News for Dec. 22, 2005

'King Kong' book already needs update

12/22/05, 2:04 pm EST - Xoanon

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - King Kong, late of Skull Island, was big and hairy. He had an eye for the ladies. He didn't like flashbulbs. He didn't like planes. He was not a fan of New York. Antisocial though he may have been, after his unveiling in 1933, Kong quickly took his place as moviedom's archetypal great ape. And, though it seems unlikely given how many scary monsters we've seen since, Kong Mark I produced plenty of sleepless nights for plenty of impressionable viewers. One of them is Ray Morton, a writer and script consultant who admits to a happy lifelong obsession with Kong, introduced to the pleasures of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack's creation as a child. "It was simultaneously the strangest, scariest, most exciting, and most touching thing I had seen in my young life, and I was completely bewitched by it," he writes. "I remain so to this day." [More]