Instead of making a third version of "King Kong" (to be released later this year), maybe Peter Jackson should have made a movie about Merian C. Cooper, the man who made the first "King Kong" in 1933. It would be something new, and, if Mark Cotta Vaz's Living Dangerously is any evidence, it would be at least as action-packed and exciting. As Vaz, the author of several books on moviemaking, says in this commendable first-ever biography of Cooper: "His own life was his greatest production." And Cooper's personal motto for moviemaking might as easily apply to his own life: "Keep it distant, difficult, and dangerous." [More]

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