Hacker Cinema
King Kong
1933 · Film · 100 min
Directed by Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack
Adventurous filmmaker Carl Denham sets out to produce a motion picture unlike anything the world has seen before. Alongside his leading lady Ann Darrow and his first mate Jack Driscoll, they arrive on an island and discover a legendary creature said to be neither beast nor man. Denham captures the monster to be displayed on Broadway as King Kong, the eighth wonder of the world.
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15 comments on Hacker News
Animators (and storyboarders, layout artists, illustrators etc) are still taught to prioritise the clarity and readability of the character's silhouette, although they're usually working with a three quarter view (between side profile and front-on) rather than a profile like the shadow puppets here. Still I can't help thinking this film would be a good object of study.
Some of the forest scenes remind me of the original King Kong in their use of dark foreground shapes and framing devices to give an impression of scale.
https://youtu.be/j6DaB0Is4jM?t=1720
https://youtu.be/1vNv-pE8I_c?t=72
There is some value in the mistakes and limitations of older movies, I am sure if you look it up people who can explain it far better than me can give lots of examples, I saw a video once about the growing trend of analog horror where people intentionally watch older horror movies in older storage and display formats like VHS and CRT televisions, because in many ways the high def modern tv screens and 4K mastered prints actually take away from the atmosphere of the original movie that was made keeping the limitations of the technology of the time. Wes Anderson also talks about how watching the fur pattern constantly changing on the model of King Kong in the black and white stop-motion movie due to the puppeteers touching the model to manipulate it inspired him to do the same in his Fantastic Mr Fox movie
The more I dug into it, the more movie soundtracks were all rooted in the Vienna scene, with Wagner at the base.
Max Steiner and Erich Korngold are for me better examples of this influence, since Steiner in particular pretty much invented the first modern film score with King Kong.
1939? I suppose you have to pick a year and call that the cutoff.
But you're cutoff leaves to the "Dark Ages" the films Frankenstein (1931), Love Me Tonight (1931), 42nd Street (1933), Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), King Kong (1933), It Happened One Night (1934), The Thin Man (1934), My Man Godfrey (1936), Stella Dallas (1937), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) to name a few.
> There is big money in storing original film prints. There are a ton of commercial warehouses (mostly in/near Los Angeles) that specializes in such things.
Until the studio decides to, you know, just destroy them or they are destroyed by fires
--- start quote ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_film
A report created by Library of Congress film historian and archivist David Pierce claims:
- 75% of original silent-era films have perished.
- Only 14% of the 10,919 silent films released by major studios exist in their original 35 mm or other formats.
- 11% survive only in full-length foreign versions or film formats of lesser image quality.[1][3]
Of the American sound films made from 1927 to 1950, an estimated half have been lost
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-04-fi-universal4-story.html
In addition to the ruined “King Kong” attraction and the burned New York street scapes, the Universal Studios Hollywood fire has claimed another casualty: perhaps hundreds of classic 35-millimeter film prints, the studio said Tuesday.
The fire also claimed about 5% of Universal Music Group’s recordings...
In an e-mail sent to several dozen film exhibitors Monday, Universal said the “fire destroyed nearly 100% of the archive prints kept here on the lot.
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etc.
"The earliest stories (among Westerners) of a dragon-like animal existing in the region circulated widely and attracted considerable attention. But no Westerner visited the island to check the story until official interest was sparked in the early 1910s by stories from Dutch sailors based in Flores in East Nusa Tenggara about a mysterious creature. The creature was allegedly a dragon which inhabited a small island in the Lesser Sunda Islands (the main island of which is Flores). ... The Dutch sailors reported that the creature measured up to seven metres (twenty-three feet) in length with a large body and mouth which constantly breathed fire. It burnt them and so they could not continue the investigation. It was believed then that the odd creature could fly." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_(island)
"The Komodo dragon was the driving factor for an expedition to Komodo Island by W. Douglas Burden in 1926. After returning with 12 preserved specimens and two live ones, this expedition provided the inspiration for the 1933 movie King Kong. It was also Burden who coined the common name "Komodo dragon."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_dragon
Your mention of dragons made me think of the Komodo dragon. I only noticed after pasting the first quote the strange coincidence that it mentions Flores! I thought it interesting that the very real Komodo dragon, 10 ft long with dragony teeth and nasty bite, produced traditional-dragon-like legends even into the 20th C.
