Classic Horror Behind the Scenes: Jeff Bridges and KONG ‘76

The Oscar-winning actor used to skip school to catch KONG ’33 on TV. So, jumping into Dino’s remake was a no-brainer. But things didn’t turn out exactly as expected.

By Bill Fleck, author of the Rondo-nominated book CHANEY’S BABY, available here.

Check out other articles on my Rondo-nominated website by clicking here.

Did you know? Two-time Rondo-Award winning filmmaker Thomas Hamilton is in the process of making THE CHANEYS: HOLLYWOOD’S HORROR DYNASTY, which is inspired by my book, CHANEY’S BABY. (I’m also a producer on the film.) If you’d like to support the project, click here and see what’s going on. Thanks!

Thanks to everyone who voted for this website once again for a RONDO HATTON CLASSIC HORROR AWARD (Best Website). We didn’t win, but I feel like we’ll be back next year!

NOTE: There is a great deal of love—and a matching amount of hate—for KONG ’76 on Monster Kid pages and chats. I’m a huge fan of KONG ’33, but still enjoy much of the 1976 version. This month’s column was drawn largely from my previous book, NOT THE DUDE: JEFF BRIDGES AND THE SEARCH FOR SELF PART 1, available here.

Wednesday, January 14, 1976. Sound Stage 30, Paramount Studios. Actor Jeff Bridges is sitting with co-star Charles Grodin, director John Guillermin, screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr., and producer Dino De Laurentiis, who is about to begin a press conference.

Waiting behind a prop jungle is first-time actress Jessica Lange, 26. She’s dressed in a black cocktail dress with a white jacket draped over her shoulders.

She’s about to be introduced as the new Fay Wray.

[Above: Jeff Bridges, Jessica Lange, and Charles Grodin on January 14, 1976. Lange is about to be introduced to the press as the star of KING KONG.]

Bridges has just turned 26. He’s been honorably discharged from the Coast Guard Reserves at the rank of Petty Officer, Second Class, and is sporting shoulder-length blond hair and a thick light brown beard. Many of the reporters don’t recognize him.

“You’ve got to be kidding!” one says when he’s pointed out. “Lloyd’s son?”

At 10 AM, with 300 people in the room, De Laurentiis gets started.

At 56, De Laurentiis is short—five-foot-four—and graying, sporting glasses with large black plastic frames. Born in Torre Annunziata, Italy, English is definitely not his first language.

But De Laurentiis has conquered Hollywood all the same.

Originally partnering with Sophia Loren’s husband Carlo Ponti in his native country, De Laurentiis has produced Fellini’s La Strada as well as Barabbas, Waterloo, War and Peace, and Anzio. By the early 1970s, he’s set up shop in the U.S. and produced the Charles Bronson hits The Stone Killer, The Valachi Papers, and Death Wish.

And on April 2, 1976, he will release Lipstick, a controversial revenge drama starring Margaux Hemingway and directed by Lamont Johnson.

But today, De Laurentiis is here to talk about King Kong. It has not been easy getting this far.

The idea of remaking the 1933 original—one of Bridges’ favorite films—is easy enough. De Laurentiis—noting the blockbuster success of Universal’s Jaws (1975)—has had a talk with Paramount exec Barry Diller about making a monster movie of their own. While searching for a subject, De Laurentiis has an “ah-ha” moment while waking his daughter for school—she has a King Kong poster pinned over her bed. [1]

From there, however, everything goes haywire.

Michael Eisner—an exec at ABC, and later, the boss at Disney—has a chat with Sid Sheinberg, C.E.O. at MCA, parent company to Universal. Eisner casually mentions the idea of remaking Kong, and Sheinberg—thinking it might be the perfect follow-up to Jaws—starts the ball rolling.

However, on May 6, 1975, De Laurentiis signs a deal for the rights with Daniel O’Shea of RKO General. But things get sticky when Universal’s attorney Arnold Shane claims O’Shea had promised him the rights. [2] Universal files a $25 million lawsuit and hires Bo Goldman (1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) to start writing a script. They plan to set their version in the 1930s and call it The Legend of King Kong.

