FROM THE ARCHIVES: King Kong Lost and Found Part 1
The Path to Skull Island
As a youngster I was an enormous fan of King Kong. I spent the years preceding my adolescence absorbing all the King Kong trivia and background arcana that my young mind could hold. I read the countless "Best of the Horror Film" books available at the Wausau Public Library, courtesy of a kind librarian who saw a future obsessive reader in 11 year-old me, freeing me from the kids section and setting me loose in the main (“adult”) wing of the library.
I’ve come a long way! The work I did on a promotional blog for Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake got me an invitation to the premiere in New York. I also developed and co-wrote the book KONG: KING OF SKULL ISLAND. (Every now and then I get tiny royalty checks from the arcade game based on the book.) That’s not to mention the long-simmering EIGHTH WONDER (see The Denham Restoration Project for more details).
The New York premiere of the film was pretty amazing, to say the least. It was in multiple theaters, so I figured I’d be in one of the “adjunct” locations down the road.
Nope - I was obviously in the main theater, bumping into one famous person after another. The environment as seen through the eyes of a midwest nobody was, to say the least, magical — and the catalog of celebrities seated and milling about in the theater pre-show was unbelievable.1
I was standing by my seat, more than a bit starstruck, when suddenly I heard someone calling “John! John Michlig!”
Imagine how odd THAT was - - an auditorium full of famous people, and someone is yelling MY name?
I looked up into the main seats and saw Bob Burns standing and waving me in his direction. I wrote about Bob’s amazing fantasy/horror film collection and background in IT CAME FROM BOB’S BASEMENT, published in 2000. He was holding the original 1933 Kong armature — Jackson is a fellow “KONG geek,” so he had to have a treasure like that at the KONG premiere event (and by “treasure,” I mean Bob Burns every bit as much as the armature).
Bob waved his arm for me to come up to his seat, and when I got there, he grabbed the shoulder of the gentleman sitting next to him and said, “George! This is John Michlig.!”
Kudos to George Lucas(!) for standing, offering his hand, and greeting me as if I was “someone.”
Those were the days before iPhones, so you’ll have to take my word for it …
In the meantime, here’s a multi-part blast from the past.
A full decade before I ever actually viewed the classic 1933 King Kong, I knew that he had two heads.
Oh, yes - - there was the distinctive "long head" on Skull Island, and then the "round head" sported for his New York trip.
True Kong buffs will claim that the giant ape actually had three heads, counting the life-size mock-up used primarily for munching unfortunate natives and New Yorkers. I also knew, among other things, that the giant wall prop was burned for Gone With The Wind, and that the reported cost of the entire production was $513,242.02. (I saw an actual well-worn memo from the period with the two cents tacked on.)
As a youngster I was an enormous fan of King Kong. I spent the years preceding adolescence absorbing all the Kong trivia and background arcana that my young mind could hold. I read the countless "Best of the Horror Film" books available at the Wausau Public Library. I risked severe punishment by jostling loudly in my bed late one night until my weary dad let me watch an 11:30 showing of the truly awful King Kong Escapes on Channel 7 - on a school night! I took what Kong-related entertainment I could get; my house didn't have cable and VCR's were still a few years off.
This leads to my confession: I didn't actually see the original 1933 film until I was in college.
Not actually viewing King Kong didn't deter me from my quest for information, a mania further fueled by the discovery of The Making of King Kong by Orville Goldner and George E. Turner at my local bookstore.
It was filled with photos and sketches, and I read it cover-to-cover at least a half-dozen times.2 At the age of twelve I could explain a Dunning process shot and tell you how many miniatures were used in the Skull Island cavern sequence.
But I still hadn't seen the movie.
The fact is, I'd stick with any boring TV special if it promised to show even a five-second clip of Kong. One night when I was eight years old I stayed overnight at my friend Eric's house because a show promising clips from Kong was going to be on and he had cable. We made popcorn and sat on the floor waiting until I saw a full 17 seconds of the ape battling planes on the Empire State Building; a great memory.
In 1976 Dino De Laurentiis made his updated version of Kong to great bally-hoo. I saw that version six times before seeing the original.
I finally got the monkey off my back one evening at a friend's apartment. There were six people in the room, and I had to buy their complicity by supplying all of the beer - everyone else wanted to rent The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (we were, by the way, close enough to the then-legal drinking age of eighteen).
My fellow viewers stayed relatively quiet and tolerated my nearly one-comment-per-scene narration for the entire 100 minutes of the film.
Digging Deeper
Finally experiencing the 1933 King Kong film didn't end my lonely quest. I still needed answers. On the esoteric front, there's always the desire to get to bottom of why this film is so enduring and dear to the world. But I had detective-type problems on my mind as well:
If there were only two 14" Kong models made, why did I see and read separate reports of an aged, orange-tinted variety at a Smithsonian display; a metal skeleton advertised at a place called Movie World in Buena Park, California, and a fully put-together Kong at Circus World Museum in …. Baraboo, Wisconsin?!?3
Could Universal, bidding for rights in the early '70s, have made a better Kong update than De Laurentiis?
And, why the heck was Forry Ackerman, editor of “Famous Monsters of Filmland” magazine, selling bits of "Kong" foam and rubber for $150 a pop?
A safari, to be sure. With jaw set as squarely as Carl Denham's as he began his journey to Skull Island, I went out looking for that beauty of a beast.
Believe it or not, it starts in my very own home state.
Stay tuned for Part II (In which the Author hunts down the lost, misplaced, and mislabeled artifacts of King Kong)
Originally published on the KONG IS KING website circa 2004
Check out the Getty Images collection from that night. See what I mean?
I would eventually be set loose into the research archives of the authors, but that’s another story…
I grew up in Wisconsin, and learned about this armature via a tiny footnote on page 182 of a book called The Girl in the Hairy Paw that read as follows: “The other is owned by Clark Wilkinson of Baraboo, Wisconsin. Ed.”