Did You Know?

The models of King Kong built for the island scenes were only 18 inches high. When producer/director Merian C. Cooper decided Kong needed to look bigger while in New York, a new 24-inch armature was constructed, thus changing Kong's film height from 18 feet on the island to 24 feet while in New York.

The project went through numerous title changes during production, including "The Beast" (original title of draft by Edgar Wallace in RKO files), "The Eighth Wonder", "The Ape", "King Ape" and "Kong".

This film was successfully reissued worldwide numerous times; some claim it was the first ever re-released film. In the 1938 reissue, several scenes of excessive violence and sex were cut to comply with the Production Code enforced in 1934. Though many of the censored scenes were restored by Janus Films in 1971 (including the censored sequence in which Kong peels off Fay Wray's clothes), one deleted scene has never been found, shown publicly only once during a preview screening in San Bernardino, California in January 1933. It was a graphic scene following Kong shaking four sailors off the log bridge, causing them to fall into a ravine where they were eaten alive by giant spiders. At the preview screening, audience members screamed and either left the theatre or talked about the grisly sequence throughout the subsequent scenes, disrupting the film. Said the film's producer, Merian C. Cooper, "It stopped the picture cold, so the next day back at the studio, I took it out myself."

King Kong's roar was a lion's and a tiger's roar combined and run backwards.

Grossed $90,000 its opening weekend, the biggest opening ever at the time.

The native village huts were left over from RKO's Bird of Paradise. The Great Wall was part of the Temple of Jerusalem set for Cecil B. DeMille's Biblical epic The King of Kings. The Great Wall set was later reused in Selznick's The Garden of Allah and finally redressed with Civil War era building fronts, burned and pulled down by a tractor to film the burning of Atlanta munitions warehouses in Gone with the Wind.

Kong's "official" height (from the posters) is 50 feet. He was closer to 19 feet tall in the jungle and close to 25 feet when in New York City.

Was voted the 47th Greatest Film of all time by Entertainment Weekly.

There was more than one model of Kong used in the film. There are considerable differences between the Kong on Skull Island and the Kong in New York. For instance, the Skull Island Kong has a longer face, which the filmmakers thought made the ape look "too human".

Jean Harlow refused the lead part.

Merian C. Cooper was partially inspired by W. Douglas Burden, who brought the world's first captive Komodo dragons to the Bronx Zoo in 1926. Cooper was intrigued how the once mythic, massive predators quickly perished once caged and displayed for the public.

The two-legged lizard that attacks Jack Driscoll was actually meant to be an aetosaur, a reptile from the Triassic Period. However, because of the high price of armatures (the metal skeletons for the puppets), RKO cut costs by not having hind legs made for it. As a result, the aetosaur has two forearms, no hind legs and a snakelike appearance.

Sensing a huge hit from industry buzz, MGM offered to buy the film outright from RKO for $1.072m (some $400,000 over its negative cost), figuring the little studio was reeling from losing $10+m in 1932. RKO was smart to decline the offer. The film smashed attendance records nationwide and ended up grossing $1.761m during its initial release. RKO would periodically, and extremely profitably, re-release the movie through the 1950s.

Art drawn for the press book associated for the original release of the film was contributed to by actor Keye Luke, who was a highly regarded illustrator before he became an actor and whose works have appeared in films themselves, such as The Shanghai Gesture.

Executive Producer David O. Selznick left RKO midway through production of this film. But Selznick's last act of business at RKO - and probably his biggest contribution to the film - was to write a memo changing the name of the production from 'Kong' to King Kong.

Ranked #4 on the American Film Institute's list of the 10 greatest films in the genre "Fantasy" in June 2008.

It has been said that King Kong was the first Hollywood film to use a fully symphonic musical score. As memorable and effective as the musical score was, some have made the same claim about RKO's Bird of Paradise, released earlier. (Perhaps that claim should be revised to "the first memorable film...") Regardless, Max Steiner, composer for both films (and many later classics, including Gone with the Wind and Casablanca) was a visionary, forward thinking man. One of the legends surrounding this film is that director Merian C. Cooper paid Steiner from his own pocket after RKO bosses expressed concern over mounting production costs.

When describing Kong to Fay Wray, Merian C. Cooper said "you'll have the tallest darkest leading man in Hollywood". She thought it was Cary Grant.

The 56-cm-high model of King Kong used in the film sold at auction in 2009 for about $203,000 (US). It was originally covered in cotton, rubber, liquid latex, and rabbit fur, but most of the covering has decomposed over the decades.

Actual close up footage of The Empire State Building was added to the film upon reissue in 1952, for the scene where Kong grabs the first plane and tosses it off the side of the building. We see a pristine picture of the Empire State Building as it existed in the 50s with its' TV Antenna. In the original scenes the NYC landmark was part of "Hollywood Set", with aerial footage added.

According to Orville Goldner in 'The Making of King Kong', the film came in at thirteen reels. Cooper feigned horror at the the number thirteen, and insisted another scene be shot to bring the film to fourteen reels. The new scene was the elevated train sequence, one that Cooper had wanted all along.

Merian C. Cooper's first vision for the film was of a giant ape on top of the world's tallest building fighting airplanes. He worked backward from there to develop the rest of the story.

The remakes of this film in 1976 and 2005, show Kong with the same temperament as in the original film. In the less popular sequel _Son of Kong (1934)_ and in the successful Mighty Joe Young, a "distant cousin", the Production Code of 1934 was a strong influence on "the script" for the central characters, as they were friendlier and less destructive.

After King Kong has been successfully gassed on the beach, and just before the break to New York, Denham yells that they've captured "Kong! The Eighth Wonder of the World!" He says "Kong" rather than "King Kong" because at that point in the script development, the picture's title was simply "Kong".

One of the characters in line to see Kong complains to his lady companion, "These tickets cost me twenty bucks." At presumably $10 per ticket, this would have been a tremendous cost in Depression-wracked 1933. In contrast, a ticket to see the 1933 New York Yankees, which featured Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, or to this movie itself, would have been about thirty-five cents.

When talking about the wall, Driscoll mentions being at "Angkor once". He could be referring to Angkor Wat, a huge Cambodian temple complex built in the 12th century.

King Kong and Snow White were Adolf Hitler's favorite two movies.

Body count: 40.

Close-ups of the pilots and gunners of the planes that attack Kong were shot in the studio with mock-up planes. The flight commander is director Merian C. Cooper and his observer is producer Ernest B. Schoedsack. They decided to play the parts after Cooper said that "we should kill the sonofabitch ourselves".