De Laurentiis, meanwhile, plans on bringing the story into the 1970s, and having “The Big Monkey”—as he calls Kong—climb the World Trade Center. To that end, he’s hired Semple to write the script. Semple, 52, is famous for writing TV’s campy Batman (1966) series, as well as scripts for Papillion (1973) and The Parallax View (1974). [4]

September, 1975. Calling the claim “tissue-paper thin,” the Superior Court of Los Angeles throws out Universal’s lawsuit. De Laurentiis—who has hired London-born John Guillerman of The Blue Max (1966) to direct—breathes a sigh of relief.

[Above: Producer Dino de Laurentiis, pictured with his Oscars for LA STRADA, in 1957. Film purists weren’t thrilled with his idea of remaking KING KONG.]

But Universal isn’t done.

In 1932, author Delos W. Lovelace had written a novelization of King Kong based upon the original screenplay by James Creelman and Ruth Rose. The copyright on the novel expired in 1960. Universal’s position? RKO may have sold the film rights to Paramount, but the story—as written by Lovelace—is anybody’s game. Universal files suit yet again, seeking a judgment. On November 20, RKO countersues.

This kicks De Laurentiis into high gear. Everyone knows the marketplace can’t support two versions of King Kong at the same time. If the court sides with Universal, the movie that gets into theaters first is the likely winner.

November 30, 1975. An ad in The New York Times depicts Kong standing atop the twin towers. He holds a blonde in one hand and a destroyed jet fighter in another.

“There still is only one King Kong,” the copy reads. “One year from today, Paramount Pictures and Dino De Laurentiis will bring you the most exciting, original motion picture event of all time.”

The line is drawn. De Laurentiis has a year and $16 million to work with. Can Universal beat that?

This is the situation as De Laurentiis begins his press conference.

After introducing Bridges, Grodin, Guillerman, and Semple, De Laurentiis gives the press what they’ve been looking for.

“Oh, yes,” he teases, “and Jessica Lange.”

The cameras feast on Lange as she enters, blonde-haired, brown-eyed, and a curvaceous five-foot-eight. She sits in a giant prop Kong hand while the photographers fire away.

Lange hails from Minnesota. She has studied dance in New York and taken lessons as a mime in Paris. She has worked as a waitress and as a model for the Wilhelmina Agency. She’s been married to Spanish photographer Francisco Grande since July 1970, but lives like she’s single and doesn’t mention her husband much. [3] Recently, she has made her home in Brentwood not far from the ocean.

A chance meeting with Charles Bludhorn, chair of Gulf & Western, gets her the screen test for Kong. The verdict? “Luminous!” De Laurentiis signs her to a seven-year contract.

“Are you scared about being in the film?” she’s asked.

“It’s an incredible way to start,” she responds.

How about a scream? comes a request.

Lange simply smiles back. She won’t be screaming.

Questions are also launched at De Laurentiis.

Is Fay Wray going to be in the movie? Will Kong climb the Empire State Building or the World Trade Center? What’s the time period? Are you making a satire? What’s Kong going to look like? Is there going to be nudity?

De Laurentiis—with assists from Semple and Guillermin—handles them all.

No, we didn’t talk to Fay Wray. Kong will climb the World Trade Center— “There is a rumor he may become mayor,” Semple cracks. Guillermin says the period “will be entirely contemporary, modern, and new.” Dino says there will be some humor, but it’s going to be a romance-adventure. Kong will be a 40-foot, million-dollar electronic creature. And though he’ll do a striptease with Dwan—Lange’s character— “he’ll do it in some way to get a PG rating.”

Bridges and Grodin, meanwhile, are sitting with zapped-out smiles. Finally, a reporter shows them some mercy.

“Jeff, why are you doing King Kong?

Bridges is obviously caught off guard. He’s cut school as a kid to watch the original on TV. He claims to have seen it one hundred times, and has used it to exercise his fear. He’s even been pondering some very experimental ideas for this new version, some having to do with the nature of The Big Monkey itself. But his anxiety—and, perhaps, his penchant for stuttering under pressure—trap him.

“Money, challenge, the role,” he finally mutters.

Moving on, the reporter asks Grodin—at 40, a six-footer most famous for The Heartbreak Kid (1972), and now darkly mustachioed for his part in Kong—why he’s doing the film.

“Money, challenge, the role,” Grodin characteristically mocks, to the delight of the press. “It was one of my favorite pictures. I hope we do justice to it.”

