The Los Angeles Times du lieu suivant : Los Angeles, California • 526

COMING SOON Sneak Previews of Forthcoming Books of Special Interest to Southern Califomians tone had been struck on a Chinese gong and King and Kong together sounded enormous and enormously right. Soon, James Creelman and Ruth Rose began to prepare a script. But I would be doing scenes for "King Kong" much before any script would be completed. Cooper wanted to start making test scenes in the jungle. The word "test" pertained especially to the rear projection process.

It was intended for the "money people" in New York to see. Afterward, it became part of the film. It would take 22 hours to make the longest I ever had to work for a consecutive period of time. A battle scene between Kong and a ty-rannosaurus had been prepared by O'Brien for rear projection onto a huge screen. I was placed in a tree alongside the screen.

Photographing the two elements together gave the illusion that I was actually seeing the monstrous fight. Cooper directed these scenes. From his vantage point behind the cameras, he had perspective and detailed clarity. From my position, all I could see was large blurry shadowy movements on the screen. It was like having the worst seat in the house, too close to define what the shadows were.

But I kept moving, kept reacting as though I really could see the fearsome creatures, and I would scream when Cooper said: "Scream! Scream for your life, Fay!" We finished work early in the morning. Me, numb with fatigue, having had little time for rest in between scenes nor much of any place to rest; two directors' chairs placed in the corner of the very crowded stage served as a cot, but not a very good one. Anyway, it was a good stretch of work and Cooper was happy. The pattern of work had been established: Animation would be prepared, then there would be a few days of shooting with me. But never again would there be such a sustained span of hours.

The film took about 10 months once they got into this "on-again-off-again rhythm" and I would be able to do other films while Kong and the prehistoric animals were performing together. Copyright 1989 by Fay Wray. with Cary but with apprehension. Such a huge animal! Cooper saw my dismay. "He won't be real.

He'll be a small figure that will be animated to look this big." His capacity to tease had played out long enough. We walked out to the back lot while he told me something of the story. The idea had begun in his mind when a friend, Douglas Burden, brought back two giant dragon lizards from the Dutch East Indies and gave them to the Bronx Zoo. Not being able to endure civilization, they died. Cooper had thought about a movie taking two gorillas to those islands and pitting them against the dragon lizards but was unable to interest Paramount or RKO in this project, the idea being considered too expensive in a time of Depression.

When he learned that Willie O'Brien was doing animation with miniature figures at RKO, he began to entertain the idea of doing a home-grown studio-made movie, and the thought of one great gorilla became bigger and bigger. He would be discovered in a jungle and brought back to civilization to his downfall. A girl (of course, a blond girl) would be part of the discovering expedition. For a while he had thought of Jean Harlow but recently had decided they could put a blond wig on me. As I listened, I was being captured by Cooper's enthusiasm more than by the idea itself.

He had the exuberance of a young boy whose dreams of adventure are forever in the forefront of his mind. He created a mood of happy mystery, as though he had ideas too many to tell. We came to a setting on the back lot where O'Brien had established the small figure of the ape in his appropriate habitat. He appeared to be about 18 inches tall, the entire jungle scene no more than 5 feet square; I think the whole was covered with glass, as if needing protection from the elements. The little fellow was not frightening at all.

As we walked away from this first introduction to the nameless creature, Cooper slowed his pace, then stopped. "I think I'll call him Kong." A pause and then, "King Kong." There was a ring to that, as though a reverberating bR4, 1988 SB Meeting King Kong going to have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood," said the producer, Merian Cooper. My thoughts were flying toward the hope that Cooper might be waiting for Cary Grant's arrival, just as I BY FAY WRAY The following is from "On the Other Hand," by Fay Wray, to be published in February by St. Martin's Press. WHAT DOES IT matter that many people would think that "King Kong" is my only film? Again and again, I hear, "I saw your film," or "Your movie was on TV the other night." "Kong" does not erase the fact that I did many other films.

But it is a fact that "Kong" is the most widely known, the most enduring. And considering the improvement in tape, it is likely to go on shaping and enhancing the state of wonder in young people and old. In the early '30s Merian Cooper asked me to come to his new offices at RKO. He showed me large drawings for a film he was planning sketches of jungle scenes that were exotically beautiful, and then an astonishing one: the figure of a giant ape climbing up the side of the newly completed Empire State Building. "You're going to have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood," he said.

And even while my thoughts were flying toward the hope that Cooper might be waiting for Cary Grant's arrival just as I was, Cooper went on to point at the giant ape and say, again, "The tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood." Now my heart was pounding, not with the excitement it would have been to work 8B LOS ANGELES TIMES MAGAZINE, DECEMB.