In his 1996 first-draft screenplay for a King Kong remake, director Peter Jackson drew a broad parody of the Carl Denham character based, at least in part, on original Kong director Merian C. Cooper. He's making a jungle travelogue called Indonesia Hell Hole of the World, and refuses to make a big deal of his cameraman losing a limb to bears: "Pain is temporary. Film is forever." By the time Jackson came to make his Kong, almost a decade later, he was using the original 1933 classic as a template but applying modern techniques: palaeontologically-correct CGI dinosaurs; a distinctly-simian Kong but with human expressions, acted in motion capture by Andy Serkis; a vertigo-inducing last stand at the Empire State, which put you up there with Kong and Ann (Naomi Watts). It's a faithful full-scale remake that turns a 90-minute classic into a three-hour celebration of it - a hi-tech extension of the original rather than an improvement on it.
Writer/editor/ghost-writer transfixed by crime, cinema and the serrated edges of popular culture. Those similarly afflicted are invited to make contact.
