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

Kong's Pulp Sensibility

Kong-blogging, essay 5 of 15 blog entries on

Skull Island in King Kong (1933)

Part One, Man vs. Dinosaur

Amazing Stories magazine reprinted The Land
That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs
in February 1927.

The Land That Time Forgot by
Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1924 hardcover edition,
with illustrations by J. Allen St. John.

At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs,
1923 hardcover edition, with illustrations by
J. Allen St. John.

Interior illustration by J. Allen St. John
from At the Earth's Core, 1923 hardcover
edition.

Weird Tales, November 1930.

Part Two, Kong’s Pulp Sensibility

Kong pulls the vine that Jack Driscoll and Ann Darrow
are attempting to escape down in King Kong (1933).

The first forty minutes of King Kong (1933) are relatively sedate, but then a wild pulp sensibility kicks into overdrive.  Suddenly, there’s human sacrifice, giant monsters, savage fights, chases through the jungle, a flight down a rope, and a plunge into rapids. This is the world of pulp magazines.

With his 1912 novel The Lost World, respected author (and Sherlock Holmes creator) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle brought living dinosaurs into the contemporary world where they could awe and terrify modern man.  Conan Doyle acknowledged the pulp boys’-adventure aspect of his tale in a verse that prefaces the story:  “I have wrought my simple plan/If I give one hour of joy/To the boy who’s half a man/Or the man who’s half a boy.”  It’s a brief statement but could practically serve as a pulp manifesto.

The literary trappings of Conan Doyle were swiftly left behind as pulp authors seized upon the new conflict of man vs. dinosaur.  Edgar Rice Burroughs was the master.  After gaining fame as the creator of Tarzan, Burroughs conceived of other pulp series with more fantastical elements.  He found romance and adventure on other planets, with his heroes battling weird alien creatures on Mars and Venus, and he found thrills on mysterious islands and in Pellucidar, a land located within our hollow earth.  Naturally, his mysterious islands and earth’s core landscape turned out to be teeming with dinosaurs.

The Lost World can lay claim to creating one more trope of the new dinosaur fiction.  In the novel, expedition leader Professor Challenger returns to civilization with a pterodactyl which subsequently escapes and flaps away over London.  The screenwriters who adapted the novel for the screen in 1925 realized both the quality of the idea and the missed opportunity:  From this point on, prehistoric monsters in cities would wreak urban destruction.  The screenwriters changed the pterodactyl to a brontosaurus and set the dinosaur loose on London’s streets, where he rambunctiously smashes the side of at least one building.  Pulp magazines quickly picked up on this fun new idea, and then King Kong (1933) pumped it up a notch further.

The key pulp dinosaur novels are Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot (which was followed by a People That Time Forgot sequel) and At the Earth’s Core (followed by a whole slew of Pellucidar sequels).  The Land That Time Forgot pitches the shipwrecked hero and heroine against villainous German soldiers, an Allosaurus, a Plesiosaurus, and a pterodactyl, as well as formidable giant mammals.  At the Earth’s Core conjectures that the pterodactyls evolved into malicious and intelligent rulers of the inner world, with the traditional dinosaurs providing the exotic background.

What pulps like these really indulged in were the breathless chases, last minute rescues, and fates-worse-than-death that moved seamlessly into the Skull Island section of King Kong.  When Jack Driscoll and Ann Darrow escape from Kong’s lair by climbing down a vine—and then Kong starts pulling the vine back up…  well, that’s classic cliffhanger material and it’s 100% pure pulp adventure.

Clinging to a vine, Jack Driscoll and Ann Darrow escape from Kong
in King Kong (1933).

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

Something from the Dinosaur Family

Kong-blogging, essay 4 of 15 blog entries on

Skull Island in King Kong (1933)

Part One, The Amazing Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins

Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins' studio in
Sydenham where he created the Crystal Palace
sculptures, circa 1853.
Source:  Wikimedia Commons

Woodcut of the 1853 celebration dinner in the mould of the Iguanodon,
a dinosaur sculpture by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins.
Source:  Wikimedia Commons

Hylaeosaurus as copied from Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins'
Crystal Palace sculpture.  Illustration from Samuel Goodrich's
Illustrated Natural History (1859).
Source:  Wikimedia Commons

The Iguanodon sculptures by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins
at Crystal Palace Park, from a 1995 photograph.
Source:  Wikimedia Commons

Part Two, Victorian Dinosaurs

In King Kong (1933), Jack Driscoll and Carl Denham consider the nature of a Stegosaurus:

Driscoll:  What do you call that thing?

Denham:  Something from the dinosaur family.

Driscoll:  Dinosaur, eh?

Denham:  Yes, Jack:  a prehistoric beast.

In 1933, people knew what dinosaurs were.  They had been around for nearly a century.

Dinosaurs are eminently Victorian.  Prior to Queen Victoria’s reign, large fossilized bones were conjectured to be any number of things—remains of giant humans, dragon bones, behemoth bones, remnants of the flood.  Then five years after Victoria was crowned in 1837, Richard Owen studied the bones of Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, and Hylaeosaurus and concluded that their were enough resemblances to coin a new suborder of Saurian reptiles, “for which I would propose the name of Dinosauria.”  The name stuck.

