All he needed was 'a chariot race', he recalled (as quoted in Celluloid Skyline by James Sanders), meaning a climactic sequence to compare with the frenetic chariot race in 1925's Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. The men were already well known for their silent documentaries, Grass (1925), and Chang (1927), featuring exotic animals in far-off lands, but Cooper fancied making a fictional 'terror gorilla picture'. The idea of an overgrown, awe-inspiring ape was conceived as a purely cinematic spectacle by Merian C Cooper, who co-directed the film with his friend Ernest B Schoedsack. Unlike Dracula, Frankenstein's creature and other such fiends, he didn't emerge from a novel or a folk tale. In part, that's because Kong himself was made for the movies. Despite having been released 90 years ago, in 1933, King Kong still stands tall as the greatest monster movie of all time.
