21. Christening Kong
Merian Cooper returned to his prehistoric project with a new component: a title character he called The Beast, a primordial missing link lured back to civilisation by a beautiful woman he carries to the top of the Empire State Building - then the tallest skyscraper in New York. For the Beast's Jurassic-era contemporaries, the filmmaker visualised Komodo dragons, discovered in Malaysia by his explorer friend W. Douglas Burden. But it took collaborators to give the project flesh. Willis O'Brien baulked at filming real lizards and created models; instead of a man in an ape suit, he developed an 18" gorilla model that could be manipulated into movement. The screenplay was assigned to London-born pulp-fiction writer Edgar Wallace, who introduced a number of plot points and named the ape 'Kong'. Wallace never lived to see the legendary fruit of his labours - he died suddenly of diabetes in February 1932, just over a year before King Kong was released, and his script was completed by the co-director's wife, Ruth Rose.