King Kong

Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack directed together. Their Kong was performed by models 14 to 18 inches tall, metal armatures padded with cotton, latex and rabbit fur; the fur shifted whenever an animator handled one, and that unintended flicker stayed in the picture. Close shots used a head and shoulders scaled to a fifty foot creature, covered in forty bearskins, with six operators for its eyes and mouth. For the scene watching Kong fight the Tyrannosaurus, Fay Wray spent 22 hours in a fake tree reacting to the fight projected behind her, and was sore for days. She recorded all her screams in one session and said she could not speak even in a whisper for days. Murray Spivack built the sounds: the roar from lion and tiger recordings mixed and played slowly backwards, the chest beats from Spivack hitting his assistant’s chest with a drumstick, a microphone at the assistant’s back. Max Steiner’s score used a 46 piece orchestra, and by his account Cooper paid its 50,000 dollars himself. The Tyrannosaurus fight is the only Skull Island scene left without music. A good fit if you want to take a creature apart shot by shot. Not for viewers who cannot set the island sequence aside; Fatimah Rony notes African Americans and a Yaqui man played Indonesians.