Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  By June 1900, the whole country was overrun with bands of Boxers. Christian villages were destroyed and hundreds of native converts massacred near Peking. The city itself was in turmoil, with murder and pillage daily occurrences and the foreign embassies under siege.

  Finally, in August, an international army of 12,000 French, British, American, Russian, German, and Japanese troops invaded China and fought its way to Peking. There, the troops not only brought relief to their imperiled countrymen, but also looted the Emperor’s Palace and slaughtered innumerable Chinese without inquiring too closely whether they belonged to the “Harmonious Fists” or just happened to be passing by. The invading nations also forced China to pay an indemnity of $320 million and to grant further economic concessions. All this actually spurred the reform movement, which culminated with the Sun Yat-Sen revolution in 1911.

  Women blink nearly twice as much as men.

  Thus did a journalistic hoax make history. Of course, the Boxers might have been sparked into violence in some other fashion, or built up to it of their own accord. But can we be sure? The fake story may well have been the final necessary ingredient. A case could even be made that the subsequent history of China, right up to the present, might have been entirely different if those four reporters had been less inventive that Saturday night in the Hotel Oxford bar.

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  And Now It’s Time For A Little…WEIRD MUSIC

  Here are some real (no kidding) albums you can get:

  • “Music to Make Automobiles By”

  Volkswagen made this recording “to inspire their workers.” It features the sounds of an auto assembly line backed with an orchestra.

  Not to be confused with:

  • “Music to Light Your Pilot By,” from the Heil-Quaker Corporation (a heater and air-conditioner manufacturer),

  • “Music to Relax By in Your Barcalounger”

  • “Music to Be Murdered By” (from Alfred Hitchcock)

  • “The American Gun: A Celebration In Song”

  A late-night TV special, not available in stores. Rage International offered this country music classic with a free oiled plastic rifle case. Songs include: “Thank You, Smith & Wesson,” “America Was Born with a Gun in Her Hand,” “Never Mind the Dog, Beware the Owner,” and the ever-popular “Gun Totin’ Woman.”

  Most married men sleep on the right side of the bed. Divorced men often switch to the left.

  KING KONG

  King Kong was one of the most influential movies of all time. As both entertainment and a vehicle for special effects, it ivas unsurpassed. Even its promotion foreshadowed modern advertising techniques. We all know the character, but few of us know anything about how the film was made.

  PART I: ADVENTURE FILMS

  The early 1900s were years of discovery in which transcontinental railroads, steamships, and airplanes were opening up the last unexplored corners of the world.

  • In 1909 U.S. explorer Robert Peary became the first person to reach the North Pole.

  • In 1911 Roald Amundsen was the first to step foot on the South Pole.

  • In 1927 Charles Lindbergh made the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to Paris.

  Thanks to the new medium of motion-picture film, it was now possible for explorers to take cameras with them and bring back footage of an exotic world that audiences at home would otherwise never see.

  The Partners

  Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack were part of the new breed of filmmaker/explorer. Cooper, a former fighter pilot, and Schoedsack, a combat photographer, had met during World War I. In 1925 they reunited and traveled to Persia (now Iran) to film a feature-length documentary about the migration of 50,000 Bhaktiari tribesmen over a 12,000-foot mountain range and across the Karun river in search of grazing land for their herds.

  Even today, the film—called Grass—is considered a classic. “The crossing of the torrential Karun river,” Eric Barnow writes in Documentary, “with loss of life among men, women, children, goats, sheep, donkeys, and horses, provided one of the most spectacular sequences ever put on film.”

  Cooper and Schoedsack followed up with Chang, a film about tribal life in the remote jungles of Siam (now Thailand). Like Grass, it was a critical success that also made money at the box office. One critic called it “the most remarkable film of wild beast life that has reached the screen….Man-eating tigers, furious elephants in thundering stampedes, leopards, bears, monkeys, snakes, and other animals are shown in…one tense thrill after another.”