We can credit the two key images of the Victorian dinosaur to the brilliant British artist and naturalist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (1807-1894).  In 1851, Hawkins was retained to create life-size prehistoric animal sculptures for the new location of the Crystal Palace in Sydenham in South London.  Working with some advice from Richard Owen himself, Hawkins created sculptures of fifteen types of extinct animals, including four dinosaurs, several giant marine reptiles, and a pterodactyl.  To celebrate the impending opening of the park in December 1853, Hawkins memorably invited various London notables to a New Year’s Eve dinner party in the mould of the Iguanodon.  Hawkins’ dinosaur exhibit soon drew thousands to the park, creating the first widely-conceived public image of what a dinosaur looked like.

Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins
standing beneath the articulated
mount for the Hadrosaurus at the
Academy of Natural Sciences.
Source:  Wikimedia Commons

The second key image created by Hawkins came 15 years later when he unveiled the world’s first mounted dinosaur skeleton, a Hadrosaurus foulki, at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  Nowadays, we expect to see mounted dinosaur skeletons in natural history museums, but this is only because Hawkins showed the world how to safely suspend fossilized bones and plaster casts from a metal armature.  The presentation looks normal to us now, but in 1868, the mounted skeleton was a spectacular sight—something entirely new in the world.

The genre of science fiction has its roots in the Victorian era as well.  Dinosaurs took their time merging into the new literature.  Jules Verne placed the giant aquatic reptiles Plesiosaurus and Icthyosaurus in the interior sea in Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864).  Then adventure romances like H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1886) created thrills in fictionalizing the great explorations of remote areas of the world (but with no dinosaurs in sight).  It took Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, famed creator of Sherlock Holmes, to merge the two approaches, ingeniously placing an ecosystem of living dinosaurs on an Amazon plateau in his novel The Lost World (1912).

Surprisingly, Conan Doyle’s dinosaurs don’t follow the up-to-date turn-of-the-century dinosaur descriptions coming from the great museums and universities.  Instead, a close reading of his prose suggests that his view of dinosaurs was still anchored in the image of those Crystal Palace sculptures, created nearly 60 years before by Waterhouse Hawkins.  Once a dinosaur image seizes the public imagination, it tends to take permanent root there.

The link to Kong?  Conan Doyle’s The Lost World book is re-imagined as The Lost World (1925) movie and then further developed into the new lost world of Skull Island in King Kong (1933).  The roots extend all the way back to Waterhouse Hawkins and his marvelous sculptures (still standing in London’s Crystal Palace Park today!).

The Allosaurus in King Kong (1933).

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

At the Earth's Core

Proud to participate in “The Maddin-est Blogathon in the World!” (September 19 - 23), a tribute to Guy Maddin courtesy of the folks at Fandor.

Maddin blogging, essay 3 of 3:

The modern scientific model of a thin earth crust, a massive layer of mantle, and a white-hot metallic core makes logical sense but does nothing for me aesthetically.  I’ll take a good hollow earth fiction any day.  Or the wonderful poetic image of a heart beating at the earth’s center.

My favorite hollow earth models populate their inner worlds with prehistoric monsters.  This offers tremendous imaginative benefits over the lifeless scientific paradigm.  For instance with the hollow earth model, earthquakes can be explained by herded mammoths toppling off cliffs, setting off seismic reverberations that can shake our side of the crust.

Jules Verne and Edgar Allen Poe couldn’t resist the pull of the hollow earth theory.  But my personal favorites are the Pellucidar books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, starting with At the Earth’s Core, where David Innes and other heroes of the inner world struggle for survival in a primeval world ruled by intelligent and malicious pterodactyls called Mahars.   Gravity is reversed along the interior surface of this earth ball.  There’s an internal sun floating at the center.  It’s a vicarious paradise for adventure-craving boys.

Anna goes down the slide, face first,
in The Heart of the World.

Guy Maddin doesn’t exactly give us a hollow earth in The Heart of the World, but it’s certainly closer to hollow earth than it is to 21^st century geology.  The geo-cosmography of The Heart of the World allows for an immense man-made tube/slide that extends from the crust all the way to the center of the earth.  There’s no apparent temperature increase as you descend (our heroine Anna never breaks a sweat).  With a good telescope, you can peer down the tube and watch the earth’s heart beating.  Initially, we can’t tell the size of the heart but the old worn-out one is ably replaced by a normal human-sized heart at the end.  As the movie winds down, our heroine’s heart appears to be strong enough to keep the whole earth project going.  In a way, I guess, Anna becomes Gaia.

But—as even Terrence Malick learned from forty years of procrastination and occasional filmmaking—everything can be improved with dinosaurs.  Maddin had an opportunity here that he unfortunately missed.  By adding just a handful more one-second shots, he could have had Anna flash by some spectacular views of the hollow earth, maybe with a styracosaurus and T. Rex briefly interrupting their battle to view her descent, as she swooshed by

                                              on her slide to the core.  A fast visual homage to

Styracosaurus vs. T. Rex in
The Lost World (1925).

Willis O’Brien and The Lost World would have fit right in with the rest of the film references.  Yes, I know that The Heart of the World is still a great short without the dinos, but just think about what a great theme park ride it could have made with them!  (I’m thinking: Universal Studio’s Land of Maddin, with rides through the avalanches, tours of the Gimli Hospital, slides to the center of the earth, and inescapable sad music piped in from hidden speakers.)

© 2011 Lee Price