As the conference winds down, some free-lancers hang around to take mop-up shots. Once Lange steps out of the monkey’s paw, a last pic is contrived wherein Bridges hoists her as if he’s carrying his bride over the threshold.

“The media have already established them as the romantic interest in the film,” notes Bruce Bahrenburg, a unit publicist who is writing a book about the production. “The real bonus would be if the romance carried over into their private lives.”

In Lange, Bridges must certainly find some temptation—she’s blonde, as he prefers, and in spite of the fact that she will be playing the airheaded Dwan, in real life, she is ferociously intelligent. The fact that she’s technically married can’t mean much.

But it never happens. He’s totally committed to his girlfriend, photographer Susan Geston. They’ll be married in 1977, and they remain so as of this writing.

[Above: Despite the rugged nature of the filming the cast and crew got along like family. The same cannot be said for the special effects division.]

January 15, 1976. Evening. Bridges is sitting on the San Pedro docks, reading a book and waiting for his first scene.

The docks are supposed to be in Surabaya, and the USS Melville—which has been rented by the production for $250,000—stands in for the Petrox Explorer, the ship which brings a crew in search of oil to Kong’s island.

Guillermin, looking to establish rapport, is going about things slowly, letting the cast and crew get to know each other; these relationships will soon become very important, given how quickly the film has to be done in order to beat Universal’s possible production and De Laurentiis’ now firm release date of December 17. Prima donna attitudes and petty disputes can cause unnecessary delays, and Guillermin hopes to avoid this.

Everyone knows, however, that they’ll have no trouble with Bridges.

“The advance word on Bridges to the crew—especially from those who have worked with him—is good,” Bahrenburg writes. “He is said to be an unassuming pro, which is surprising, since he is so young. And he has a reputation for being friendly and considerate. He smiles a great deal, and his smile seems natural—not the defensive, mechanical grin so many actors hide behind.”

The night of January 16, Bridges—as Jack Prescott—shoots his first major scene.

The premise is that Prescott—an associate professor at Princeton University, specializing in primates—has learned that Petrox is planning an expedition to a mysterious island in the Indian Ocean. Fred Wilson, the Petrox exec played by Grodin, is convinced the island can be tapped for millions of gallons of crude. Prescott, on the other hand, thinks there might be something else there—and ancient documents indicate that the ‘something else’ might be large and furry.

Determined to find out, Prescott boards the Petrox Explorer as a stowaway.

“Getting aboard involves a difficult hand-over-hand climb up a mooring line from the dock to the ship,” Bahrenburg observes. “Ten feet below, the cold, murky water slaps against the gray hull. There is no safety net under the line, and Bridges has never practiced the stunt.”

Guillermin calls for action.

Noting that Bridges “has put on some weight but still has the build of an athlete,” Bahrenburg says, “The scene goes without a hitch. Bridges doesn’t even appear to be winded as he walks down the gangplank to Guillermin, expecting to be asked to do another take.”

Everything went fine, Guillermin says. We don’t need another one.

Later, Bahrenburg watches as Bridges signs autographs for two ‘tween boys. When one of them says he loved Bridges in a film Bridges didn’t even do, the actor kindly gives him an out by naming the actual movies he’s made. The kids enthusiastically say they’ve seen them all.

“They are not being deliberately mendacious,” Bahrenburg notes. “They are simply trying to get out of an uncomfortable situation, even if it means telling a few small lies. The boys are becoming adults.”

Behind the scenes in the special effects department, uncomfortable situations abound.

For cinephiles, the complete story can be had in Roy Morton’s excellent book King Kong: The History of a Movie Icon from Fay Wray to Peter Jackson. But briefly: De Laurentiis has informed the press that Kong will be played by a 40-foot-tall robotic creature. Away from the mic, however, he has plans to use a man in a Kong suit.

But then, special effects wiz and fellow Italian Carlo Rambaldi, 50, convinces De Laurentiis that he can build a full-size Kong that will do everything the script describes. Dino gives him the go-ahead. Because the movie is being approached as a romance between Kong and Dwan, De Laurentiis conceives of Kong as an ape-man. Rambaldi designs his creature with this in mind.

[Above: Special effects man Carlo Rambaldi convinced de Laurentiis that he could build a 40-foot robot capable of acting out everything in the script. But special effects supervisor Glen Robinson knew the idea was a bad one.]

