Jonathan Bing writes: Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong hits the big screen in December. But for the last year, he's been giving eager fans a behind-the-scenes look at the world he built for the big ape. Posted while the cameras were still rolling, these extraordinary online diaries break every closed-set taboo in Hollywood...

King Kong is about to die. Shoulders hunched, the great ape is perched atop the Empire State Building, 1,200 feet above Fifth Avenue. At that height, the skies are empty but for two Curtis Helldiver biplanes that swoop through the clouds. The planes arc toward Kong and strafe the beast with bullets, their silhouettes black against the Gotham sky. This footage, the public's first glimpse of the final scene of Peter Jackson's King Kong, was lifted from the server of a special effects shop in Wellington, New Zealand, converted into a short QuickTime movie, and posted online a few months ago. But the clip isn't the product of a studio leak or a hacker's wiles; it was created and released by Jackson himself. Posted on Kongisking.net, it's one in a series of so-called Production Diaries, which chronicle the making of Jackson's new motion picture. [More]