Posted on 12/19/2005 11:50:34 AM PST by Ed Hudgins
We Three Kongs by Edward Hudgins The Objectivist center & The Atlas Society
If art holds a mirror to reality, the original 1933 King Kong, the 1976 remake and the latest version by Peter Jackson, show a culture that swung from a romantic optimism to cynicism and now perhaps is returning to a healthier sense of life.
The original Kong very much reflected the values of its maker, Merian C. Cooper. As a six-year old a book his uncle gave him on “Adventures in Equatorial Africa” inspired Cooper’s imagination with tales of the jungle and strange animals, including gorillas. He wanted to be an explorer! He went to the U.S. Naval Academy but got booted out for suggesting that the recently-invented airplane could some day sink battleships. He became a bomber pilot in World War I and was shot down and imprisoned by the Germans. After the war, in 1920 he flew for the Poles who fought Soviet invaders. He was shot down again and thrown into a communist slave camp but escaped. Years later he made movies celebrating American values to counter communist propaganda.
In the 1920s he became the first major movie-maker to take cameras to exotic places. In “Grass” he documented a Persian tribe’s struggle against their harsh environment. He filmed “Chang” in Siam, letting roaring tigers come right up to his lens and elephants stampede around his camera – all to get extraordinary shots.
Cooper’s love for adventure, technology and story-telling came together in Kong...
(Excerpt) Read more at objectivistcenter.org ...
I seriously doubt that.
AMC channel recently did a biography on Cooper: excellent!
It is worth watching-for in their schedule.
It's probably true. He would be guilty of one of the most serious crimes in academia. Telling someone something they don't want to hear.
It was Turner Classic Movies. The title is "I Am King Kong."
I don't know how true that story is, but Billy Mitchell was damned near court martialed for suggesting similar things.
The Naval Academy info is from the extras DVD in the new DVD of the original movie. Most of the other info is from a couple of books and most can also be found on the DVD. Buy it, it's a great deal!
I stand corrected. Billy Mitchell WAS court martialed.
Since we've only got a third-hand (at best) account of the details, probably filtered through the personal biases and reminiscences of Mr. Cooper, I am not willing to buy it.
True.
There's a huge difference between "suggesting" and being a pain in the ass to the point of insubordination (especially if you are right).
Jessica Lange was hot back then. However, as she has aged, her politics have made her a hateful old hag, born out of a lifetime of Hollywood ignorance. As Dr. Savage says, the rear end drops, the liberal quotient goes up.
In early 1919, Mitchell was appointed the deputy chief of the Air Service, retaining his onestar rank. His relations with superiors continued to sour as he began to attack both the War and Navy Departments for being insufficiently farsighted regarding airpower. His fight with the Navy climaxed with the dramatic bombing tests of 1921 and 1923 that sank several battleships, proving-at least to Mitchell-that surface fleets were obsolete. Within the Army he also experienced difficulties, notably with his superiors Charles Menoher and later Mason Patrick, and in early 1925 he reverted to his permanent rank of colonel and was transferred to Texas. Although such demotions were not an unusual occurrence at the time-Patrick himself had gone from major general to colonel upon returning to the Corps of Engineers in 1919-the move was nonetheless widely seen as punishment and exile. Not content to remain quiet, when the Navy dirigible "Shenandoah" crashed in a storm and killed 14 of the crew, Mitchell issued his famous statement accusing senior leaders in the Army and Navy of incompetence and "almost treasonable administration of the national defense." He was courtmartialed, found guilty of insubordination, and suspended from active duty for five years without pay. Mitchell elected to resign instead as of 1 February 1926 and spent the next decade continuing to write and preach the gospel of airpower to all who would listen. The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Navy man, was viewed by Mitchell as advantageous for airpower. In fact, he believed the new president would appoint him as assistant secretary of war for air or perhaps even secretary of defense in a new and unified military organization. Such hopes never materialized. Mitchell died of a variety of ailments including a bad heart and influenza in 1936.
You give way too much credit for open thinking in the Military Schools.
You give way too much credit for the power of a midshipman's mere opinion as a factor on getting kicked out. As with the example of Billy Mitchell (see helpful post #15), if he really was kicked out over airplanes, it would have been more due to his approach to the problem, rather than the opinion itself.
Billy Mitchell's greatest crime was that he spoke the truth. When your boss (or bosses) don't want to hear the truth, that is death for a career.
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