As a back-up plan, De Laurentiis hires Rick Baker to design a suit. Baker, 25, has done special effects makeup for The Exorcist (1973), It’s Alive (1974), and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974). When he learns that Plan A is to use a full- size Rambaldi robot in the film, Baker—something of a gorilla nut—is incredulous.

“He can’t do it,” Baker tells everyone who’ll listen. “If NASA can’t do it, he can’t do it—especially on a short movie schedule.”

De Laurentiis gives Baker and Rambaldi an assignment—each is to go off for six weeks, create a Kong suit, and come back for a comparison.

When the appointed day arrives, Baker shows up not as an ape-man but as a pure gorilla.

“I was going to save them from themselves,” he’ll chuckle years later.

Two developments irk Baker that day. One is that Rambaldi has missed the deadline and has been given an extension; the second is that De Laurentiis hates the pure gorilla look. Baker is slotted to use his suit for test shots only.

Meanwhile, Rambaldi has finished the designs for both the Big Kong and the pair of giant hands Jessica Lange will spend a lot of time in. He submits them to special effects supervisor Glen Robinson.

Robinson realizes there’s no way these robots will work.

Not wanting to disappoint De Laurentiis, Robinson puts Rambaldi’s designs out to an aircraft company for bids, then quietly draws up simpler plans of his own utilizing hydraulics.

The news from the aircraft company is bad: it will take 18 months to three years to build Rambaldi’s monster, with no guarantee it will do what it’s supposed to. De Laurentiis is crushed until Robinson brings him the hydraulic designs. De Laurentiis puts Robinson in charge of the Big Kong, wounding Rambaldi’s pride. [5]

When Rambaldi finally presents his Kong suit, no one likes it. Guillermin—who has been making tests with Baker, and has gotten used to the pure gorilla concept— dismisses it as a “$200,000 disaster.” Yet Baker is ordered to develop his final suit in collaboration with Rambaldi. Baker almost quits in protest, and animosity between Rambaldi’s crew—made up of Italians—and Robinson’s crew—mostly Americans— develops.

[Above: Special effects wizard Rick Baker as Kong. He knew the 40-foot robot would never work, and was further aggravated by the fact that de Laurentiis insisted upon his developing his Kong suit in collaboration with Rambaldi.]

Even simplified, the Big Kong takes a long time to construct. Once it’s completed, it’s obvious it can do very little in the film, and what it does do, it does badly. [6] And because it has been based on Rambaldi’s drawings, it has a completely different face than will the final hybrid Baker-Rambaldi suit. [7]

Far more efficient are the giant hands.

Initially, they have been built with the ape-man concept in mind at a scale that would give Kong a height of 30 feet. However, with the updated Baker-Rambaldi suit— and Kong’s announced height of 40 feet—new hands have to be constructed. [8] Though they cause Lange some scary moments—she’s often hoisted high in the air in them in front of a blue screen—they look very good on film.

The illusion isn’t easy to accomplish.

“I can remember John Guillermin, the director, is an English guy,” Bridges laughs in 2017, “and there was this scene where the monkey is holding Jessica Lange...So Jessie’s in the giant hand—and this is back in ’76, you know; the technology is nothing like today...and they had an Italian guy on each finger, operating one of these things...”

“All right,” Guillermin says. “The index finger—move the index finger.”

But this needs to be translated by an interpreter, which slows things down to a crawl.

“Finally, John, he would blow up every once in a while,” Bridges remembers.

“Just watch my bloody hand!” Guillermin demands.

“And so you had all these Italian guys looking at his hand,” Bridges chuckles, “and practically crushing Jessie.”

“Oh, no!” Lange screams. “Stop it! Stop! Stop!”

[Above: The Robinson-designed giant hands worked very well in the finished film, though behind the scenes, they caused Lange some difficulty.]

Thinking back on the production, Bridges realizes how tough a task Guillermin has taken on.

“There was a lot of pressure on John,” he says. “He had to get what had to be gotten.”

“He’s really the star of this movie,” Grodin tells American Film. “He keeps the rhythm and quality of the film in his mind constantly and holds it together through all the delays...It seems impossible, but he’ll get the picture ready for Christmas.”

