Remembering King Kong (and Moviemaker Merian Cooper) 75 Years Later

Primatology’s loss was moviedom’s gain when, along about 1930, an overly neat maid tossed an 800-page monograph on baboons onto the fire, thus consigning Merian Caldwell Cooper’s careful research to the flames. Cooper, who’d been fascinated with apes all his life and had taken time from location scouting in Africa to do all that side work, apparently didn’t flinch, though neither did he ever try to reconstruct what had been lost.

Whether the maid kept her job, we do not know. But by all accounts, Merian Cooper was a man who seemed bent on racking up the life experiences of any dozen lesser souls, and yet treated his slower-moving brethren with due courtesy—the occasional communist or suspected fellow traveler aside.

Cooper’s life might make a film to put the Indiana Jones franchise to shame. He came from a Southern family that admired martial courage above all else; an ancestor had fought alongside the Polish cavalryman Kazimierz Pulaski in the Revolutionary War, and an old Confederate colonel who lived down the street told tales of fighting against Apaches and Yankees and Abyssinians, the last “the best soldier in the whole round world.”

Those tales proved influential. After service as an ace pilot in World War I—and spending time in a prisoner of war camp, from which he escaped—Cooper went off to volunteer for service with the Polish air force against the invading Bolsheviks. He was again captured and removed to the Soviet Union, where an American journalist who just also happened to be a spy helped his cause. That spy, Marguerite Harrison, was eventually caught—denounced to the Soviets by none other than Louise Bryant, to whom Diane Keaton lent such angelic visage in Warren Beatty’s film Reds.

Again Cooper escaped, and now he was ready for real adventure. He did a stint as a writer for the New York Times but, as Mark Vaz writes in his biography Living Dangerously, he “had other goals than to live out his life as an eyewitness and scribe to the ‘dingy horror’ of the news trade.” His head full of visions of a favorite novel, A. W. Mason’s Four Feathers, he made off for Abyssinia, met with the emperor, headed for the Andaman Islands and Borneo, and learned his way around a camera. Now in the company of budding filmmaker Ernest Shoedsack and Ms. Harrison, who had managed to get out of Russia, Cooper traveled to the Iranian desert to make what might be thought of as the first Discovery Channel film, a documentary of nomadic life called Grass.

The film, now on the National Film Registry, was a hit, as was a successor called Chang, its elephant stampede providing stock footage for many a jungle film to come. Then, after shooting his beloved Four Feathers, starring a young Fay Wray, Cooper showed a newly jobless producer named David O. Selznick a strange and immodest script for a film with a filmmaker hero who journeys off to the wilds and returns with the biggest ape the world had ever seen.

The film that resulted was King Kong, and with it all Hollywood was Cooper’s.

He made hay with that 1933 movie, which took filmgoers’ minds off the Great Depression and transported them into a world the likes of which they had never seen. With the capital thus accrued, he made other films as well, teaming up with John Ford as producer for a 20-year run of classics including The Lost Patrol, Fort Apache, and The Quiet Man and with Schoedsack for another strange gorilla movie, Mighty Joe Young, which gave a technician named Ray Harryhausen (who turned 88 last Sunday, and to whom we send birthday greetings) his first big break. Somehow, along the way, Cooper stole time enough to help found studios, production houses, and even a couple of airlines while roaming the war zones of the world.

Was Carl Denham, the showman lead of King Kong, Merian Cooper’s alter ego? Toward the end of his life, Cooper set to work on an autobiography that answered the question; he called it I’m King Kong. Seventy-five years after the birth of that great film, Merian Cooper, a filmmaker unlike any other, deserves remembrance and homage.

Watch the original trailer to King Kong below.