The King Leaks: discourses of failure and the hierarchy of effects in King Kong (1976)

Fig. 1 - King Kong (John Guillermin, 1976).

From the multi-sunned vistas of Star Wars VIII: The Rise of Skywalker (J.J. Abrams, 2019) to the Slavic monster-hunting in Netflix’s The Witcher (Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, 2020) there has been an immense rise in fantasy and science fiction fuelled by spectacularly crafted movie magic. As such it is a great time to be a special effects geek. Writing in the early 2000s, Michele Pierson describes a culture of “effects connoisseurship” (2002: 51) that sprung up around effects, where fans can appreciate the work and labour that goes into these fantastic images. These fans discuss the techniques that creators used to bring fantastical things to life, some even rank them by difficulty or artistry. But hark, the rumble of giants approaches. King Kong and Godzilla are squaring up to fight again in the upcoming eponymous film due for release this November, the first time that these two titans will brawl on American shores. These two loom large within the special effects world, especially King Kong who has inspired the work of effects pioneers Ray Harryhausen and Rick Baker. Kong’s legacy spans decades, incarnated in multiple ways and through diverse animated effects (Fig. 1). Of these films, one stands out as the awkward middle child in this series of giant ape movies, producer Dino De Laurentiis’s doomed 1976 version of King Kong (hereafter referred to as KKII) directed by John Guillermin, largely because numerous critics and audiences have consistently panned the film in comparison to the original, which is lauded as a genre masterpiece. This editorial will examine the ways in which KKII’s critical reception has responded to the techniques filmmakers used to bring Kong to the screen in 1976. Looking at reviews and news articles released at the time of KKII’s release, we will see whether all Kongs are created equal.

KKII has been designated an embarrassing failure with a fascinating production history that was “plagued with danger and disaster” (Bahrenburg 1976: i). It is not a film that is so-bad-its-good, or a “badfilm” as described by J Hoberman (1980). Rather, KKII better fits Ian Q. Hunter’s (2019) recent analysis of another monster movie – Jaws: The Revenge (Joseph Sargent, 1987). Hunter uses Jaws the Revenge as a case study of failure that bucks the traditional narrative of catastrophes like The Room (Tommy Wiseau, 2003). Hunter concludes that Jaws: The Revenge was neither a financial flop nor a cult classic as it does not produce the same pleasure as other So-Bad-Its-Good films (2019: 678). This certainly matches KKII’s status. When you look at KKII’s production history, it is clear that everything that could go wrong did. De Laurentiis was described as a hack peddling schlock by Stuart Byron (1977: 18), and Simon Crook described KKII as a “monkey sham” (177). The production was delayed due to a major lawsuit and, most interestingly, it was lambasted for the construction of its central star. Advertised as having a spectacular 40ft tall “Million Dollar Robot” (Robinson 1976: 9) by an Italian special effects star Carlo Rambaldii, critics laughed at the leaky, stiff, malfunctioning animatronic for all 6 seconds it appeared on screen (Fig. 2). Additionally they shamed the film for the “hastily knitted monkey suit so unconvincing that audiences kept looking out for the zipper” (Crook 2007: 177).  These responses to KKII seem to fly in the face of how academics often theorise the ways in which audiences interact with special effects, or rather it opens up another avenue to explore when it comes to special effects criticism.

Fig. 2 - The animatronic Kong.

Many academics engaging with special effects, such as Bob Rehak, take their cue from Christian Metz’s 1977 article ‘“Trucage” and the Film’. This sometimes means trick photography according to translator Francoise Meltzer (1977: 657), yet Rehak argues that Metz asserted “all cinema is, in some sense, a special effect” (2018: 6). Metz’s article, while specifically referring to editing effects like fade transitions, speaks to a tension between fantasy and reality; when an audience member watches a film, they feel the pull of the suspension of disbelief. We know that there aren’t giant apes from forgotten islands scaling the tallest buildings in the world. Yet we as audience members would like to believe that they can, and cinema invites us to believe it while also being aware of its impossibility. As Rehak says “engagement with special effects [is] one of division and hybridity, conflict and uncertainty” (2018: 6)  Similarly, Dan North argues that “visual illusions have always depended upon a kind of doublethink on the part of the spectator – we need to recognise the illusion” (2008, 12). An effective effect is one that tricks the audience, but is not so convincing that the audience does not gain the pleasure of connoisseurship that comes from spotting and gathering information about that effect. It appears that KKII lacks that “doublethink”; the effects are too obvious in their trickery that it does not lead to that kind of double engagement.

KKII is a remake, and while some considered it an obvious film to remake, Constantine Verevis also points out that “remaking is often taken as a sign of Hollywood film having exhausted its creative potential” (2006: 3) as well as the fact that they are often viewed as economically driven exercises (4). This is the attitude that many critics took with KKII. Critics were concerned that the film would not have the same “technical genius of Willis Harold O’Brien” (Mandell 1976: 40). This would be the second volley in a fight between De Laurentiis and the rest of the film critic community due to a comment he made about “jerky” stop-motion animation (Kelly 1977: 20). Yet De Laurentiis’s comment was probably made in order to both separate his version from the original, and to show how much more spectacular his Kong would be as a giant robot rather than a small articulated model (Fig. 3).

