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