re: Stout's Charles R. Knight sketchbook

[StephanPickering@cs.com]

       Indeed, Bill Stout's work is a masterful re-visit. However, I would offer a correction: all of the conceptualizations for the 1933 film came not from Merian C. Cooper (he contributed the name for his "killer ape" only), but from lengthy discussions between OBie and Edgar Wallace. I have both of the latter's unfilmed scripts, and the entire paradigm for the film is  to be found there (alas, the contributions of Harry Hoyt to the 1933 film, which owes so much to the Creation project, were not acknowledged by RKO). James Creelman did two rewrites of Edgar Wallace, Ruth Rose (Ernest Schoedsack's wife) did 2 more (removing all of Creelman's descriptive narrations). My in-progress book, Alfred Russel Wallace's KING KONG, examines all of the 1925-1933 intertwined scenarios (including OBie's plans for a short film, Charlie Chaplin in the Lost World, which survive in marvellous sk!
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ches in my collection), as I have had access to all of Merian Cooper's papers.