I’ve heard that the ideal of the locale came from fictional films like Chang and even Nanu of the North.
I’ve got some books on King Kong but I don’t recall much for details at this point.
I think the stop motion animator had already done films with dinosaurs.
Cooper took his inspiration for Kong from both fact and fiction. As a small boy he was inspired by the adventure stories of Paul Du Chaillu, African explorer, whose embroidered tales of battles with hippopotami and giant apes in the depths of the jungle were a strong influence on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan. Years later, he managed to borrow enough money to fund a North African expedition for the purposes of making a documentary about the nomad Bakhtiari tribe: Nanook of the North wowed audiences in 1922 and he though he could capitalise on the new fascination with anthropology. He was accompanied by an ex-combat photographer, Ernest B. Schoedsack, who had honed his post-war camera skills at Mack Sennet’s studio. They joined the tribesmen’s migration over the mountains, and, over twenty-six gruelling days shot the footage that would become the documentary Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life (1925). Paramount offered a distribution deal, and it grossed many times its original $10,000 budget. Jess Lasky was persuaded to give Cooper and Schoedsack $60,000 to make their second documentary, Chang: A Drama of The Wilderness(1927) which focused on a Lao tribesman, Kru.
...He also worked on a book about baboons, which led him to recall the adventure stories of his boyhood, and his more recent adventures in Asia. He began to work on a treatment for King Kong, but struggled when it came to the effects. He ruled out using a real gorilla, but couldn’t find a believable alternative.
Cooper was lured back into entertainment by legendary producer David O. Selznik, who was then working at RKO. Willis O’Brien, stop motion animation genius, was also part of the studio, working on a silent project, Creation, which was ultimately dropped. O’Brien had wowed Hollywood with his work re-creating dinosaurs in The Lost World (1926), and offered sophisticated solutions to Cooper’s technical difficulties. RKO funded some test footage, shot by Schoedsack - three model gorillas (18” high) shot against miniatures of Skull Island and Manhattan. RKO were sufficiently impressed by this footage to give Cooper a budget of $500,000 (later upped to $650,000); impressive as the country was beset by the worst privations of the Great Depression....
Very interesting.
I tell you that movie really holds up. I watched it late one night a few years ago, and I was pretty terrified. The effects work very well.
Wow! Thank you. I think King Kong (1933) holds up to the day.