King Kong Roars: Hollywood's Giant Awakens

Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's King Kong premiered at both Radio City Music Hall and the RKO Roxy Theatre simultaneously on March 2, 1933, breaking the opening-day attendance record for a motion picture. The film's stop-motion animation, supervised by Willis O'Brien, created a giant ape so convincing that audiences reportedly screamed and fainted during the Empire State Building climax. The special effects budget consumed roughly a third of the film's ,000 production cost. Cooper, a real-life adventurer who had survived being shot down in World War I and imprisoned in a Soviet POW camp, based the story partly on his own obsession with gorillas and exotic locations. King Kong earned million at the box office during the depths of the Great Depression and was rereleased multiple times, eventually influencing every giant monster film that followed, from Godzilla to Jurassic Park. The Empire State Building, opened only two years earlier, gained its most famous fictional tenant.