The first (and original) King Kong

A reckless adventurer, a war-time photographer and a Hollywood actress who didn't realise what she was getting into - John Walsh reports on the making of a film that was an adventure all by itself

Poor Fay Wray. They told her that the co-star in her next movie would be "the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood". Nobody mentioned in those early days that it would be a 50ft giant ape.

The image of Ann Darrow, the part played by Fay Wray, wriggling and screaming in the giant paw of King Kong is so imprinted on our collective memories that it's hard to imagine a time when it was unimaginable. In 1933, special effects were so new, and trick photography and stop-animation so rudimentary, that Hollywood hadn't yet got round to awarding Oscars for them.

Talking (let alone screaming) pictures had been going for only six years. The idea of a film as pure spectacle, a 100-minute feature that would combine adventure, horror, romance, fantasy, jungles and the relatively mundane streets of Manhattan, and be calculated to shock the pants off any audience, anywhere in the world, was a new one indeed.

From the perspective of 72 years, the original Kong movie may look a little foolish to us (not to mention racist, sexist and, shall we say, symbolically naive) but it still packs a visceral wallop. No wonder it was the movie that fired Peter Jackson (who saw it aged nine) with a passion to make films, for the narrative moves through a series of coups de cinema as powerful as Jungian archetypes: the dancing savages on Skull Island, the staked-out virgin tied between two pillars waiting to be ravished, the first close-up of the gorilla's face and its half-comical look of surprise and inner turbulence, Kong bursting from his chains in a New York cinema, Kong swatting biplanes on top of the Empire State Building. But the story behind the making of King Kong is a narrative that's a considerable action adventure all by itself.

It represents the coming together of several elements - not just people in the movie business, but themes, straws in the Zeitgeist wind. One was horror. For reasons possibly connected to the Depression, the early 1930s were the cradle of the classic horror movie. Tod Browning's Dracula and James Whale's Frankenstein were both released in 1931, setting a template for the iconic Monster who terrorises innocent humans, especially young women. Horror cliches began here, newly minted. The dangerous sea voyage in Dracula, the flaming torches in the night at the end of Frankenstein - you see echoes of them in the passage of the trusty ship Venture as she conveys the film crew to Skull Island, and in the flaming brands of the natives as they wait for Kong's arrival.

Jungle fantasy was also a popular genre. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, in which the intrepid Victorian explorer Professor Challenger discovers prehistoric monsters still living in the South American jungle and brings a dinosaur back to London, was filmed (silently) in 1925; it featured stop-animation effects by the great Willis O'Brien, who was to animate King Kong. The idea of an imprisoned monster on display in the city was given topical force by the presence, in Barnum & Bailey's Circus, of "the largest ape in captivity", christened Gargantua.

Tarzan, the muscular jungle hunk created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, was the star of several movies in the 1920s, most especially Tarzan the Ape Man, scripted (amazingly) by Ivor Novello. Also popular was Bring 'Em Back Alive, a book by Frank Buck about capturing animals for incarceration in zoos. Published in 1930, it was filmed in 1932.

The period was heaving, in other words, with jungles, primal imaginings and freakish creatures in shaky confinement. And a pervasive feeling that the big city, namely New York, was no longer a safe place to be. All that was needed now were the right people.

The plot of King Kong involves a megalomaniacal film director called Denham, a man with a reputation for reckless adventuring. Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) knows his name when they meet. "Yes, I know you," she tells him. "You make moving pictures in the jungle and places."

Denham's real-life counterpart was, in fact, two people: the film's co-directors. Merion C Cooper was a Florida-born journalist and airman. He worked on sailing ships, served in the US Army Air Corps in China during the First World War, and was a freelance journalist when he met Ernest B Schoedsack in 1926. Schoedsack was from Iowa, and had worked as a cameraman at the Keystone studio (home of the famous Cops).

