Robots and Ape Suits Hit "pause" during the Kong-Allosaurus fight sequence just as Kong back-flips his opponent, and as you advance one frame at a time you'll get a look "behind the scenes;" three frames of film clearly reveal supporting rods holding the stop-motion figures in position for animating. Or watch Kong atop his mountain dwelling and freeze-frame that "flicker"; it's a position guide accidently left in-frame (see below). These can hardly be considered serious lapses, since movie audiences could scarcely perceive something so fleeting. In fact, sophistication of filmgoers hadn't advanced all that much since OBie fooled a Magicians Society meeting a decade earlier - people couldn't grasp the fact that they were watching small models. In the March 13, 1933 issue of Time magazine, a scale-impaired writer reports that King Kong was made with the aid of a robot 50 feet tall with "eyes as big as tennis balls." The very next month, Modern Mechanix and Inventions dutifully reported that Kong was a normal size actor in an ape costume; an animated series of photos were later cut into the hand of the ape to give the illusion of carrying Fay Wray (see clip from that article above). Much later, the Chicago Sun Times wrote that an actor named Ken Roady "really is King Kong." "I worked on that picture for more than a year, made $150 a week and never could get along with either Fay Wray or Robert Armstrong. They never realized how important I was to them, I guess," Roady explained.

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Here are the queries McGrath could remember :

• What was Denham's plan for his big show? "It seems that Kong breaking free in the theater was the only boffo entertainment - it saved the show! Like Daffy Duck's famous 'dynamite trick' in the Warner Bros. cartoon; great, but you can only do it once."
• Who cleaned up the mess on the ship during Kong's trip to New York?
• Why does that guy drive, nearly unprovoked, right into the side of the hotel at the beginning of Kong's rampage? "Did this driver feel that ramming his car into a brick wall would improve his lot in this situation?"
• What did Kong do with the other girls sacrificed to him by the natives?
• Who was the Son of Kong's mom?
• Why did the natives construct a wall big enough to keep out the prehistoric beasts of Skull Island, but include a door so massive that giant beasts could use it comfortably? "They take a girl out to the altar once a month and require a door five stories high? The answer to this question is another Warner's maxim; 'If we don't, we ain't got no picture.'"

King Kong has plot holes the great ape himself could walk through without stooping. To McGrath's list of incongruities, I add some of my own;

• The voyage to Skull Island took six weeks (according to a line of dialogue inquiring as to how many potatoes the Chinese cook had peeled in that period). Are we to believe that the hero, Bruce Cabot, required all that time to finally make his move on Ann Darrow? For that matter, are we to believe that Ann Darrow - a street urchin, as far as anyone could tell - was unmolested by the Venture's crew of sailors for that entire period of time?
• The voyage back to New York had to take at least a month as well. How did they feed Kong for that period? Where did they store the hundreds of gas bombs necessary to keep him sedated? How did they unload him at a New York port without attracting attention? What about permits?
• How come Kong could easily scale - one handed - buildings with tiny window ledges for fingerholds and not that relatively dinky wall back on Skull Island, behind which resided a veritable Whitman's Sampler of chewy natives?
• What possessed the two fleeing lovers, Ann and Jack, to "hide" in a hotel room with a window facing the street upon which Kong was rampaging?

Go ahead; play along at home.

An initial draft of the Kong screenplay was written by Edgar Wallace, a prolific writer of enormous fame in England brought over to the States by RKO to punch up some of their productions. According to his letters and journals, Wallace's work consisted of meetings and phone calls with producer Merian C. Cooper wherein Cooper fed aspects of the scenario to Wallace, who then incorporated them into screenplay form which was then reviewed by Cooper on a sequence-by-sequence basis. As Wallace noted in a December 29, 1931 journal entry:

When Wallace fell ill and died early in the process, Cooper assigned James A. Creelman to the project. Unsatisfied with Creelman's output, Cooper tapped Ruth Rose, a.k.a. Mrs. Ernest Schoedsack (the co-producer/co-director of Kong), to create the final script which enjoyed favorable reviews at the time of the film's release. Today, the dialogue comes across as hopelessly dated with an opening sequence consisting of a show-stopping parade of expository line readings (many would argue - - and evidently David O. Selznick did via memo - - that the first eight and a half minutes of the film could be excised without notice; better to pick it up from when Jack Driscoll accidentally biffs Ann on the deck of the Venture).

He-man actor Robert Armstrong is no help. His characterization of Carl Denham is vintage '30s film thespianism --- that is to say, stiff-shouldered shouting and reciting with minimal use of inflection or show of emotion. While any actor would be challenged by the stilted dialogue he's faced with ("Some big hard-boiled egg gets a look at a pretty face and, bang! He cracks up and gets sappy."), Armstrong conveys the impression throughout Kong that he has just poured milk on a bowl of cereal off-camera and would like to get back to it very soon.

Given the above handicaps --- now-quaint proclivities of early filmmaking that King Kong shares with every other film of its era --- it becomes rather obvious that this movie is not a masterpiece for its acting and dialogue. Rather, King Kong is a jewel in the crown of American cinema for the fact that its visual scope is so all-encompassing and unique. We never saw anything like it before and, frankly, haven't seen anything close since. The Japanese, for all their love for "radioactive giant" monster films, could never construct a vision so intimately frightening and sympathetic as Kong.

The credit for Kong's tremendous visual impact falls squarely with Willis O'Brien. OBie, as he was known, developed and raised to high art the process known as "stop-motion animation," a by-now familiar process by which the illusion of movement is conveyed on film via photographing incremental adjustments of models one frame at a time. Persistence of vision creates a sense of "life" when the film is played back. Early audiences were stunned, to say the least. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle exhibited excerpt of an early OBie film called The Lost World in 1922 at a dinner of the Society of American Magicians. The New York Times said of the dinosaurs portrayed, "If fakes, they were masterpieces."

Doyle is, of course, the same man who verily believed in fairies.

While putting together a film called Creation at RKO, OBie's work was noticed by Merian C. Cooper when he was brought aboard the barely-afloat RKO studio by David O. Selznick to decide which pictures should continue in development and which should be abandoned. The bad news; Creation was deemed expendable. The good news; Cooper felt that Obie and his techniques would be perfect for his new idea concerning a "prehistoric Giant Terror Gorilla." After a test reel was shown to RKO execs in 1932, the die was cast; Kong went into production, and its title character would be portrayed by a rubber, steel and glass puppet brought to life by a method that made filming three strides in the jungle an all day operation.

Stop-motion animation was a painstaking process, to say the least. During production, new bulbs had to be put into every light for each new scene; a burn-out would ruin the shot as a replacement of even slightly different intensity would be apparent in finished footage. Days of work were once wiped out when it was discovered during screenings that live plants in the "jungle" background actually grew and bloomed in "seconds" of on-screen time.

The Kong ape miniatures --- two were reportedly made, each 18" tall --- had to be "skinned" every evening by craftsman Marcel Delgado in order to keep the underlying armature's screws and hinges tight, accounting for the changes the apes face seemed to undergo from scene to scene.

Were these guys nuts?