Remembering King Kong (and Moviemaker Merian Cooper) 75 Years Later
Primatology’s loss was moviedom’s gain when, along about 1930, an overly neat maid tossed an 800-page monograph on baboons onto the fire, thus consigning Merian Caldwell Cooper’s careful research to the flames. Cooper, who’d been fascinated with apes all his life and had taken time from location scouting in Africa to do all that side work, apparently didn’t flinch, though neither did he ever try to reconstruct what had been lost.
Whether the maid kept her job, we do not know. But by all accounts, Merian Cooper was a man who seemed bent on racking up the life experiences of any dozen lesser souls, and yet treated his slower-moving brethren with due courtesy—the occasional communist or suspected fellow traveler aside.
Cooper’s life might make a film to put the Indiana Jones franchise to shame. He came from a Southern family that admired martial courage above all else; an ancestor had fought alongside the Polish cavalryman Kazimierz Pulaski in the Revolutionary War, and an old Confederate colonel who lived down the street told tales of fighting against Apaches and Yankees and Abyssinians, the last “the best soldier in the whole round world.”
Those tales proved influential. After service as an ace pilot in World War I—and spending time in a prisoner of war camp, from which he escaped—Cooper went off to volunteer for service with the Polish air force against the invading Bolsheviks. He was again captured and removed to the Soviet Union, where an American journalist who just also happened to be a spy helped his cause. That spy, Marguerite Harrison, was eventually caught—denounced to the Soviets by none other than Louise Bryant, to whom Diane Keaton lent such angelic visage in Warren Beatty’s film Reds.
Again Cooper escaped, and now he was ready for real adventure. He did a stint as a writer for the New York Times but, as Mark Vaz writes in his biography Living Dangerously, he “had other goals than to live out his life as an eyewitness and scribe to the ‘dingy horror’ of the news trade.” His head full of visions of a favorite novel, A. W. Mason’s Four Feathers, he made off for Abyssinia, met with the emperor, headed for the Andaman Islands and Borneo, and learned his way around a camera. Now in the company of budding filmmaker Ernest Shoedsack and Ms. Harrison, who had managed to get out of Russia, Cooper traveled to the Iranian desert to make what might be thought of as the first Discovery Channel film, a documentary of nomadic life called Grass.
The film, now on the National Film Registry, was a hit, as was a successor called Chang, its elephant stampede providing stock footage for many a jungle film to come. Then, after shooting his beloved Four Feathers, starring a young Fay Wray, Cooper showed a newly jobless producer named David O. Selznick a strange and immodest script for a film with a filmmaker hero who journeys off to the wilds and returns with the biggest ape the world had ever seen.
The film that resulted was King Kong, and with it all Hollywood was Cooper’s.
He made hay with that 1933 movie, which took filmgoers’ minds off the Great Depression and transported them into a world the likes of which they had never seen. With the capital thus accrued, he made other films as well, teaming up with John Ford as producer for a 20-year run of classics including The Lost Patrol, Fort Apache, and The Quiet Man and with Schoedsack for another strange gorilla movie, Mighty Joe Young, which gave a technician named Ray Harryhausen (who turned 88 last Sunday, and to whom we send birthday greetings) his first big break. Somehow, along the way, Cooper stole time enough to help found studios, production houses, and even a couple of airlines while roaming the war zones of the world.
Was Carl Denham, the showman lead of King Kong, Merian Cooper’s alter ego? Toward the end of his life, Cooper set to work on an autobiography that answered the question; he called it I’m King Kong. Seventy-five years after the birth of that great film, Merian Cooper, a filmmaker unlike any other, deserves remembrance and homage.
Watch the original trailer to King Kong below.
Written by Gregory McNamee on July 2nd, 2008 with
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Frederick Law Olmsted Remembered: The City as Garden
Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) designed the grounds of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., and other parts of that city; Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York; Belle Isle Park, in Michigan; portions of the campus of Stanford University near San Francisco, California; the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina; and many other instances of what might be called “mediated landscapes” throughout North America. Until recently, he was little remembered outside the textbooks, but he was famous in his own day, cheered as a pioneer of a particularly American kind of garden and landscape design.