During the war he'd filmed battle scenes, but had, like Cooper, drifted into journalism. Their meeting was auspicious. Both men were keen on travel, adventure and authenticity, and decided to make documentaries together. They were hired by Paramount and sent to Abyssinia to film Haile Selassie. When that worked out they were contracted to make Grass (in 1926) about obscure tribes in Iran, then Chang (1927), set in Thailand, then Rango (1931), set in Sumatra. Both men radiated derring-do. As David Thomson notes in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film, "The standard photograph of Schoedsack might have been submitted for casting Allan Quatermain [hero of the H Rider Haggard novels]: a lean-faced man with a long jaw and direct gaze, open-necked shirt, pipe in mouth and pith helmet on head." When he and Cooper graduated to making feature films, they were precisely the all-action, manly-heroics-in-tropical-climate stuff the Denham character supposedly makes: The Four Feathers, set in Sudan, and The Most Dangerous Game.

The latter was set in Malaya; and it was about this time that Cooper met W Douglas Burden, an explorer, who regaled him with the tale of his 1926 trip to Malaysia to capture the giant "dragon" lizards of Komodo. It was probably also Burden who told him the Malay word for gorilla: kong.

Enter Edgar Wallace, the British writer and plot-factory. Born in Greenwich, he started life selling newspapers in Ludgate Circus in central London, but relocated to South Africa, where he became a war correspondent so adept at finding scoops that Lord Kitchener banned him from attending press conferences out of pique. Back in England he published The Four Just Men in 1905, when he was 30, and embarked on a spectacular career as a hugely prolific writer of best-selling thrillers and detective stories (170 in all). A successful playwright, he also created British Lion, the film company, to turn his stage hits into movies and further expand his vast fortune. One of his most popular films was Sanders of the River, a classic imperial ripping yarn, set in Africa. Then in 1930, he headed for Hollywood. In America, the story goes, he looked at the "concrete jungle" of Manhattan and itched to make a film that contrasted it with the real jungle of Africa, and featured a giant gorilla.

It seems that Cooper took Wallace's original story and adapted it to become a kind of love story - a Beauty and the Beast fable, as the screenplay obligingly hints on three separate occasions.

Everything started happening at once. Willis O'Brien, who'd constructed the screen dinosaurs in The Lost World, had embarked on a new stop-animation project called Creation, about a group of submarine sailors trapped on a spooky island inhabited by dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. Creation was now bought by David Selznick at RKO Studios, but soon deemed too expensive and abandoned. When Merion Cooper (now an RKO executive) was looking through studio projects to see what was worth keeping, he found the footage from Creation, and realised how it might be spliced into his giant-ape story, using O'Brien's triceratops, tyrannosaurus rex and pterodactyl models. He commissioned a screenplay, provisionally entitled The Eighth Wonder of the World, from Ruth Rose, aka Mrs Ernest Schoedsack, a thrilling young woman who had gone on foreign travels with Cooper and her husband. She was the real-life Ann Darrow. James Creelman was drafted in to co-write it. The title was shorted to Kong, but Selznick thought that sounded "too Oriental" and added the "King".

Meanwhile, Willis O'Brien and his team got to work on the monster. A chap called Marcel Delgado constructed the giant gorilla and the dinosaurs using metal armatures with ball-and-socket joints, covered with rubber muscles. Kong's skin was made of pruned rabbit fur. Though he was advertised as being 50 feet high, Kong in the film is actually no more than about 18 feet, proportionate to Fay Wray. (Eagle-eyed viewers may spot that he grows during the final shoot-out. Merien Cooper decided he looked too puny against the skyscrapers and ordered him rebuilt at 24 feet. Hardly anyone noticed.) Cooper and Schoedsack, meanwhile, gave themselves a walk-on part in the film - they're the pilots who shoot Kong off the Empire State Building at the end.

The film had its premiere on 2 March 1933 at the Radio City Music Hall and the New Roxy; music and dance extravaganzas preceding the screening. They were the nation's two largest movie theatres and no movie had ever opened simultaneously at both - between them, they could seat 10,000 people. By the end of the first day's performances, 50,000 tickets had been sold. The film was an instant smash-hit and earned $89,931 in four days.

The RKO studio was almost bankrupt at the time, but King Kong saved it. The giant ape gave the thunderstruck filmgoers of Depression America a whole lot more to think about than their own melancholy state.

And Skull Island? It was a studio mock-up, I'm afraid, and you can't visit there, nor see the Great Wall behind which the Kong once lurked. David Selznick had it set alight during the making of Gone with the Wind, to give a bit more oomph to the Burning of Atlanta sequence.