YouTube now has maybe several dozens, maybe more, of full movies available to watch for free "with ads". Where they got the movies, I have no idea. If click around enough at YouTube, can get a Web page that lists just movies, all or nearly all for free and the rest "for rent".
In my experience, the operation of downloading a movie, or any video being played in a Web browser, at least with the software tools I have, to a file is touchy, slow, unreliable, etc. but at times works, but I was able to download, from somewhere, Sargent York. Also I was able to buy on DVD the original King Kong.
Both of these two old movies show, at least to my eyes, that the basic craft of drama, story telling, and, really, movie making was plenty advanced by the time of those two movies (the 1930s). For "York" busy movie music composer Max Steiner in places was plenty dramatic.
From such old movies, I have liked the examples of the basic craft of movie making with simpler and easier to understand movies that don't do nearly as much as a lot of more recent movies with special effects.
My guess is that most of what is important in making a movie popular is the basic craft and not the rest, and in my judgment the craft has not improved much since the best work of the 1930s. Maybe this observation is just Film School 101. Yes, current computer based special effects are amazing, but that is only an indirect approach to the main goal of the basic craft, insight into humans. Having at least some understanding of the "basic craft" is somewhat relevant to my Internet startup.
Sure, in school I was a STEM field major and refused to take literature seriously. But at times literature tries to address a serious subject -- humans. Literature does not always do well with that subject, but neither do the STEM fields.
To my eyes, sometimes literature, ..., and movies actually do well in some respects with humans, at times good enough to take seriously in the goal of understanding humans.
Indeed. They were the most prominent feature of the lower Manhattan skyline, often the prominent focus of any photos/flyover/footage of the city, especially views from either New Jersey to the west or Brooklyn to the east.
A nice montage of some movie appearances is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsedxIoWFZo
In some, they were just a part of the distinctive background place-setting New York skyline, or a ground-level signifier of "downtown financial district'; in others, they were part of the action. Especially memorable was the 1976 'King Kong', which updated the 1933 version to have Kong climb the twin towers instead of the Empire State Building. Other films featured the observation deck, a popular tourist attraction.
> The experiment isn't entirely meaningful, because it is culturally dependent -- not just the star-ness, but the expectations of the performance. You don't have to go back very far in time to watch actors who were highly praised but seem off now. And go 20 years in the future, and a lot of what you see now will seem weird and fake.
Exactly that. I was just watching King Kong the other day, and most of the acting reads as terrible today. Delivery's bad, physical acting's way too much, timing's extremely bad. Ed Wood level, much of the time, and that's not an exaggeration. Some of the best (to my modern-viewer perceptions) is from the side characters. Yet, presumably, the leads were at least considered OK actors, at the time. This is true for lots of older films, especially before the 70s or so when the typical style seemed to shift to something much closer to what's in use today, and requires adjusting expectations and some, if you will, immersion therapy, to get over that hurdle and start to enjoy them on their own terms.
But then again, you can go back all the way to the silent film era and find some performances that still feel real and very good, even today and without much expectation-adjusting. Some of it seems to depend on the country producing the film—so, again, it's about culture. And comedy seems nearly immune to the problem, I guess because actors in comedies in all eras are rarely even trying for "believable", and are always kind of in on the whole thing with the audience.
You also see this with oration. Old speeches that are recorded sound totally strange. Part of it's that we had entire accents and styles of speech that were once common, that are now all but gone, a century or less later. Makes one wonder exactly how alien the past might have been, really, if one went even farther back. Written language makes it seem so close, at times. And yet....
Two quick thoughts:
1. The results don't load for me in Firefox unless I reload the page. I can see from the network tab that the ###.json file is received, but nothing is shown. (Tested on both desktop and Firefox for Android.)
2. I think the request "Name an old movie..." undercuts the surprise factor of discovering how old the movie you picked is, which is presumably the point of the site. My first pick for an old movie was Casablanca, which is too old to even generate results. I picked Lawrence of Arabia and then Star Wars, but the comparison films (some French thing from 1903 I'd never heard of, and King Kong) only confirmed that my choices are, indeed, old. I think some other prompt would be better able to create surprise. You want people to be entering films like Avatar or Men in Black, not films they consider "old".