The dismissal of stop-motion by De Laurentiis as a technique enraged critics, many of whom consider stop-motion to be the only way to see Kong on the big screen. A 1977 interview with De Laurentiis by Famous Monsters of Filmland - a genre-specific magazine - asked if Ray Harryhausen was involved in the project. De Laurenetiis said no (1977: 18). The publication Cinefantastique seems to be the most vitriolic in their hatred for KKII. In an open letter written by Paul Mandell, he states that his intention is not “to merely make a pitch for stop-motion techniques to the moguls it is addressed to, rather, it is to make them realize how well stop-motion models worked in the original film” (1976: 43). Mandell also lashes out at a more recent Kong appearance. In 1962 and 1967 Toho (the studio behind Ishiro Honda’s Gojira (1954)) created suitmation versions of Kong for King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962) and King Kong Escapes (1967), both directed by Honda. Mandell claimed that the “degenerative development certainly warrants no further exploration but illustrates just what happens when a classic film creation is purchased from the original source and blasphemed by the producers of shlock” (1976: 40). Not only does this rather grand letter diminish transnational interpretations of cultural icons, it also reflected Bosley Crowther’s 1961 review of Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) which describes the lack of Shakespearean language in the adaptation of Macbeth as “brutish and barbaric”. It sets up a rather interesting hierarchy of opinion within special effects techniques. Stop-motion is here considered to be of a higher quality of special effect. KKII was doomed to fail because it does not present Kong in the way that it has been presented before. However, there does not seem to be any reason given for why Mandell would think this.

Fig. 3 - The production of Guillermin’s King Kong.

In the letter section of Cinefantastique, Terrel L Templeman challenges the way in which previous editions of the magazine have discussed and ranked the special effects of King Kong and KKII.  Firstly, he states that “Mr. Mandell’s dogmatism in presuming that the only way to accomplish a remake is to employ the same methodology used in the original – methodology that he assures us probably cannot be equalled anyway” (Templeman 1977: 33). Even Harryhausen is not safe from Mandell’s screed. He states that Harryhausen had lost his way because he had “abandoned or limited” (1976, 42) O’Brien’s original techniques. We see then that in the pages of these effects journals there is a fierce protection of Kong as an effect. Rick Baker, the man who built and inhabited the Kong suit, had a similar attitude that led him to be in constant conflict with production over “what Kong should be” (Rinzler 2019: 113) in terms of aesthetic. We have a question of validity and essentialism, what Kong is, looks like and how Kong should be done. Perhaps critics view stop-motion as more traditionally artistic, with the creators having more control. However, one would have assumed that critics and fans of special effects would have been appreciative of the effort that went into the creation of Kong, and the physical pain that Baker was in during his time under the heavy fur.

Fig. 4 - Effects artist Rick Baker.

The final major point of interest in this tale is from a fellow professional. Jim Danforth, a stop-motion animator best known for his work animating the Pegasus with Ray Harryhausen on Clash of the Titans (Desmond Davis, 1981), resigned from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Effects Nominating Committee in 1977 due to KKII being put up for a Special Achievement Oscar. This was because “Rick Baker was not in any way in my opinion to be considered a special effect” (CFQ 1977: 24). This idea of what is a special effect in this context is especially interesting. Again, there are multiple things happening in the background of KKII’s production, with debates about how truthful De Laurentiis was when taking journalists on studio tours, the promotion of the metal monkey, and the way they hid Baker entirely during the promotion of the film. However within Danforth’s assertion is a separation of types of roles, where Baker is placed as just a makeup person, rather than a special effects practitioner like Rambaldi (Fig. 4).

Eventually the interest in KKII dwindled almost immediately, and most forgot the film. There were a few jabs thrown in the run up to the release of Peter Jackson’s version of King Kong in 2005, which were designed to make fun of the film and place Jackson and Andy Serkis, who played Kong with the help of performance capture technology, as the true successors to Willis O’Brien’s legacy and painting them as true fans. Perhaps it is Gordon Gow for a 1976 edition of Films and Filming that seems to pick up on the tensions that are at work in much of the critical reception. Gow asks “Do we believe in him quite so readily as we do when we look, admittedly with nostalgic eyes, at his former manifestation in that romantic-horror classic of the thirties? Hardly” (1976, 40). The thing that is at the front and centre of this engagement with special effects technology is nostalgia. This sits at odds with the idea of novelty and the new that is central to spectacular image, as Pierson puts it “special effects represent a mode of visual display that privileges aesthetic novelty over realism” (2002: 156). Critics seem to be nostalgic for the older techniques, whether this is because of aesthetic consistency, dismissing KKII out of hand because it is not like the original movie.

Fig. 5 - Baker and Kong.

To conclude, we can see multiple issues pulling on the reception of KKII; it had a disastrous production cycle filled with delays and inflated promises. Critics at the time vehemently opposed the film, due to the way in which it was different to the original. This discourse seems to fly in the face of what was previously thought about when we discuss film special effects. Not only is the new being dismissed in favour of the old, but there is a fervent dislike or diminishing of the effort that Rambaldi, Baker and others put into the film (Fig. 5). This vitriol may have been a protective reaction against what fans perceived as a money hungry producer remaking a property they care about for profit. Fan discourse may therefore have affected the way in which critics have discussed KKII and how audiences have continued to think about the film. There is definitely a fierce protection of King Kong as a media image, an idea of what Kong is supposed to be and how the great ape is made. Thus when KKII used a robot and a man in a suit to play the famous ape, critics and audiences saw it as an evolution of the spectacle of cinema, but also a step back in the evolutionary chain.

**Article published: April 3, 2020**

References

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Biography

Benjamin Pinsent is a PhD Candidate at the University of East Anglia specialising in Special Effects, Spectacle and Film History. He is currently writing his thesis on the perception of special effects artists in film production, more specifically on Rick Baker and his creature effects.