to film through the work of film artists and technicians at RKO Radio Pictures.

Merian C. Cooper was 38 years old in 1932.  A restless adventurer, Cooper had already survived enough adventures to fill several normal lifetimes—he had pursued Pancho Villa on the Mexican border, flown bombers over Germany during World War I, escaped from a Soviet Union prison, feasted with Haile Selassie in Ethiopia, migrated over the Zardeh Kuh mountain range of Iran with the Bakhtiari tribes, and filmed elephants and tigers at close range in Thailand.  The idea of Skull Island began with Cooper.  He imagined a mysterious island in the South Pacific, an enclosed world locked in a prehistoric past and ruled by a mighty gorilla.  Then he searched for the talent needed to transfer the dream to film.

Ernest B. Schoedsack, also 38 in 1932, was Cooper’s friend and film-making partner.  In addition to sharing the Bakhtiari and Thailand film-making experiences (resulting in their classic silent films Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life and Chang), Schoedsack had recently returned from a solo film-making expedition to northwestern Sumatra for his movie Rango.  Schoedsack knew exotic jungle islands first hand.  Along with Cooper, Schoedsack would share producer and director credit for King Kong.

Ruth Rose was 36 years old in 1932 and had been married for five years—to Ernest B. Schoedsack.  She had never written a film script.  But she had fully shared in her husband’s rough-and-tumble globe-trotting life and had developed an ear for how these men talked and how they viewed the world. Rose took Cooper’s fragmentary story ideas—partially and awkwardly developed by writers Edgar Wallace and James Creelman—and fashioned a smooth rising narrative that brought a surprising plausibility to Skull Island.  Her dialogue for the ship’s crew places the audience in a world that is romantic, realistic, and theatrical in equal parts.  It meshes with the Skull Island landscape in a way that intuitively feels right.

Willis O’Brien, at 46 both the oldest in this group and the longest in the film business, was the film magician who could bring Cooper’s vision to film life.  He was the artist most responsible for the island’s physical appearance and the technical genius who grasped how to endow miniature monsters with cinematic power.  O’Brien had one major film success, The Lost World (1925), behind him and 18 years of experience in developing and mastering the art of stop motion animation.

Marcel Delgado, 31 years old in 1932, was an artist with a gift for sculpting.  O’Brien recognized his talents and employed Delgado to create the articulated models of Skull Island’s spectacular inhabitants.  Like O’Brien, Delgado had proved his skills with The Lost World and was ready to show the world that he could transcend that remarkable achievement.

Murray Spivack, at 28 the youngest of this group in 1932, created the aural landscape of Skull Island, fashioning a film soundtrack that had to sound entirely unfamiliar yet believable.  Before King Kong, many people had seen pictures of dinosaurs but they had never heard the dinosaurs.  Now sound had to match picture.  Spivack brought symphonic musical experience and a natural technical curiosity to the challenge.

Max Steiner, 44 years old in 1932, bathed Skull Island with memorable music that shapes the viewer’s understanding of the setting.  Without Steiner’s musical cues, the night-time fogs would not feel as thick and the forest not as primeval—the ferocity of the Allosaurus would drop a notch and Kong would lose a touch of his mysterious humanity.  Our emotional response to the wonders of Skull Island is always filtered through Steiner’s music.

Now let’s bring them out on stage.  Here are our principal island builders.  Many others probably deserve nearly as much credit—art technicians Mario Larrinaga and Byron L. Crabbe, editor Ted Cheesman, production assistant Archie S. Marshek, executive producer David O. Selznick, O’Brien’s ace technical crew and a crowd of others contributed much.  But if I was only allowed to ask seven people to stand on the stage beside Kong, as the gentlemen of the press flashed their pictures, I’d invite Cooper, Schoedsack, Rose, O’Brien, Delgado, Spivack, and Steiner to share with Kong in his moment of triumph.

Reference Sources

The Making of King Kong by Orville Goldner and George E. Turner

Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper by Mark Cotta Vaz

Willis O'Brien: Special Effects Genius by Steve Archer

Dinosaurs Past and Present, Volume 1, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Dinosaurs Past and Present, Volume 2, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time by Richard Milner

All in the Bones: A Biography of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins by Valerie Bramwell and Robert M. Peck
Special features on the two-disc special edition, King Kong (1933) by Warner Home Video Inc.

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

Watch King Kong...

Purchase a King Kong DVD or Blu-Ray set at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Rent King Kong at Netflix or other rental service.

© 2012 Lee Price