How I Did It #3: Return to Skull Island

This story has a complicated history. By rights it ought to have been the first entry in the "How I Did It" series, because I originally wrote it back in 1995, but it didn't actually get published until 2001.

It's written in the form of an article for a low-budget movie magazine -- an article about the classic film King Kong, in honor of its upcoming 65th anniversary (that was the original version; when I sold it in 2001 I changed it to the 70th anniversary). The narrator, presumably "James L. Cambias," joins two friends to watch the new digitally-remastered special edition of the old movie.

"James" and his friends watch the movie, making snarky, Mystery Science Theater style remarks about how lame the romantic scenes betwen Bruce Cabot and Fay Wray sound. Then we get to the part where the natives kidnap Fay Wray and tie her up beyond the ginormous gate as an offering to Kong. Kong arrives, and the reader finally discovers that this isn't quite the King Kong we all remember. Kong's got scaly skin, bat-like wings, and his face is a mass of octopus-like tentacles.

That's right, Kong is Cthulhu in this version. One of the narrator's digressions explains how producer Merian Cooper came across H.P. Lovecraft's story "The Call of Cthulhu" and adapted it into a movie. (He changed the name from Cthulhu to Kong so that people could pronounce it.) I gave Lovecraft a brief career as a screenwriter in Hollywood, ending with "a disastrous series of morale-building shorts" during World War II. He spends the next couple of decades as a cranky old man going to science fiction conventions. (And you just know that's how he would have wound up if he hadn't died young.) There's also some (mostly true) stuff about Merian Cooper, who produced King Kong, and Willis O'Brien, the stop-motion animator who brought him to life.

With the narrator still in full snark mode, the plot of the alternate-universe King Kong lurches toward the finale. Paralleling the plot of Lovecraft's story, a heroic pilot kills Kong/Cthulhu by crashing a biplane into it, knocking him off the Empire State Building before everyone in New York goes mad from his psychic emanations. Carl Denham gets the last line, though: "With strange eons, even death may die."

The article wraps up with some harsh words about the Dino DeLaurentis remake of 1976. The script was lame, the effects were clumsy -- but what really ticks off my narrator is the decision to replace the classic tentacle-faced Kong with a "garden-variety giant gorilla." The end.

I remember the origin of this story pretty exactly. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I was running a Space: 1889 roleplaying campaign during the 1990s in Durham, North Carolina. One episode involved the characters exploring the ruins of an elder civilization on a remote Pacific island. The players were "meta-gaming" -- trying to figure out what was going on by guessing which fictional model I was adapting (or ripping off, if you prefer). To keep them off-balance, I kept flipping back and forth between homages to "The Call of Cthulhu" and King Kong. (It turned out to be ancient Martians, anyway.)

The ease with which I could alternate between the two started me thinking. King Kong really is a rather Lovecraftian story, if you think about it. The chief difference is that Kong is ultimately a figure of pathos rather than cosmic menace. Individual humans are tiny and weak compared to Kong, but human civilization is far mightier than he is.

So, I thought -- what if H.P. Lovecraft had written King Kong?

I think I hit upon the faux-nonfiction style for the story right away. I must have already read some of Howard Waldrop's stories using the same structure, and it seemed like the obvious way to tell this one.

The best part of the project was the research. I watched King Kong several times, and dug up magazine articles and books in the Duke University library. (Remember, the Web was still in its infancy in those days.)

This led to my discovery of the fractally-interesting life of Merian C. Cooper, the man who produced King Kong and actually came up with the idea in the first place. (Edgar Wallace got the story credit, but apparently his main contribution consisted of depositing his check.) Cooper is a fascinating real-life character -- moviemaker, explorer, aviator, war hero. He knew everybody: he was friends with John Ford, a Persian nomad chieftan, Jock Whitney, the king of Thailand, and Douglas MacArthur.

For a time after writing "Return to Skull Island" I toyed with the idea of pitching a proposal for a biography of Cooper, but then I heard somewhere that another writer was already working on one -- and sure enough, in 2005 Mark Cotta Vaz published his book Living Dangerously, which I recommend. I did sell an article to Pyramid Online about Cooper, writing him up in GURPS character stats as an example of a real-life pulp adventurer.

I shopped the story around for a while without success. Asimov's rejected it. Amazing Stories not only rejected it, their reader never noticed the fictional aspect of the story at all. Gordon Van Gelder at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction rejected it -- but it was a nice rejection, hand-typed and signed, telling me he liked it but couldn't use it. That was my first "professional" rejection. Which is why I sent "A Diagram of Rapture" to him first a few years later.

I did eventually find a home for "Skull Island," at a small-press 'zine called The Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives, edited by Alex Irvine and T. Davidsohn. It came out in 2002, but sadly no longer seems to be available.

"Return to Skull Island" is still one of my favorites among my own stories. Out of pure vanity I may put it up on this blog at some point. It was the first story that I knew was good enough to publish. Interestingly, that knowledge made its rejection easier to handle, because I was certain it would eventually see print.

If I were to rewrite it today I think I'd toss in some venom for the Peter Jackson remake as well as Dino's. Jackson's Lord of the Rings was a masterpiece, but his Kong had all the original's faults and none of its virtues.

Comments

[Dwtwiddy]

"Out of pure vanity I may put it up on this blog at some point."

Do it!

"So, I thought -- what if H.P. Lovecraft had written King Kong?"

My gut reaction answer to this is: 'He did, in 'Arthur Jermyn', and his take on it was "Forget gorillas, what's *really* scary is miscegenation."'

[Francesca B]

We'd love to read the story!

And I'm very amused at the reader who didn't notice the alternate-history.