A short look at Willis OBrien after King Kong, Son of Kong, The Last Days of Pompeii and She. In 1939 Willis OBrien wrote a screenplay about Dinosaurs and Cowboys that he tried to get RKO to produce entitled Gwangi. They thought the story both ridiculous and too expensive to make. It would remain in his drawer. In 1956 a Mexican/American co-production came out entitled The Beast of Hollow Mountain starring televisions Wild Bill Hickcock Guy Madison and beautiful half Spanish/half Irish Patricia Medina. The film was credited as being from an original story by Willis OBrien and in actuality it was adopted from Gwangi by him, but he didnt like what was being done by the producers so his name as a screenwriter was removed and a false one added. This was the first time OBrien would be promised he would do the stop motion animation and made drawings, etc, but the producers decided he was ideas were too expensive and it was dropped. The same year OBrien and his protégé Ray Harryhaussen teamed to make the slightly less than Ten Minute Dinosaur sequence in Irwin Allens documentary The Animal World. The stop motion process was too expensive for Allen and like with the previous film models in different posses, like puppets, were substituted to make the animals move. In 1957 which some of the same cast from The Beast of Hollow Mountain, which I admit liking even though the Beast doesnt show up until the last 15 minutes, another Mexican/American co-production was made with actual stop motion animation by OBrien entitled The Black Scorpion. OBrien actually wrote this script and did the stop motion animation, but money ran out and that is way there is so many shots repeated and even the black matte shots used were stop motion figures were to have been inserted. 1959 saw OBrien do some excellent stop motion animation in the British film Behemoth the Sea Serpent aka: The Giant Behemoth and then came a meeting with Irwin Allen again over a remake of OBriens classic 1925 film The Lost World. OBrien submitted a script, drawings of the prehistoric animals he wanted to animate and a storyboard. This would be another example of somebody wanting to just use OBriens name as a draw. He is again credited for the story idea to get his name associated with the project and as you all know Allen used lizards with added back pieces. I always felt this could have been a great film as Allen had an outstanding cast with the likes of Michael Rennie (Klaatu in the original The Day the Earth Stood Still), Claude Rains (Both Universals The Invisible Man and The Phantom of the Opera), David Hedison( The original Fly and the television series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea) along with Jill St. John and Fernando Lamas. One year later with another script in hand entitled King Kong vs Frankenstein OBrien approached American Producer John Beck with the idea of a film were Dr. Frankenstein is living in Africa experimenting on Gorillas is creating a giant Gorilla of his own from spare parts. It is up to the original 1933 King Kong to save the animals and humans being attacked. Beck immediately purchased the rights to the script from OBrien and told him he would be doing all the stop motion animation on the project. Then along came Tomoyuki Tanaka looking for a way to revitalized Godzilla as a result of the World Wide interest in the character being generated from of all things the American re-edit of Godzillas Counterattack entitled Gigantis, the Fire Monster. Beck made a deal for the American Rights to what would become 1962s King Kong vs Godzilla and Willis OBrien was out in the cold and the first of many law suits by OBrien and his Estate would be filed affecting the question of who actually owned the character of King Kong. Eventually Merian C. Coopers Estate, Ted Turner and even RKO pictures would get in the act. From this one script Tanaka was able to create King Kong Escapes, Frankenstein vs Baragon and Frankensteins Monsters: Sanda versus Gaira while the creator of the original story Willis OBrien got zero in royalties as Beck had sold the script outright to Tanaka. Willis OBrien died on November 8, 1962 three months after the Japanese original version of King Kong vs Godzilla came out and seven months before John Becks American re-edit was released in 1963. In 1969 Ray Harryhaussen released The Valley of Gwangi as a tribute to his mentor Willis OBrien from that original 1939 script.
Posted on: Mon, 27 Jan 2014 13:35:12 +0000
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