Last year, KING KONG celebrated its 90th anniversary and is arguably the greatest "giant monster" movie ever filmed (sorry, Godzilla!). Like many other monsters that appeared in the 1930's, Kong has long-enjoyed iconic status along with DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN and THE MUMMY.
What made this film so remarkable is the extensive use of puppet animation, miniature sets and a host of special photographic techniques used behind the scenes. When combined, the viewer is immersed in the action like no other film that came before it (with maybe the exception of 1925's THE LOST WORLD) and holds up very well even today.
In 1991, KING KONG won that year's award by the National Film Registry.
The UK's amateur filmmaking magazine HOME MOVIES AND HOME TALKIES ran from 1932-1934. Luckily, KING KONG was released during that period and they did a nice two-page spread in their June 1933 issue on the "secrets" of many of the effects.
NOTE: The title photo shows master miniature effects maker Willis "Obie" O'Brien and live action cinematographer, Edward Linden.
Fascinating. I'd always read that makers of King Kong spread misinformation about how they made the movie. This seems pretty accurate to me. I think we sometimes get too caught up in how movies are made and not why, but in the case of stop-motion movies I make an exception because the techniques are so clever and difficult.
ReplyDeleteInteresting that you mention it, but I have never come across what you wrote about misinformation, and lacking specifics I am skeptical on the assertion, wherever it came from. I do know that the miniatures set was closed to everyone but the staff, studio execs, and a few other key individuals. In a 1933 issue of American Cinematographer, a writer enumerated the optical effects that were used in the making of Kong and added that all the effects that were known at the time were employed, as well as some new ones that were developed during the production. Interviews with key animators (ex. Obie O'Brien, Marcel Delgado) and technicians found in books such as Goldner and Turner's The Making of King Kong and Gottesman and Geduld's The Girl in the Hairy Paw in my estimation were very forthcoming and I didn't detect any obfuscation in their words. If anything, they were, to a person, extremely proud of their work and really had no motivation to misinform anyone. As for your other comment, after reading fairly deeply into the history and background of horror, fantasy and science-fiction films, the number one motivation for making a movie was for profit. Just the budget cuts alone were proof enough that studio executives were entirely profit-oriented. Even Junior Laemmle who so wanted to produce Dracula and Frankenstein as sort of vanity projects (although he did think that U could make money from them) from the source material had to endure the trimming of budget costs to make them profitable. And then, of course, there were the censors . . .
ReplyDeleteUPDATE: After watching "The Making of King Kong" bonus disc on the Turner/Warner DVD, one of the guests did talk about not only keeping the animation a secret, but also misguided people into thinking that the effects were created using conventional cartoon animation, as shown in this posted article. Didn't connect the dots with what I was looking at!
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