The pressure often causes Guillermin to throw fits. At dailies, if he sees something he doesn’t like, he kicks chairs. One bad take gets him so riled, he flings his drink—glass and all—at the screen. On location, he shoves a slow-moving member of the crew and dashes a table to the ground. And at one point, he clashes so badly with executive producer Federico De Laurentiis—Dino’s 21-year-old son—that the elder De Laurentiis thinks about canning him. By the time production wraps, Guillermin will be almost 20 pounds lighter.

Yet, in spite of Guillermin, most of the cast and crew are happy working on the picture. De Laurentiis himself gets high marks from almost everybody.

“He was very resourceful and the best producer I ever worked with,” says Director of Photography Richard Kline.

“Some pictures are family and some are war,” unit production manager Brian Frankish will say. “Kong was family.”

[Above: Director John Guillerman (with pipe). In spite of keeping everything together, he was frustrated by the fact that the film had been scheduled for a Christmas release, leaving him feeling rushed.]

January 28, 1976. The suits have struck a deal. De Laurentiis will pay Universal a small portion of his profits [9] and merchandising on King Kong, plus give them veto power over any proposed sequel. In return, Universal agrees not to produce any Kong film of its own for at least 18 months following the release of Dino’s version. Universal goes away.

Early February, 1976. MGM studios. Guillermin and company are filming Petrox Explorer interiors. For Bridges, these will be the easiest days, at least physically—during much of the rest of the film, he’ll be climbing hills, hanging on to vines for dear life, running like mad, and/or carrying Lange through the jungle. He will do the vast majority of these stunts himself. In spite of the sweating he’ll do, his biggest challenge is acting in front of a blue screen, reacting to nothing—a great opportunity to test his imagination and stimulate his fear.

“Kong is an opportunity to get back into that,” he tells Tim Cahill in 1977. “A lot of time the machine isn’t there and you just stare into space, being scared. You know, ‘Look over there, that’s where Kong is.’ And you’d be looking at a dishrag. What’s frightening isn’t this big giant monkey. It’s everything I’ve ever feared in my life. It’s my mind.”

 In addition, he finds his co-stars to be impressive, particularly Lange.

“I think her performance—and Chuck Grodin’s performance—they got the tone of the whole thing,” he’ll say in 2017. “And it was tough—that’s tough. ‘Cause you know Jessie now, you know what she does, but that was a hard thing to pull off.”

Along the way, Bridges realizes that Prescott is the most normal character of the three leads, so he’s in danger of being wiped off the screen by Grodin’s comic take on Wilson’s menace [10] and Lange’s beautiful but loopy Dwan. Too, as the conscience of the piece, Prescott utters many pretentious lines. Bridges decides to gift Prescott with a sly sense of humor to bring out his human side.

“I see Prescott as a knight who sets off to fight a dragon,” Bridges explains to Bahrenburg. “Prescott likes to think that he has purer motives than he really does. The fact is, he can be as ambitious as the next guy, and he is tempted to exploit Kong like the rest of them. However, his personal moral code, which he forgets easily in the picture, takes over toward the end, and he will have no part of Kong’s final degradation.”

Asked about Prescott’s attitude toward the Big Monkey, Bridges waxes poetic.

“Sometimes he thinks the ape’s big and scary,” he explains, “but at the end of the film, Prescott sees him as a Christ-like symbol of the pure, moral being done in by greedy, unprincipled men.”

Bridges even has an original idea regarding how the film should end and pitches it to Guillermin.

“They didn’t want to do it, but I wanted to see the monkey fall off the tower and smack into the ground, and it would be a machine inside,” he tells Cahill. “And they should just leave it like that. I mean, what the f*** is that? Is it from outer space? What kind of weird practical joke is that? An offshoot of that is maybe that’s what we are. I mean, the more they look into DNA and RNA, the more mechanical it seems. You see where they can now put together totally new forms of life. Well, what if we were one of those forms? What if we get really sophisticated with the mechanical aspects of genetics? What if we impregnated a woman? Put her in a spaceship and sent her out into the universe somewhere to start the whole thing again. A machine thing. And...and...it all came around again until finally it would be us really impregnating our own earth with ourselves in some strange time warp.”

February 15. Cast and crew flies to Hawaii—specifically, Kauai—which will serve as Kong’s homeland. Susan Geston joins Jeff. The location requires everyone to be helicoptered in on a daily basis. The giant arch on Cathedral Beach is put to good use. Bridges, who is sick, is ordered by a doctor to stay in bed and doesn’t work until the 17th. Everyone is blessed by a local Protestant minister and is given a lei.

