Even more monkey business
SUGANDHI RAVINDRANATHAN
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Can Peter Jackson's `King Kong,' releasing today pull Hollywood out of the doldrums?
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HOMAGE Peter Jackson, obsessed with King Kong as a boy, has stayed close to the original classic.
If there's anything the movie business fears, it's the kid with his play station and Blackberry who can doom a monstrously budgeted film with an MMS before going back to read his favourite blog.
This is a century where entertainment need not entail an expedition to the multiplex, pricey tickets, and soggy popcorn. Hollywood studios and their well-greased publicity machines have been sweating a bit of late thanks to a slew of hyped up bad films that have had audiences voting speedily with their feet. (An abomination that immediately comes to mind is Mr. and Mrs. Smith.) And who else will they look to for a happy ending but the King of the Rings, Peter Jackson, who has come up with Version 0.3 of King Kong?
The film is personal for the director who saw a TV rerun of the 1933 original in his native New Zealand as a nine-year-old. The precocious Jackson was so impressed he set about remaking it on Super 8 with his mother's old stole, which provided the gorilla's fur, and a cardboard cut out of the Empire State Building. The project was never completed, of course.
But his subsequent attempt — over three hours long and on a budget of $207 millions of Universal's money (exceeding the original estimate by $32 millions) — is being released throughout the country today by Paramount Pictures. It has also been dubbed in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu.
Like the campy original, King Kong is set during the Depression. A starving, out-of-work vaudeville actress, Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), is conned by hustler-filmmaker Carl Denham (Jack Black) into taking the place of the heroine who has dumped him. Darrow looks the part, and more important, fits into the already stitched costumes. Carl has to, by sundown, get the crew to board the Singapore-bound tramp steamer, S. S. Venture, so as to complete his adventure film. What the crew doesn't know is that the ship is bound not for Singapore, but the foggy, primordial Skull Island.
Peter Jackson set his film in the 1930s because: "I think that there's no real sense of mystery or discovery in the world anymore today. Yet in the 1930s, you could believe that there was one tiny, unchanged corner that hadn't been discovered by man yet... this one tiny, little speck of an island on the ocean that could have slipped through the net."
In fact, Jackson did contemplate making `King Kong' a good decade before. But there was competition in the likes of other big ape films such as Mighty Joe Young and Godzilla and Universal put it on hold.
Jackson then consoled himself with a project that would occupy the next several years of his life (helping him shed 70 pounds en route): the Rings trilogy. He then returned to King Kong, but with a different perspective. As he put it: "One of the lessons we learned with the Rings movies was the more fantastical your story, the more you should try to ground it in the reality of the world."
Jackson picked Naomi Watts after he saw her in David Lynch's `Mulholland Drive' (a mutilated version was aired on cable TV here). Her character Ann Darrow signs on with Carl Denham only after she learns that a committed playwright, Jack Driscoll (the Oscar-winning Adrien Brody), is writing the screenplay.
For those who don't know the story, the crew turns up at Skull Island where the natives kidnap Darrow and offer her as sacrificial bride to appease the 25-ft Kong that has been terrorising them. The white woman fascinates the gorilla, which hitherto has been fed on a diet of local women. Kong battles all sorts of dinosaurs which are also interested in Darrow, but as nourishment. Meanwhile the film crew is on a rescue mission and captures the ape. Kong is ceremoniously brought to New York as a showpiece, escapes, clambers up the Empire State building, is attacked by biplanes, and dies.
Jackson's Kong, when not CGI (computer-generated imagery), is Andy Serkis in a monkey suit. The original movie, which still has a cult following, impressively used available special effects, including the stop motion technique where miniatures were moved a teeny-weeny bit, filmed, moved again, filmed, and so on. It also had a daring scene (apart from other rape imagery) where Kong strips Darrow (Fay Wray, who was known as the Queen of Scream for her remarkable display of lung power) lying unconscious in his palm.
The main strands in the movie are the clash of nature and civilisation, the end of a way of life, and sexual repression. Despite Kong's protective love for her, Darrow can never be his mate. It is not technology that kills Kong but his unrequited love for the diminutive blonde. Indeed it is beauty that kills the beast.
The original movie, co-directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, with soaring music by Max Steiner, was a runaway hit, pulling RKO out of bankruptcy. Will Jackson's uber-ape yank Hollywood out of the doldrums?
Trivia
Like the original movie, the Empire State Building was also built during the Depression. The 102-storeyed building was completed in a phenomenal 410 days. After the razing of the World Trade Center, it is back to being the tallest building in NYC.
There was a 1976 version of King Kong in which Jessica Lange made her debut. The movie was initially panned by critics. But later reviews were more charitable towards the actors who hammed away gloriously.
The 1976 version had slimy oil tycoons instead of the film crew. In New York, Kong shimmied up the WTC instead of the Empire State Building.
There was a 1986 sequel that had a lady Kong romancing the King. It starred Linda Hamilton who powered her way through the first two Terminators.
The Japanese loved to pit Kong against Godzilla and routinely made films in which the two grappled.
Our own Dara Singh occasionally wrestled with an adversary called King Kong.
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