The Apes of Wrath

by Richard Klaw

  Godzilla unfolds the map. On it are red marks. Above the red marks are listings: Nigger Town. Chink Village. White Trash Enclave. A Clutch of Queers. Mostly Democrats.

  Godzilla thinks about what he can do now. Unbidden. He can burn without guilt. He can stomp without guilt. Not only that, they’ll send him a check. He has been hired by his adopted country to clean out the bad spots as they see them.

  TWELVE: The Final Step

  Godzilla stops near the first place on the list: Nigger Town. He sees kids playing in the streets. Dogs. Humans looking up at him, wondering what the hell he’s doing here.

  Godzilla suddenly feels something move inside him. He knows he’s being used. He turns around and walks away. He heads toward the government section of town. He starts with the governor’s mansion. He goes wild. Artillery is brought out, but it’s no use, he’s rampaging. Like the old days.

  Reptilicus shows up with a megaphone, tries to talk Godzilla down from the top of the Great Monument Building, but Godzilla doesn’t listen. He’s burning the top of the building off with his breath, moving down, burning some more, moving down, burning some more, all the way to the ground.

  Kong shows up and cheers him on. Kong drops his walker and crawls along the road on his belly and reaches a building and pulls himself up and starts climbing. Bullets spark all around the big ape.

  Godzilla watches as Kong reaches the summit of the building and clings by one hand and waves the other, which contains a Barbie doll.

  Kong puts the Barbie doll between his teeth. He reaches in his coat and brings out a naked Ken doll. Godzilla can see that Kong has made Ken some kind of penis out of silly putty or something. The penis is as big as Ken’s leg.

  Kong is yelling, “Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. I’m AC/DC, you sonsofbitches.”

  Jets appear and swoop down on Kong. The big ape catches a load of rocket right in the teeth. Barbie, teeth and brains decorate the graying sky. Kong falls.

  Gorgo comes out of the crowd and bends over the ape, takes him in her arms and cries. Kong’s hand slowly opens, revealing Ken, his penis broken off.

  The flying turtle shows up and starts trying to steal Godzilla’s thunder, but Godzilla isn’t having it. He tears the top off the building Kong had mounted and beats Gamera with it. Even the cops and the army cheer over this.

  Godzilla beats and beats the turtle, splattering turtle meat all over the place, like an overheated poodle in a microwave. A few quick pedestrians gather up chunks of the turtle meat to take home and cook, ’cause the rumor is it tastes just like chicken.

  Godzilla takes a triple shot of rockets in the chest, staggers, goes down. Tanks gather around him.

  Godzilla opens his bloody mouth and laughs. He thinks: If I’d have gotten finished here, then I’d have done the black people too. I’d have gotten the yellow people and the white trash and the homosexuals. I’m an equal opportunity destroyer. To hell with the twelve-step program. To hell with humanity.

  Then Godzilla dies and makes a mess on the street. Military men tiptoe around the mess and hold their noses.

  Later, Gorgo claims Kong’s body and leaves.

  Reptilicus, being interviewed by television reporters, says, “Zilla was almost there, man. Almost. If he could have completed the program, he’d have been all right. But the pressures of society were too much for him. You can’t blame him for what society made of him.”

  On the way home, Reptilicus thinks about all the excitement. The burning buildings. The gunfire. Just like the old days when he and Zilla and Kong and that goon-ball turtle were young.

  Reptilicus thinks of Kong’s defiance, waving the Ken doll, the Barbie in his teeth. He thinks of Godzilla, laughing as he died.

  Reptilicus finds a lot of old feelings resurfacing. They’re hard to fight. He locates a lonesome spot and a dark house and urinates through an open window, then goes home.

  THE MEN IN THE MONKEY SUIT

  Mark Finn

  Hollywood, the primary twentieth-century architect for the popular misconceptions of great apes, exploited many of the common falsehoods about simian behavior. They quite successfully reduced the chimpanzee to little more than a parodic stand-in for humans; made the orangutan a comic relief figure; and cast the gorilla in the role of the heavy, or the monster.