March 15-17. Scenes on board the oil tanker Susanne Onstad are shot—this is live action footage of Kong’s trip to the U.S.

Early April. Back at MGM, the crew shoots scenes at Kong’s wall. A huge concrete mountain has been constructed over a wooden frame. The wall itself is 47 feet high and more than 500 feet long. Three hundred extras are employed. One day, legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman shows up on the set.

“When they’re not required in front of the cameras, Jeff and Jessica do not linger at the wall,” Bahrenburg notices. “They retire to their separate dressing-room trailers, parked behind the Wall in front of a burned-out southern mansion. Bridges is a loner, staying by himself in his trailer, reading books suggested by his friends or playing the guitar.” [11]

Shortly thereafter, De Laurentiis realizes—to his horror—that he may run out of money. Initially budgeted at $12 million, the race with Universal has pushed costs to sixteen. And now, to get the film out by Christmas as promised, they have to cough up even more.

De Laurentiis goes to his backers. He shows them the scenes that have already been filmed. They increase their contributions. De Laurentiis is back on track.

June 7. The production hits New York City. Here, a full-scale model of the dead Kong—made of Styrofoam, fiberglass, latex, and horsehair—is placed in front of the World Trade Center. More than 2000 people show up, augmenting the paid extras. However, souvenir seekers pick at Kong, who loses an eye, a fingertip, and tufts of hair.

“Kong got mugged,” one member of the crew cracks.

[Above: Lange with a 30-foot styrofoam figure of the dead Kong. Lange was into the scene so much that she actually cried profusely.]

Between shots, Bridges has a strange encounter.

“This little guy comes up to me,” Bridges remembers in 2017, “and says, ‘Do you like my temple?’”

Confused by the man’s thick accent, Bridges can’t quite make out what the fellow means.

“I walk across the tightrope,” the man explains, waving his finger between the Twin Towers.

It dawns on Bridges that he’s talking to Phillipe Petit—the same Phillipe Petit who had illegally rigged a tightrope between the towers—1350 feet above the ground, mind you—and walked it eight times on August 7, 1974.

“He was sentenced for walking across,” Bridges remembers. “His punishment was to perform for free in the park for a year.”

During shooting, the crew often sees Petit cruising by on his unicycle while holding on to a taxi.

According to Bahrenburg, Bridges stays in a midtown hotel, hits the party circuit, goes to the theater, and enjoys good restaurants, “responding to these experiences in the same laconic style that typifies his discussion on a book he is reading or why he likes mountains. This is not from any indifference to the subject; rather it is from an innate shyness, an insecurity about his ability to verbalize his reactions.”

When surrounded by autograph seekers, Bridges is happy to sign anything that’s shoved his way.

On one of the last nights in New York, Lange is set to shoot Dwan’s farewell to Kong. She thinks about how cruel greedy people can be and cries real tears during the scene. When the action is done, she can’t reclaim her composure.

“It was Kong, and he was dying,” she explains later.

Bridges approaches her noiselessly and hugs her. She looks up at him with appreciation and a small smile.

July 23. Back at MGM, Bridges and Lange do the close-ups for the scene wherein Dwan and Jack escape from Kong by jumping off a cliff into a distant river. They’ll actually be falling only three feet into an air mattress—the stunt pros will do the rest.

Bridges blows the first take by accidentally grabbing Lange’s shirt and ripping it open. Then Lange blows the dialogue in the next six takes. On the seventh try, they tumble into the air mattress—and Lange lands right smack on Bridges’ crotch. It takes him a while to recover, and when he does, he’s not as focused.

Finally, Guillermin tells them to do the jump without any dialogue. This makes everyone happy.

“It was a lousy line anyway,” Lange cracks.

August 5. Once again short on money, De Laurentiis borrows from his European bankers. King Kong will now cost north of $23 million. No one’s seen numbers like this since Cleopatra (1963).

Meanwhile, Bahrenburg catches up with Bridges on the set. He’s shooting the scene where Kong suddenly appears and shakes the Explorer crew off of a log bridge. The log is made of aluminum, and—amazingly—there is so safety net below. As Bahrenburg notes, it’s risky business for Bridges to cross.