  If a female ferret goes into heat and can’t find a mate, she’ll die.

  Chang was popular with theater audiences, but theater owners complained that the movie would have played to larger audiences if it had contained a love story. Cooper took their message to heart.

  PART II: GORILLA MY DREAMS

  In 1929 Cooper and Schoedsack split up: Cooper stayed in New York to tend to his investments in the fledgling aviation industry; Schoedsack and his wife shot another film in the Dutch East Indies.

  While he was stuck behind his desk in New York, Cooper began reading up on the newly discovered Komodo dragons. The world’s largest species of lizards, they are found in only one place on earth: the island of Komodo in the South Pacific.

  The Island That Time Forgot

  The dragons gave Cooper the idea for another film, set on an imaginary island “way west of Sumatra.” It would be about modern man’s discovery of the island, and an encounter with huge “prehistoric” animals there. As the plot developed in Cooper’s imagination, he explained,

  I got to thinking about the possibility of there having been one beast, more powerful than all the others and more intelligent. Then the thought struck me—what would happen to this highest representative of prehistoric animal life in our materialistic, mechanistic civilization? Why not place him at the pinnacle of the tallest building, symbol in steel, stone and glass of modern man’s achievement and aspiration, and pit him against modern man?

  Evolutionary Thinking

  That central character, Cooper decided, should be a gigantic ape. An ape would be better at approximating human emotions than an elephant or dinosaur.

  He wrote up a proposal for the film in 1931 and pitched it to Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He suggested filming the jungle scenes on location in Africa and on Komodo Island, and casting a real ape in the lead—a character he named “Kong.” The studios liked the concept, but the Great Depression was underway, and they refused to risk so much money on a film that relied on animal actors and expensive on-location filming. Cooper put the idea aside.

  More than 25 percent of the world’s forests are in Siberia.

  PART III: THE SPECIAL EFFECTS MAN

  In 1932 David Selznick, head of production at RKO studios, hired Cooper as his executive assistant. Like many Hollywood studios in the 1930s, RKO was on the verge of bankruptcy. Cooper’s job was to help Selznick review studio projects to see which ones were likely to make money, and which ones should be scrapped.

  One project that Cooper looked over was test footage from Creation, a movie about shipwrecked sailors who land on an island of prehistoric animals. The dinosaur footage was created by Willis O’Brien, a former cowboy, prize-fighter, and newspaper cartoonist who was now a pioneer in trick photography,

  Stop-Motion Animation

  As a feature film, Creation didn’t work because the footage was boring—Cooper called it “just a lot of animals walking around”—and there wasn’t much of a plot. But Cooper was still amazed by what he saw: the dinosaurs were lifelike and huge, and the backdrops were incredibly realistic.

  It turned out that the creatures were less than eight inches tall. O’Brien had made the footage with miniature models on a tabletop in his garage, using a procedure called “animation in depth” (now known as stop-motion animation). O’Brien filmed the animation frame by frame: he took pictures of his models, then moved them slightly and photographed them again. He r
epeated this painstaking process again and again, 24 times for each second of animation. When played back at ordinary speed, the models appeared to move by themselves.

  O’Brien also knew how to combine the footage with human action sequences, making it appear as if dinosaurs and humans were in the same scenes.

  Greek temples were originally painted in bright colors; time has just bleached them white.

  Cooper had stumbled onto someone who could actually make his Kong movie work. With animation in depth, he wouldn’t need a real ape, and he wouldn’t need to film on location—he could film all of the ape sequences right on O’Brien’s workbench for a fraction of the original cost.

  PART IV: GOING APE

  RKO agreed to pay for a test reel of animation footage showing Kong in action, and O’Brien’s assistant, Marcel Delgado, was assigned the task of designing the ape model that would make or break the film. Cooper told him to make it look somewhat human, so audiences would feel sorry for it at the end of the movie.

