Just finished the chapter in LeMay's book on
The Legend of King Kong.
Firstly: WOW.
I didn't realize how far into pre-production The Legend of King Kong had gotten, it sounds like it wasn't canceled until late 1976. With RKO out of the picture, Universal and Paramount came to an agreement that Universal's movie would come out a year after the De Laurentis movie but with how far along they were Universal ended up stopping production, supposedly a "temporary" delay, before finally giving it the axe.
Which really IS a shame, 'cause now that I'm reading this summary this would've been MUCH better than the DDL movie. It was going to be set in 1932, directed by Joseph Sargent (The Taking of Pelham 123), and would star Peter Falk as Denham (already cast), Robert Redford as Jack Driscoll (he was in talks, their second choice was Nick Nolte), and Susan Blakely as Ann Darrow; with Jim Danforth in charge of stop motion effects. There was apparently a lot of back and forth going on over how to portray Kong: Danforth wanted stop motion (obviously), but the studio and Sargent wanted suitmation, and were planning to cast body builder Franco Columbu (best known as the "Future Terminator" in the opening of The Terminator) to play Kong (though they'd also done auditions with Bob Burns). They'd even manage to snag the rights to the original movie's musical score from the Max Steiner estate.
Like, wow, this cast and crew is SO MUCH BETTER. And the story is awesome, very similar to the 1933 movie but since they were basing it on the Lovelace novel and making a point to not infringe on RKO's copyrights they were going to include a totally different set of dinosaurs and monsters so the island sequences are similar but at the same time new.
Also, I've NOT been giving LeMay enough credit - I figured if he wasn't going to talk about the Kong public domain issue early in the book in the chapter on the novel, he wasn't going to talk about it at all.
Not so!
He goes into it almost immediately during the chapter on Universal's The Legend of King Kong. As it turns out, I was wrong about who discovered Kong's status and when: it wasn't Universal's lawyers during the lawsuits, it was JIM DANFORTH.
The Legend of King Kong started off because in the aftermath of Hammer's second attempt at a remake falling through, Danforth decided he wasn't ready to abandon it and started pitching it to Hollywood studios (he had clout now because he'd just won an Academy Award for
When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth). He went to RKO, who said "no" like they had previously to Hammer because they still would only agree to doing sequels, which Danforth thought was disrespectful, so Danforth started doing research to find out just exactly what RKO had the rights to. That's when he found out the novel was copyrighted first, that the copyright on that had been held by Cooper not RKO, and that Cooper had failed to renew the copyright in 1960 so now the character and story were public domain.
The book even has the same line, quoted from Danforth, about how because of the laws at the time due to the order of copyrights the novelization was the original work and the screenplay the derivative work even though the screenplay was written first!
My apologies, Mr. LeMay!
