It’s one of the most iconic scenes in motion picture history. The giant ape Kong, clinging atop New York’s Empire State Building, fends off an aerial assault by a squadron of machine-gun mounted biplanes in 1933’s King Kong. It’s been replicated, spoofed, and paid homage to in dozens of movies over the years. But what viewers may not realize is that the killing shots that felled mighty Kong were fired by none other than his cinematic creators.
Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack led lives as interesting–if not more so–as the movies they produced. Cooper flew planes for the U.S. Army Air Service during World War I. He later joined the Polish Air Force in its battle against the Soviet Union and was shot down, spending nine months in a POW camp. Getting his start in filmmaking as a member of the Explorers Club, Cooper would join forces with fellow WWI Army pilot and adventurer Schoedsack after the men took part in an early ’20s sea voyage. The trip took them to eastern Africa and had them meeting Ethiopian emperor Haile Sellasie and narrowly avoiding capture by pirates.
In 1925 the Cooper/Schoedsack team made the groundbreaking “ethnographic documentary” Grass, which followed the nomadic Bakhtiari people of western Persia on a 200-mile trek to bring their herds to pasture. Two year later came Chang, a look at the daily struggles of a northern Thai farmer and his family. They then combined location footage from an African journey with Hollywood studio scenes for a 1929 version of the adventure classic The Four Feathers.
A dream of Cooper’s about a gargantuan gorilla loose in New York City inspired him and Schoedsack to develop King Kong. (Fun Fact: one of the film’s scripters was Schoedsack’s wife, actress-turned-writer Ruth Rose). For the final sequence, where Kong grabs Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) from her Manhattan hotel room then climbs the recently-constructed Empire State Building, the duo knew the only way to eliminate him would be through air power. And who better to take part in the attack than a pair of former WWI flyboys? In Cooper’s own alleged words, “We should kill the sonofa—– ourselves.”
If you look closely at the fateful showdown, you’ll see Cooper and Schoedsack manning one of the planes before they deliver some of the final shots that send the super-sized simian off his thousand-foot-high perch and into the street below. The box-office success of King Kong led them and RKO to rush out a sequel, The Son of Kong, the very same year.
In the years that followed, Cooper and Schoedsack–separately and as a team–worked as producers and occasional directors on such pictures as The Last Days of Pompeii (1935), Dr. Cyclops (1940), Fort Apache (1948), The Quiet Man (1952), This Is Cinerama (also ’52), and many more. And let’s not forget their other contribution to the “oversized monkey” genre, 1949’s Oscar-winning Mighty Joe Young. That time they let the title primate live. Cooper died in 1973, with Schoedsack following six years later.