His agent should get him somehow to be part of the RIAA. They seem to have the right kind of lawyers for this level of bullshittery.
I find royalty issues interesting because when I was a kid, my mother worked for RKO Radio Pictures. One of her tasks every so often (quarterly? yearly?) was to send checks to everyone involved in the film King Kong.
Some people got hundreds or thousands. Some people got pennies. But everyone got paid. She make sure of that.
I'm not sure I'm able to visualize this correctly. Let's say we have an array of strings containing the top 20 movies from Rotten Tomatoes:
The Wizard of Oz The Third Man Citizen Kane All About Eve Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) Modern Times A Hard Day's Night The Godfather E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial Metropolis It Happened One Night Singin' in the Rain Laura The Adventures of Robin Hood Inside Out Repulsion Boyhood North by Northwest King Kong Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
What would this data structure look like?
Really nice article with lots of nifty technical stuff about optics, lasers, etc.
But this thread also has a lot of thoughtful comments that question the actual bottom line financial potential of this nifty technical stuff.
Here's much of the rest between the nifty technology and the financial bottom line: The art, entertainment, content, etc.
E.g., I've never paid much attention to ballet. Since early on I liked music and classical music, I have some CDs of the music to a few of the famous ballets, right, The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, Coppélia.
But, right, via YouTube, it was easy, e.g., to watch some of Coppélia, so I did. It's fun! It's a light comedy, with a cute story by Hoffmann (right, as in Tales of Hoffmann), and a LOT of really pretty girls (right, I'm a human male!) acting really cute!
Movies and the OP? I'm coming back to that with Coppélia as an example!
The YouTube performance I watched was from The Australian Ballet. Well, too soon that performance was taken down on YouTube. Bummer! But, if The Australian Ballet had used YouTube just as a free sample, then it worked because I bought the DVD.
Now the DVD of Coppélia on my computer is really nice, nicer to watch than via YouTube. No matter how the work goes on a day, a little Coppélia will make the day a lot better.
Why? Lasers? Nope! Instead of lasers, what's good is just the art, entertainment, content, and these come across quite nicely via the DVD. The music is terrific; the story is cute; the girls are really pretty. Drive 50 miles to a 3D, 4K laser movie version at big bucks? Likely not.
Why? There's an old point: Once long ago a guy asked a child which he liked better, radio dramas or TV dramas. The boy said radio. For why, he said, "The pictures are much better on radio.". Yup.
Sorry laser guys: Some of the best pictures are what the viewer forms in their head from just hints from the content itself.
Sit down, laser guys: I have a DVD of the original 1933 King Kong. It's just black and white, but it's still fun! The nicest part is the interplay with the Fay Wary character, the poor, pretty, sweet, naive girl, the older, powerful, assertive, rich movie producer, the hard boiled crew of the ship, etc., the beauty and beast theme -- all that comes across very nicely with just that old 1933 black and white version.
My wife understood drama: So, once she took us to a summer stock play, only a few actors, a small stage, a small audience, and afterward pointed out to me how there is some magic to the theater, that the audience can really get into the story and experience with just the hints of such meager production values. Not nearly new since such drama goes way back in English literature and the ancient Greek theater.
Net, the main issue is the content, not the technology.
It's a very abstract game that simply takes imagery from the classic King Kong movie.
At this point trying to read more into it is a tad paranoid IMO.
That's just wrong. Overcraking (running the film through the camera faster than normal) slows motion down. Undercranking speeds it up.
Stop-motion doesn't slow things down; it's a technique where you expose one frame of film, move something (usually a model) slightly, and expose the next frame.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_motion
Stop-motion animation examples include the original King Kong, Sinbad and all those other Ray Harryhausen films, the AT-ATs in Empire Strikes Back. (And there was also a technique called "Go motion" animation where the puppet was moved during the frame exposure, thus causing motion blur, and making for a much more realistic animation, which was used for the dragon in DragonSlayer and I think some of Return of the Jedi.)
If you want to get really pedantic, probably the best term for this jellybean video is "pixilation". I know we use that word differently nowadays, but before computer graphics were common, "pixilation" was the term for stop-motion animated real-world objects.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixilation
Thank you for letting my nearly pointless film degree not go entirely to waste.