Olmsted was a man of the city, and, though he loved the countryside, he labored first of all to make America’s cities—then grim, smoky, congested, and often dangerous places—more livable. (That remains a challenge for designers, planners, and environmentalists today.) Along the way, by bringing it within their reach, he instructed city dwellers in the pleasures and value of nature, incorporating a sense of the wild in all his designs. All this helped ease the way to the development of a national park system in the closing years of his life, and it is no accident that the greatest architect of that system, Theodore Roosevelt, was a New Yorker who admired what is perhaps Olmsted’s most famous creation, Central Park, and sought out his opinions on how to protect some of America’s most scenic places.
Like Roosevelt, Olmsted packed many careers, wide travel, and deep learning into a long life. He came from a good family, but he was restless, and his father worried that young Frederick, who showed indications of straying from respectable commerce into the arts, was destined to be a dabbler and wastrel. To prove him wrong, and to escape whatever remedy his father might try to apply—an apprenticeship or clerkship, perhaps—Olmsted signed on as a hand on a China-bound freighter, and he served his young years as a common sailor.
His shipboard service, which steered him into many storms and required backbreaking labor, convinced Frederick that the seafaring life was not for him. It did nothing to cure his wanderlust, however. He spent time in Europe, studying art and touring monuments and ruins. He managed, briefly and disastrously, a California gold mine. He crisscrossed the country many times over, writing reports and articles, and worked as an editor for the New York Daily Times and The Nation, where he polished the prose of Herman Melville and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Finally, during the Civil War, he became the administrator of a hospital unit, where he witnessed horrors and bureaucratic ineptitude.
His experiences in the war helped settle Olmsted somewhat. Having seen so much destruction, he was now determined to serve the cause of beauty. He developed a vision of America’s landscape, with its broad vistas and open skies, as a means of shaping the national character. He labored to make America’s urban spaces speak to that promise, bringing trees and scenery into the congested grid of urban streets. He inserted wilderness and pastoral settings into the heart of North American cities such as Montreal, Boston, and Chicago, preferring a small human scale and the randomness of real life to European public spaces, with their imposing architecture and nothing-out-of-place formal gardens.
His program of parks, broad avenues, and greenways would, Olmsted argued, serve a public good by connecting city dwellers to the natural world—and, more practically, by relieving the city’s grim monotony of concrete and metal. And he was right: New York without a Central Park would be a different, and far poorer, place.
It is worth looking at Central Park in detail, for it well illustrates Olmsted’s ideas on what a great public space should be. Working with and often arguing with a formally trained partner for the duration of the project, Olmsted insisted that lawns, trees, and water be the park’s three great elements, punctuated by small plantings of flowers rather than the great, elaborate flowerbeds favored in classic European landscape design. Olmsted used trees as a painter uses colors, mixing different species in different combinations against big, grassy foregrounds. That pleasure in mystery is reflected in Central Park’s playful, mazelike paths, glades, tunnels, and bridges, which enable dwellers in what is certainly America’s most crowded city to find little spots to get away from other people. His other urban parks fill much the same need, offering both private spaces for harried urbanites and large open areas where they could meet en masse to play, see sports events, listen to concerts, and enjoy the sun.
Olmsted also took away from his hospital experiences the notion that planning was the key to success. Whereas most Americans of his time lived from year to year, bound to the cycles of agriculture and business, he considered what his projects might look like a hundred years and more in the future. He carefully plotted the placement of statues, fountains, ponds, benches, and flowerbeds alike, and he drew and erased and measured and drew again before putting anything on the ground—a very good practice for any gardener or home-improvement buff to take up.
Olmsted insisted on being allowed to act independently to achieve his vision. His clients usually complied, though they didn’t always pay him on time. It is hard to imagine any designer being given as much autonomy today, for now endless commissions, interest groups, and municipal offices turn every project into a design by committee—which may be one reason why modern gardens, parks, and public spaces seem formulaic and uninteresting in comparison to his creations.
Written by Gregory McNamee on August 28th, 2008 with
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