This Cooper & Schoedsack series began with the silent work, presented last year in Sacile (Le Giornate del Cinema Muto). Now we reveal the sound films – including the legendary King Kong, and two John Ford’s masterpieces produced by Cooper. King Kong may seem far too familiar, but we guarantee that if you have seen the expedition films, it will have much more meaning (and humour).

The story so far; Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack were the most adventurous film-makers in Hollywood – although they were seldom in Hollywood. Cooper, an aviator in World War One who fought the Russians when they invaded Poland in 1919, was a journalist. Schoedsack, a front-line cameraman in France, became a cinematographer for expedition films. The two men joined forces to produce Grass (1925), an epic documentary on the migration of a Persian tribe. Its success astonished their distributors, Paramount, who sent them to Siam where they filmed Chang (1927), another sensation. Inspired themselves by Robert Flaherty, these men became an inspiration to others. After Chang, they wanted to make a film about starvation among American Indians, like The Silent Enemy. The project came to nothing, as did Cooper’s attempt to persuade the Rockefeller Foundation to finance him at $10,000 a year to develop the story-telling teaching film. Cooper turned to the challenges of civil aviation and Schoedsack made Rango in the jungles of Sumatra.

In New York, Cooper found life in the boardroom, an anti-climax after the thrill of picture-making, and he spent as much time as he could at the Explorers’ Club and the National Geographic Society, where the idea for King Kong began to take shape. Neither Paramount nor MGM wanted to participate, but Cooper knew David O. Selznick from The Four Feathers, and Selznick was interested. Cooper joined him at RKO in 1931. The company had been spending a great deal of time and money on a project called Creation, which was master-minded by Willis H. O’Brien – the genius who had achieved the dinosaur sequences for The Lost World (1925). The project was cancelled, but out of it came King Kong. Schoedsack left Paramount in 1932 and joined Cooper and O’Brien in the great adventure, which was then entitled The Eighth Wonder.

Kevin Brownlow – Photoplay Productions