“He’s got a good body,” Bahrenburg writes. “He was not noticeably overweight at the beginning of the production, and now he’s stabilized at a sturdy 180 pounds with a fat-free waist. A non-athlete with the natural grace of a gymnast, Bridges moves like a tightrope walker to the middle of the log...”

August 27. Bridges and Lange finish the scene wherein Dwan and Jack escape from an elevated train just before Kong destroys it. Though Lange will work through September—mostly in special effects shots—Bridges is done.

Working like mad, Guillermin cranks out miniature effects scenes with Baker, which are delivered as soon as they’re printed to Frank Van Der Veer in optical effects. Van Der Veer’s job is to convincingly combine miniatures with live action, mostly through the blue screen process—tedious, exacting work with no margin for error. The looming deadline forces Van Der Veer to work more quickly than he’d like, and many shots are of lesser quality because of it. The last matte shot is completed only hours before the film is locked for the final print.

Guillermin has never understood the rush for a Christmas release.

“Why is it necessary to have it out by then?” he complains. “What is necessary is making it good.”

No matter. Edited by Ralph E. Winters (Mr. Majestyk) with a score by John Barry (the James Bond films), King Kong is set to invade 1500 theaters the week before Santa makes his rounds.

December 17, 1976. King Kong opens in Los Angeles. The next day, it opens seemingly all over the planet.

A few weeks prior, it had previewed in Denver, and—according to Ray Morton— had been “reasonably well received.” Based on audience comments, several last-minute changes are made—for one, Grodin’s character dies, and Prescott’s lament that he and Dwan can only have a future if Kong survives has been removed.

[Above: Upon release, KING KONG received mixed reviews. Some critics, like Pauline Kael, championed it; others found it to be a mixed bag. Some, like FAMOUS MONSTERS editor Forrest J Ackerman absolutely hated it. The debate continues online to this day.]

As might be expected, the build-up to the release has been intense, and among cinephiles, ferocious lines have been drawn. Purists insist that a classic like King Kong should never be remade, especially in an updated version without the use of stop-motion animation. Others are guardedly optimistic that a quality remake can actually be done. But most of the movie-going public doesn’t consist of cinephiles, and De Laurentiis knows it.

“Let’s face it,” he tells American Film, referencing the first Kong and John Ford’s The Hurricane (1937), which he also plans to remake. “The people who saw those pictures when they came out, if they’re still alive, are old and don’t go to movies anymore. And the young moviegoers, even if they’ve seen revivals of the originals, have not seen them with the new technical special effects. The old ones were spectacular for their time, but they can’t compare with the new ones.”

Film critics quickly weigh in. Pauline Kael at The New Yorker likes what she sees.

“I wanted a good time from this movie, and that’s what I got,” she writes on January 3, 1977. “It’s a romantic adventure fantasy—colossal, silly, touching, a marvelous Classics-comics movie.”

Jack and Kong aren’t alone; Kael has also fallen for the blonde.

The New York Times isn’t so enthusiastic.

“When it is played as a straight adventure-fantasy,” Vincent Canby writes on December 18, “Dino De Laurentiis’s $25-million remake of ‘King Kong’ is inoffensive, uncomplicated fun, as well as a dazzling display of what the special-effects people can do…It’s something to make you cringe with embarrassment, though, when it attempts to disarm all criticism by kidding itself (proclaim the ads, ‘the most exciting original motion picture event of all time’) in lines of dialogue that are intended as instant camp.”

Perhaps the most damning review comes from Forrest J Ackerman, editor of Famous Monsters, a publication for horror and science fiction film aficionados read faithfully by the likes of Steven Spielberg.

“Briefly, I hated the new King Kong,” Ackerman writes in May 1977. “Loathed it. Detested it. Was bored and embarrassed by it. Never want to see it again. Hope 50 years from now it is a lost film that stays lost. Paid nothing to see it, and, considering what I can earn in a couple of hours, felt I should have been paid for my wasted time. One line in the picture is its perfect epitaph, as far as I’m concerned: ‘This isn’t a farce, it’s a tragedy.’”

Today, King Kong inspires the same passions. It has many defenders and detractors.

