Post by politicidal on Feb 7, 2021 3:48:25 GMT
It was more like a old-school comedic adventure film which the original writer described as eerily similar in tone to The Mummy (1999). While I do love that movie, I’m thankful that Jackson changed his mind and went for something more reverential and extravagant.
TEXT:
In Jackson and Walsh’s original version, Jack Driscoll (eventually played by Adrien Brody) is an ex-fighter pilot and World War I veteran suffering from PTSD after the loss of a fellow pilot. But he’s also steadfast and charismatic, not unlike Brendan Fraser’s character in The Mummy. “I remember initially the first time we come across Jack he’s a World War I fighter pilot,” recalls King Kong pre-production CG supervisor Matt Aitken in the making-of doc. “And he and his buddy are up in their biplanes doing baseball practice, chucking a ball and hitting it back to whoever was flying along.”
The comparisons don’t end there, as the story of this version of King Kong revolved around an archaeological dig in Sumatra, with the character of Ann Darrow (eventually played by Naomi Watts) now an archaeologist. “Ann was sort of an upper-class English kind of character,” Rivers explains. “She was the daughter of a lord who was a Bothany archeologist-type.” Ann, Jack, and the documentary filmmaker Carl Denham (eventually played by Jack Black) are on a dig in Sumatra when they uncover an ancient civilization and the idea of this “ape god.”
The character of Carl Denham in this version was more overtly villainous, whereas the Ann Darrow character is more curious – she actively seeks out Kong due to her archaeological interests. Jack, meanwhile, is the swashbuckling hero who in the finale commandeers an old plane and flies around the Empire State Building, trying to protect Kong from other fighter pilots attempting to bring him down.
All of this would change when Jackson finally made King Kong, but most of what did carry over into the 2005 version of King Kong was the set pieces. The Kong vs. Three T. rex fight was in this original version, as was the brontosaurus stampede. But whereas Jackson intended to use CG effects in 1996, he also planned on homaging the other two King Kong movies by bringing in a mechanical hand:
“We were gonna do the classic Kong’s mechanical hand like they had done in the previous versions. I know that Weta Workshop had gotten pretty far advanced with designing and building a mechanical hand rig. We also had a sequence with some crocodiles that attacked a sinking car at one stage, and we were gonna be building mechanical animatronic crocodiles that were gonna be busting in the windows of the slowly sinking vehicle.”
collider.com/peter-jackson-king-kong-original-version/
TEXT:
In Jackson and Walsh’s original version, Jack Driscoll (eventually played by Adrien Brody) is an ex-fighter pilot and World War I veteran suffering from PTSD after the loss of a fellow pilot. But he’s also steadfast and charismatic, not unlike Brendan Fraser’s character in The Mummy. “I remember initially the first time we come across Jack he’s a World War I fighter pilot,” recalls King Kong pre-production CG supervisor Matt Aitken in the making-of doc. “And he and his buddy are up in their biplanes doing baseball practice, chucking a ball and hitting it back to whoever was flying along.”
The comparisons don’t end there, as the story of this version of King Kong revolved around an archaeological dig in Sumatra, with the character of Ann Darrow (eventually played by Naomi Watts) now an archaeologist. “Ann was sort of an upper-class English kind of character,” Rivers explains. “She was the daughter of a lord who was a Bothany archeologist-type.” Ann, Jack, and the documentary filmmaker Carl Denham (eventually played by Jack Black) are on a dig in Sumatra when they uncover an ancient civilization and the idea of this “ape god.”
The character of Carl Denham in this version was more overtly villainous, whereas the Ann Darrow character is more curious – she actively seeks out Kong due to her archaeological interests. Jack, meanwhile, is the swashbuckling hero who in the finale commandeers an old plane and flies around the Empire State Building, trying to protect Kong from other fighter pilots attempting to bring him down.
All of this would change when Jackson finally made King Kong, but most of what did carry over into the 2005 version of King Kong was the set pieces. The Kong vs. Three T. rex fight was in this original version, as was the brontosaurus stampede. But whereas Jackson intended to use CG effects in 1996, he also planned on homaging the other two King Kong movies by bringing in a mechanical hand:
“We were gonna do the classic Kong’s mechanical hand like they had done in the previous versions. I know that Weta Workshop had gotten pretty far advanced with designing and building a mechanical hand rig. We also had a sequence with some crocodiles that attacked a sinking car at one stage, and we were gonna be building mechanical animatronic crocodiles that were gonna be busting in the windows of the slowly sinking vehicle.”
collider.com/peter-jackson-king-kong-original-version/