  In the Golden Age of Hollywood, there were no such things as special effects, not in the way we understand them today. Computer-generated imagery was light-years away. If a director wanted a fantastic creature on the screen, they had to build it and film it. Monsters were either animated by hand, on paper articulated puppetry, inch by madding inch at a time. Stop-motion animation may have been preferable for simulating dynamic movements and scale, but it was expensive and time-consuming. Thus, getting an ape on the big screen was best accomplished by the judicious application of a man in a suit. While fashioning a gorilla suit may have been a big undertaking, it was well within the means of a specialized kind of man—the kind of man who didn’t mind spending all day in a sixty-five pound, blazing hot suit, who seemed to get a genuine thrill in disappearing under the mountains of latex and yak hair to become something other than himself, who recognized a specific need in his rarefied industry and stepped in to fill it—a job only a handful of men in the history of film ever performed. They are collectively, if not colloquially, known as the Gorilla Men.

  There were, all in all, less than a dozen men in the history of Hollywood who made a living wage playing great apes. Some of them were aloof and secretive, while others were extremely giving of their time and talents, even going so far as to encourage and recruit replacements for themselves as age and poor health took their toll on their careers. Despite the seeming constant demand for a gorilla, either as the subject of some mad scientist’s demonic whim, or as a companion to the villainous witch doctor in a twelve-chapter serial, only a few men possessed the physical strength and stamina as well as the mental (and possibly even emotional) desire to suit up and spend twelve hours under blistering hot Klieg lights with little assistance from the cast and crew.

  It was long, lonely work; there was no fraternity of fellow day-laborers like the legendary stuntmen enjoyed. Most gorilla men weren’t a part of the fledgling make-up departments of the new Hollywood studios—they were actually paid the same as day-laborers. They were gunslingers, after a fashion. One day at a time. One day on the Columbia lot, two days on the Republic lot, and then nothing for a week. Most gorilla men had second jobs, or used their ape suits to bolster their income when work on the lots was scarce.

  Gorilla suits had been in play as early as 1918, when anonymous actors in suits populated the background in Tarzan of the Apes, starring Elmo Lincoln. The suits were crude, and so were the actors’ performances. Aside from jumping up and down or sitting hunched over on tree limbs, no effort was made to portray a real ape.

  The first and, many say, the greatest, recognized gorilla man was Charles Gemora. Like so many of the Golden Age of Hollywood’s luminaries, Gemora was an immigrant from the Philippines who literally smuggled himself to Los Angeles in 1920, where his skills as an artist were noticed by someone at Universal. At the age of seventeen, he went to work in their art department as a sculptor, working on a number of famous sets (including the Opera House for Lon Chaney’s version of The Phantom of the Opera). He sculpted his first gorilla suit in 1927 for a film adaptation of the play, The Gorilla, while working in the make-up department. By 1928, he’d made a suit for himself, the first of many, and landed the gorilla chores in The Leopard Lady. It was destined to be.

  Gemora set the gold standard for what the job entailed. He traveled to the San Diego Zoo, one of the only places back then with a gorilla in captivity, and studied the gorilla’s movements. A natural mimic, Gemora picked up on the great ape’s walk, the way his arms swung out beside him, and more.

  His original suit was made by hand, and to fill out his slim, short frame, it was stuffed with kapok, a fibrous plant material used for mattress ticking.
Including the underpads Gemora wore to bulk up his 5’4” frame, the suit weighed sixty-five pounds, and thanks to the kapok, trapped his body heat and turned the suit into a pressure cooker. Later, he created more sophisticated apparatus that included water-filled bladders in the stomach of the suit to give a more realistic sway and jiggle, along with improved sculpting on the face and hands. Gemora also used arm extensions for shots when he would be walking in the suit, to better sell the illusion of true apelike proportions.

  All of this attention to detail, coupled with Gemora’s stirring performances in the suit, earned him the title “The King of the Gorilla Men.” He continued his job at Universal, moving into the make-up department, and in his later years became head of make-up for Paramount. He made close to two dozen screen appearances as a gorilla, including the early exploitation flick, Ingagi, one of the great-grandfathers of today’s “shocking true stories shot on videotape.” The film was allegedly a documentary about a tribe in the jungle that offered up their women as mates for the gorillas, whom they worshiped. Gemora played the titular gorilla, but because of the nature of the production, denied any involvement in the film until the Hayes office got involved and shut the picture down. Despite that little setback, Ingagi grossed two million dollars in 1931.