But what’s most surprising is how many people believe that King Kong was a financial failure. It wasn’t. By March 1977, the film rings up $88 million on its way to an eventual $90.6 million total. Adjusted for inflation, this translates into $463 million at this writing—serious coin. [12] According to Morton, King Kong finishes third among 1976 releases, beaten out only by Rocky and A Star is Born, “by all measures, a terrific success.”

Oddly, the financial success not only does nothing to advance Lange’s career; the film is seen as a setback for Bridges as well. It takes Lange a couple of years to get taken seriously, which she finally does in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981). Bridges takes even longer to recover; despite a star turn in Tron (1982), it’s not until Against All Odds (1984) that he attracts any attention again. And it takes the financial success of Jagged Edge (1985) to truly break him back in.

But those are stories for another time.

NOTES

[1] Michael Eisner, an exec at ABC and later the boss at Disney, has a different story; he says he pitched the idea of remaking King Kong to Diller at Paramount.

[2] O’Shea says he said no such thing; see Morton, p. 151.

[3] They will divorce in 1981.

[4] Though Semple hasn’t crammed the script with too many Batman-like satiric jokes, naming the oil company Petrox—no doubt after the 1975 pet rocks craze—is very much something we’d expect to see in the world of the Caped Crusaders.

[5] He will do far better when creating the alien for Steven Spielberg’s E.T. (1982).

[6] Shooting Kong’s NYC debut, a hydraulic hose in the crotch busts, causing fluid to spill down Kong’s leg. “He’s peeing oil,” Guillerman yells (Morton, p. 205). “He just got excited seeing the girl,” one wag comments (Bahrenburg, p. 267). Only six shots of the Big Kong make it into the film (Morton, p. 205).

[7] Baker and Rambaldi argued over practically every aspect of the suit—from the padding to the covering to how to operate the five different mask heads—with De Laurentiis overruling Baker on just about everything. The suit was stiflingly hot, and Kong’s contact lenses hurt Baker’s eyes. Still, on film—when carefully lit—the suit looks great.

[8] This gives rise to rumors that the tech crew is so incompetent, they built two right hands for Kong, which even Bridges believes. “They made a mistake,” he says at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in 2017. “They made two giant right hands. They didn’t have a left hand” ( OfficialSBIFF. “SBIFF 2017—Jeff Bridges Discusses ‘Heaven’s Gate,’ ‘King Kong’ & Phillipe Petit.” YouTube. YouTube, 10 Feb. 2017. Web).

[9] Eight or 11%...there are conflicting reports (Morton, p. 166). Universal will make their own King Kong film in 2005 with Peter Jackson directing.

[10] Grodin has chosen to do this, intending to liven up the hour before Kong shows up. Not everybody was happy with his choice (Morton, p. 167).

[11] In spite of his dislike of formal education, Bridges is a lifelong reader, and his knowledge will eventually encompass diverse topics such as art and mythology, and authors like Kurt Vonnegut and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

[12] Compare this to the $566 million grossed by 2017’s Kong: Skull Island.

SOURCES

Ackerman, Forrest J: “Zings & Zaps at the New Kong From the Throng.” Famous Monsters, Issue 134. May 1977. Print.

Bahrenburg, Bruce. The Creation of Dino De Laurentiis’ King Kong. New York: Pocket Books, 1976. Print.

Bridges, Jeff, and Bernard Glassman. The Dude and the Zen master. New York: Plume, 2014. Print.

Canby, Vincent. “Screen: King Kong Bigger, Not Better, in Return to Screen of  Crime.” The New York Times. December 18, 1976. Print.

Drew, Bernard. “Gorilla Power.” American Film, Dec-Jan. 1977. Print.

Fleck, Bill. NOT THE DUDE, PART 1. Wurtsboro, NY: Just Pay the Ransom Publishing, 2017. Print.

Kael, Pauline. “The Current Cinema: Here’s to the Big One.” The New Yorker, January 3, 1977. Print.

Morton, Ray. King Kong: The History of a Movie Icon from Fay Wray to Peter Jackson. New York: Applause Theater and Cinema Books, 2005. Print.

Pascall, Jeremy. The King Kong Story. London: Phoebus Publishing Co., 1976. Print.

OfficialSBIFF. “SBIFF 2017—Jeff Bridges Discusses ‘Heaven’s Gate,’ ‘King Kong’ & Phillipe Petit.” YouTube. YouTube, 10 Feb. 2017. Web.

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