  The first model was apelike, but still too human; so was the second model. So Cooper changed his instructions. “I want Kong to be the fiercest, most brutal, monstrous damned thing that has ever been seen.” O’Brien argued that if the ape was too apelike, no one would sympathize with it, but Cooper disagreed. “I’ll have women crying over him before I’m through, and the more brutal he is, the more they’ll cry at the end.”

  What a Doll!

  The test Kong was 18 inches high and covered with sponge rubber muscles and trimmed rabbit fur. “I never was satisfied with the fur,” Delgado later recalled, “because I knew it would show the fingerprints of the animators.” (He was right—even in the finished film, Kong’s fur “bristles” as if it is being blown by the wind; an unintentional effect caused by the animators’ fingers disturbing the fur as they move the model between shots.)

  RKO executives watched the footage…and immediately commissioned the film. Cooper called Schoedsack in, and the two became partners again.

  PART V: WRITE ON

  Finding someone to write a satisfactory script proved as hard as building a good ape: The first writer died of pneumonia before he could start work, and the second couldn’t figure out how to make some of the key parts of the plot seem believable, such as how Kong gets to New York.

  Q: Whose song is sweeter, the male or female canary? A: Male. Female canaries can’t sing.

  Finally Schoedsack turned to a real adventurer to write the story: his wife Ruth Rose. She had never written a screenplay in her life, but her travel experiences as an explorer made her perfect for the job. “Put us in it,” Cooper and Schoedsack told her. “Give it the spirit of a real Cooper-Schoedsack expedition.”

  The Story

  The finished version of the story did just that: it featured a crazed documentary filmmaker named Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) who learns of Skull Island from a Norwegian skipper and plans an expedition to the island to make the ultimate travel-adventure film. With him on the voyage is Ann Darrow (Fay Wray), a beautiful but desperate young woman he rescues from the mean streets of New York City only hours before the ship sets sail. Hired to add “love interest” to the documentary, Darrow delivers more than expected when she capture’s Kong’s heart.

  PART VI: SPECIAL EFFECTS

  Like the Star Wars films that would follow four decades later, King Kong was a milestone in special effects filmmaking. Willis O’Brien and his crew performed camera miracles the like of which no one had ever seen.

  Making the Monkey

  All of the ape sequences were made using models. There isn’t a single man-in-an-ape-suit scene in the entire film (although at least two actors would later claim to have been the “man inside Kong”).

  O’Brien and Delgado made the ape footage in total secrecy, with only Cooper, Schoedsack, and top RKO executives allowed to monitor their progress. The secret was kept for several years after the film was released, and few people had any idea at all how the ape scenes had been created. One rumor had it that RKO had built a full-sized, walking robot ape that was controlled by several men who rode inside. The reality was much different.

  #1 holiday for telephone calls: Mother’s Day. #1 holiday for collect calls: Father’s Day.

  Kong was billed as a 50-foot-tall ape. Actually, he was portrayed as much smaller than that in the film.

  • The ape model used in the jungle scenes was only 18 inches tall; the one used in the Empire State Building scenes was 24 inches tall.

  • Since the modelers were working on a scale of 1 inch as equaling 1 foot, that means Kong was 18 feet tall in the jungle and 24 feet tall in the city.

  Why the difference in sizes? Cooper wanted Kong large enough to be terrifying, yet small enough to take a believable love interest in tiny Fay Wray. Eighteen feet was initially set as the standard…but when work began on the Empire State Building scenes, he and Schoedsack saw that Kong looked too small against the skyscrapers. “We realized we’d never get much drama out of a fly crawling up the tallest building in the world,” Schoedsack said later.

  You Big Ape

  There were no full-scale models of the complete ape, although the studio did make full-size models of the body parts that had contact with human actors. A huge hand suspended from a crane was made to lift Fay Wray aloft; and a huge foot and lower leg were made for the scenes in which Kong stomps natives to death.