  Gemora’s oft-cited best role, according to most experts, is 1941’s The Monster and the Girl, wherein he plays a gorilla with a man’s brain. Ignoring the terrible science, Gemora managed to capture the pathos and the power of the great apes, often by using only his eyes, the only visible part of his own face.

  Gemora managed to keep Universal stocked with gorillas at a moment’s notice, but what about the other studios? Republic and Monogram were two of the largest perpetrators of the “cliffhanger” serials, full of derring-do, endless fights, raucous stunts, and unbelievable villains of every stripe. And where there were villains, especially in the jungle epics, there were bound to be gorillas, mostly played by one man.

  What Ray “Crash” Corrigan lacked in finesse, he made up for in enthusiasm. A tall, handsome man, he entered the movies as a stuntman and a gorilla man in the early 1930s, and even had the privilege of doubling Johnny Weissmuller on Tarzan and his Mate, in 1934. He also played the part of the gorilla (uncredited at the time) for the production. Crash had a suit made to his specifications, including some creative modifications to the interior armature for the head and jaw that allowed the gorilla face to “snarl” when the jaw was opened past a certain point, triggering the second set of springs and levers. Crash also made a second gorilla suit, for use in the old chestnut of someone dressing up as a gorilla as part of a harebrained scheme, and then his partner encounters a real gorilla and thinks it’s the guy in the suit. Hilarity ensures, naturally. Crash even had a white gorilla suit built for one of his more memorable roles, White Pongo.

  Around the same time that Crash was appearing in such interesting films as 1936’s Darkest Africa, he was hired as a contract player at Republic Pictures to star as one of the affable cowboys in The Three Mesquiteers series. This long-running series of “B” westerns was a Saturday matinee staple and ran for three years, making Crash Corrigan a hit with junior cowboys everywhere. There was just one nagging problem: the studio forbade Corrigan to play gorillas under his own name. They were trying to create a brand with Crash and didn’t want this strange sideline to sully their efforts. Crash had no intention of giving up this lucrative sideline that he genuinely enjoyed doing, so he cut a deal with them: he could keep playing gorillas as long as he was never credited. As a result, it’s not really clear how many appearances Crash made in the suit, but any time you see “...And...Pongo!” alongside the still of the gorilla, it’s a good bet Crash is wearing the suit.

  Corrigan did well for himself. He made a lot of money doing westerns and invested in a large swath of land in the Southern California scrub, upon which he built a replica western town and dubbed the place “Corriganville.” One of the area’s first theme parks, he staffed the place with old actors and stuntmen and put on wild west shows for the kids, and later in the fledgling era of television, rented the entire space out for productions. Crash continued playing gorilla until failing health and a life lived hard took their toll on him. In 1948 he sold the suits to a bartender he knew who wanted to break into movies, Steve Calvert, and taught him some of the signature moves, and passed his legacy forward.

  Calvert was another big strapping guy and he led a short but distinguished career behind the mask, appearing in some of the most infamous gorilla movies of all time. These magnum opuses included, but were not limited to: Bride of the Gorilla (1951), Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952), Panther Girl of the Kongo (1955), and The Bride and the Beast (1958), directed by none other than Ed Wood, Jr.

  Another prominent gorilla man who trod the same soundstages as Calvert was George Barrows. The son of silent-era actor Henry Barrows, George was a world-class fencer, and in demand as a stuntman and extra. Again, there are no records of what caused him to take such a bizarre career turn, but he took a leaf out of Gemora’s playbook and built his suit from scratch. He was widely used in film and television, appearing on a number of classic television episodes in the fifties and sixties. Barrows’ apex (some would say his nadir) was the god-awful Robot Monster (1953) wherein he plays the eponymous robot by attaching a modified diving helmet atop his regular gorilla suit. There is no explanation, and if there were, I doubt it would satisfy. Fortunately, Barrows’ television work on The Addams Family, F Troop, Adventures of Superman, The Beverly Hillbillies, and many others create a far more watchable, if not reasonable, accounting of his time in the suit.

