King Kong is a business movie, like the Big Short and that one about Beanie Babies
This post is from my free email newsletter GROSS, in which I’m climbing the Hollywood ladder, from Traffic in Souls, 1913’s top-grossing movie, to the present day. King Kong was 1933’s biggest film and the first feature-length stop-motion monster movie.
On Skull Island, as on Manhattan Island, it’s all business. The first character we hear from in King Kong is a theatrical agent. Straight away we’re into a conversation about production insurance, the practical difficulties of making a film in the tropics and the demands of exhibitors and distributors.
Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong), film producer — actually a kind of Attenborough, specialising in docs from wild places — has assembled a crew (and a lot of weapons) on a ship in New York harbour. Someone told him there’s a huge ape, feared by the natives, on an uncharted island to the West of Sumatra — he’s acquired the only map. The situation’s got ‘hit movie’ written all over it. He’s got a track record for bringing impossible projects home, he just needs…
