FROM THE ARCHIVE: King Kong Lost and Found Part 3 - The Real Deal
All it took was a trip to Bob's Basement
As we ended Part 2, my pursuit of the stop motion armature used in 1933’s King Kong led me to contact the enigmatic Clark Wilkinson of Baraboo, Wisconsin — located right in the very State where I lived (and live) — because he’d been cited in a book footnote1 as the current owner of the treasure. After some pre-internet wrangling (this was the early 90s) so he and his wife could send me the photo of the armature that they had framed on their wall (could they be any nicer?), I discovered that they actually had a Mighty Joe Young armature (before they’d sold the item to special effects artist Lyle Conway, who may still have it).
Alas, the actual Kong is still in existence, but nowhere near as whole as his cousin Mighty Joe.
Enter Bob Burns.
You may know Bob as one of Hollywood's original "gorilla men;" he portrayed, among countless other simians, "Tracy" on the Ghost Busters TV series of the 1970's. Burns has worked in and around fantasy movies for decades as an actor and special effects man, and has the distinct honor of being able to say that he sat next to Tor Johnson at the premiere of Ed Wood's Plan Nine From Outer Space. A genial and generous soul, his involvement in the horror and science fiction movie industry has made him many life-long friends, and those relationships have helped him to become the consummate collector of classic props.
And he has the king of them all.
"The Kong armature came along in about 1975," Burns recalled. "A fellow named Phil Kellison knew OBie (Willis O’Brien) pretty well, and loaned him (Kong]) to a museum near Burbank called MovieWorld. When the place went belly-up, Kong just sort of disappeared." Burns kept reminding Phil about the item until finally provoking him to look into possibly getting Kong back.
"The guy gave Phil some sort of song and dance - 'Oh, he's lost..,'" Burns continued. "So I happened to be at this fella's place with a friend to pick up Robby the Robot2, which he'd bought when the museum went under. Over in the corner of this big old storage building, I see Kong standing there, and I said, 'Whoa!"
Burns was unable to get it at that point, but alerted his friend Phil to the situation. "After some discussion with Phil — during which the guy claimed he wanted to open another museum in Oregon and exhibit Kong there — Phil said, 'No, I think you've had your chance,' and took it back. Not much later, he called me and asked, 'Will you take this guy off my hands and take care of him, please?'"
He didn't have to ask twice.
Preserving the Legend
King Kong's condition at that point wasn't too regal. "These were tools, so the studio used them as much as possible," Burns noted. "My Kong is the long-headed version of the two armatures made --- this is the one that roams the jungle on Skull Island. He survived because he did double duty, serving as the skeleton of the Son of Kong as well."
According to reports by the people involved at RKO during the King Kong era, the other model was dismantled and junked.
"When Phil had Kong, he was basically coming apart," Burns says of his armature. "The rubber and fur 'flesh' of the Son of Kong was only there in clumps, and it smelled terrible as the materials decomposed. Then a chemist friend of mine told us that the rubber was eating into the metal skeleton and gears, so we had to remove the remaining covering before the armature itself was destroyed."
Phil took the crumbling figure to a local commercial cleaner where it was steamed free of "flesh."
"When the guy was told what he was spraying, he started exclaiming, 'I'm killing King Kong! I'm killing King Kong!'" Burns recalls with a laugh. By the time Phil loaned Kong to the MovieWorld Museum, he was as he appears now, a metal skeleton.
The Smithsonian has been after Burns on a regular basis to donate the one-of-a-kind item to its collection, but he won't do it. Perhaps he still has a bad taste in his mouth from an early encounter with an outside contractor working for the museum.
"Several years ago a guy was putting on a traveling show for the Smithsonian, and he wanted Kong for the tour. I didn't want to chance losing it, so I said no. He assured me that the insurance company would pay for a re-construction if anything happened to my armature, which misses the point entirely, of course. He got so mad that he said he'd make his own. 'That's fraud,' I warned. 'I don't care,' he said."
Incredibly, the exhibit coordinator evidently had a similar ape-like puppet pulled from the archives and began to exhibit it as "The Model Used in the Movie King Kong." The fraud appeared along with a large sheet of Mario Larrinaga storyboard art for the unfinished film Creation (which morphed into King Kong after Merian C. Cooper canceled it), the familiar concept drawing depicting Kong atop the Empire State Building (created by Willis O'Brien, Byron Crabbe and Larrinaga), and a very large French King Kong poster.
"It had sort of orange fur and was old and beat up," Burns said of the stand-in puppet. "My friends and I weren't fooled, of course. We know all the tricks, and it was obviously bogus."
A news crew filmed the fake Kong, believing that they were seeing the real deal, and the story went out on CBS. "I worked at CBS, and everyone at the network knew I had the real Kong. We did our own cut-in with the actual Kong in time for Dan Rather to make a correction. The Smithsonian just about died."
The fake Kong remained on the tour, however, with a plaque that was amended to read "This may have been the model...". Its current whereabouts are unknown, but don't be surprised - or fooled - if it turns up in the near future.3
Burns also owns an armature for Mighty Joe Young.
"It's smaller and lighter than Kong, but is considered to be the best armature ever designed and made. When Industrial Light and Magic was doing The Empire Strikes Back they borrowed Joe from me to study it while they built tauntauns."
Ray Harryhausen, who worked with Willis O'Brien on Mighty Joe Young, has since informed Burns that he has "Joe # 1," the model that OBie himself used.
"Roy looked at it and knew right away that it was '#1' because it has hinge joints. The newer armatures, including the other Joes used in the movie, had ball-and-socket joints; only OBie could deal with the tricky hinge joints and actually preferred them, so this one is his," Burns said.
Also in his collection, a scale "guide" model of the great wall and gates; the head of the Elasimosaurus that comes up out of the water in Kong's cave, and; a foot from the Kong model.
"I had one of the original programs from the premiere in 1933, but like an idiot I gave it away about 30 years ago," Burns recalls. "The guy cut it apart and sold pages at $100 apiece. It wouldn't hurt so much if he wouldn't have destroyed it."
If there were a way to assign a cash value to Burns' collection of Kong material, it would mean little to him. "I could never sell these artifacts," he said. In fact, much of the intrinsic value of Burns' items is derived from the spirit with which they were given to him. These treasures are in good hands.
In 1983, Burns joined a large group of craftsmen in the construction of a recreation of the long-gone Kong "big head" prop (see above) for exhibit at the 50th anniversary re-premiere of King Kong at Mann's (Graumann's) Chinese Theater. His wife, Kathy, created and constructed the large fur pattern needed to cover the bust, and the fruit of their labor stood in the east forecourt just as he did in 1933 at the first premiere. Kong was so authentic looking that several news reports indeed mis-identified it as the original prop. Sadly this giant bust is no longer exists, a victim of the elements and looters while in storage.
More Kong to come …
A version of this article was originally published on the KONG IS KING website circa 2004
Lesson: It pays to read the footnotes
Yes. THAT Robby the Robot.
The PBS show History Detectives investigated the model’s authenticity and merely suggested it may not be the one used in the 1933 film.
Great story, John! Love these slices of 'behind the scream.' Look forward to the next tale you have to tell!