  There were many others, of course. Bob Burns made a number of fast and loose, low-budget film appearances as Kogar the Gorilla at the same time that he was collecting discarded props and models from the various studios. Burns made live appearances as “the gorilla” in spook shows and special events held by the Los Angeles movie theaters. Considered the foremost authority on the subject of gorilla men, he tracked down Gemora, chronicling the elderly man’s accomplishments in the field. Burns dubbed him the “King of the Gorilla Men.” In his own gorilla suit, he is best remembered as the super-intelligent primate Tracy from the 1975 Saturday morning live-action show The Ghost Busters.

  Another gorilla man who performed both on and off stage was Emil Van Horn. This handsome, compact performer was extremely secretive about his gorilla suit; he never discussed where he got it, who made it, or its operation. And what a strange suit it was! Van Horn’s suit was known for his long arm extensions and a more chimp-like performance. His head featured a secondary trigger in the mouth to draw the lips up in a snarl. Van Horn started out in Vaudeville, appearing on stage as a “live” gorilla. Aside from a few bit parts, he only played apes during his film career. When jobs in Hollywood were scarce, Van Horn would play an ape in burlesque houses in what was known as a “beauty and the beast” act. The scrub work paid well, and Van Horn continued to appear more and more as the foil for the beautiful stripper and less on the silver screen as a gorilla man. His threadbare suit was eventually stolen by persons unknown, and he moved to Florida, where he died, alone and broke. His most famous role onscreen was in the 1942 cliffhanger serial Perils of Nyoka as the villainous Satan.

  As technology became more elaborate, it was possible to make better gorilla suits. One of the most technically proficient gorilla men ever is Rick Baker. Even if he hadn’t played the great ape in the not-so-great 1976 Dino De Laurentiis King Kong remake, he would still make the list for his impressive make-up contributions. His Kong suit featured a host of cable-controlled armatures for a wide range of expressions, a first in the field. These were improved upon in 1984’s Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, and again in 1988 when he created full body, realistic gorilla suits for Gorillas in the Mist. Baker, like so many filmmakers of his generation, credited King Kong as a seminal influence adding to his lifelong fascination with apes. In 1998, he created the gorilla f
or the remake of Mighty Joe Young, and completely and convincingly redesigned the iconic ape make-ups for Tim Burton’s 2001 “re-interpretation” of Planet of the Apes.

  There were, of course, even more gorilla men who performed a role once or twice. These men came to the profession through unknown means, and left for a variety of reasons. Janos Prohashka is best remembered for his television work in shows like The Outer Limits and Star Trek, where he battled William Shatner as the Mugato. He and his son’s lives were sadly cut short in a plane crash in 1974. Don McLeod was a noted mime who donned a gorilla suit for several films in the late seventies and early eighties, most notably in the movie Trading Places. Peter Elliott was a gifted mimic who made a career out of playing the gorilla underneath Rick Baker’s fantastic gorilla suits in King Kong Lives, Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, and Gorillas in the Mist. Elliott brought natural, realistic moves to his performances and convinced millions of moviegoers that the actors were working alongside real apes.

  Baker may indeed be the last of his kind, working with concrete materials such as yak hair, latex, and remote-controlled cables. As digital filmmaking and computer-generated imagery have gradually taken over the process, filmmakers have experienced a creative freedom unlike anything seen before in the history of movies. If you can imagine it, it can be built into a computer and animated. However, when it comes to certain creatures, directors have wisely concluded that you get a much better performance when you put a man into the suit—even if the suit is digital.

  Andy Serkis is the latest man to wear the moniker of gorilla man. But Serkis has an advantage that no other gorilla man ever had: absolute freedom of movement because he’s not in a gorilla suit. Rather, he wears a skin tight motion-capture suit, allowing the digital camera to pick up key movement points on his body. These are then scanned into a computer and the all-digital gorilla “suit” is drawn around the motion points. The result is a digital subject with incredibly lifelike movements.