  The most complicated piece of all was the full-sized head-and-shoulders model, which was made of a wood and metal skeleton covered with rubber and carefully trimmed bearskins. The plaster and balsa wood eyeballs were as large as bowling balls, and the mouth, complete with a full set of huge balsa wood teeth, opened wide enough for Kong to chew on the natives.

  The head-and-shoulders unit was large enough to hold the three men who controlled Kong’s facial expressions using levers and compressed-air hoses connected to the movable mouth, lips, nostrils, eyes, eyelids, and eyebrows.

  PART VII: THE VOICE

  Sound effects were also a challenge: in some scenes Kong roared for as long 30 seconds, and though RKO had a sound effects library with more than 500,000 different animal sounds, even the longest elephant roars only lasted 8 seconds.

  Americans throw away an estimated 27% of their food every year.

  RKO sound man Murray Spivack went to the zoo at feeding time to get his own sounds. He got Kong’s sounds from the lion and tiger cages, as he later recounted:

  The handlers would make gestures like they were going to take the food away from them and we got some pretty wild sounds. Then I took some of these roars back to the studio and put them together and played them backward. I slowed them down, sort of like playing a 78-rpm record at 33, until the tone was lowered one octave, then I re-recorded it. From this we took the peaks and pieced them together. We had to put several of these together in turn to sustain the sound until Kong shut his mouth, because Kong’s roars were many times longer than those of any living animal.

  For the affectionate sounds Kong makes when he’s with Ann Darrow, Spivack grunted into a megaphone, then slowed the recording down until he thought it sounded like a big ape.

  PART VIII: THE SCENERY

  Their revolutionary approach to special effects included innovation with scenery. The “location” sequences were filmed on miniature sets that used a combination of special effects:

  • The background details were painted on glass.

  • Objects in the foreground, such as trees, rocks, and logs, were modeled in miniature using clay, wire, and even toilet paper.

  • Sometimes the human footage (a person crouching in a cave, for example) was shot in advance. Then, in a process known as “miniature projection,” a tiny screen would be set up in the tabletop jungle set where the ape animation was filmed. The human footage was then projected onto the screen frame by frame, making it seem as if the cave was part of the jungle. In the finished film, Kong appears to be towering over someone hiding in a cave.

  PART IX: KONG O
N THE RAMPAGE!

  Cooper and Schoedsack wanted a powerful, one-word title for their film, so they named it Kong. But David Selznick was afraid that Kong would be mistaken for just another travel film (like Grass or Chang). So just before the film was released, he changed the name to King Kong.

  America’s favorite vegetable: broccoli. America’s least favorite veggie: Brussels sprouts.

  When work on the film began, everyone in Hollywood thought it would fail. But when RKO showed the finished film to theater owners, the response was so enthusiastic that the studio launched the biggest promotional campaign in its history. “THE PICTURE DESTINED TO STARTLE THE WORLD!,” advertisements blared in national magazines.

  The promotions paid off—in New York City, King Kong was booked at both the Radio City Music Hall and the New Roxy, the city’s two largest theaters, with a total of more than 10,000 seats.

  Even that wasn’t enough. It made no difference that the Depression was on—as Goldner and Turner write in The Making of King Kong, “in the first four days of its run, King Kong set a new all-time world attendance record for any indoor attraction, bringing in $89,931….To accommodate the crowds it was necessary to run ten shows daily.”

  The movie made so much money that it lifted RKO out of debt for the first time in its history.

  PART X: CENSORING KONG

  By the time King Kong was re-released in 1938, the Hays Office and its infamous Production Code controlled Hollywood, and the film had to be re-edited before it could be shown in theaters. Censors removed all of the scenes of Kong stomping the natives to death, chewing them in his teeth, and dropping a woman (played by 19-year-old Sandra Shaw, Gary Cooper’s future wife) off the side of a hotel building after he mistakes her for Fay Wray.