Is it true that the director of the film “King Kong” was inspired by the fairy tale of Korney Chukovsky?

There is a widespread belief on the Internet that the “godfather” of the iconic American film character was the children’s poet Korney Chukovsky, because director Merian Cooper read in the fairy tale “Crocodile” how “The Wild Gorilla dragged Lyalya away.” We checked how reliable this version is.

Merian Cooper's 1933 film King Kong included ranked among the best films in history according to Rotten Tomatoes. In this technologically revolutionary film for its time, which became one of the symbols of pre-war Hollywood, many people see domestic influence. Allegedly, the director came up with the title character under the influence of the fairy tale “Crocodile”, in the text of which a “wild Gorilla” dragged Lyalya onto the roof of a tall building. Texts supporting this version can be found on a variety of resources: from "Live Journal" And regional media to "Radio Sputnik" - divisions of RIA Novosti.

Before turning to cinema, the future creator of King Kong, Merian Cooper, served in aviation. In 1919, he joined a volunteer squadron that supported the Polish army in the war with Soviet Russia. A year later, Cooper's plane was shot down, and the American himself was captured. It is alleged that Isaac Babel, in particular, communicated with Cooper at that time, described in his diaries, a meeting with the pilot Frank Mosher. Although the writer called the conversation “endless,” Cooper himself spoke about it didn't remember. In 1921, shortly before the end of the war, Cooper was able to escape to Latvia.

The authors of publications talking about Chukovsky’s influence on the future blockbuster claim: during the months spent in captivity, Cooper tried to learn the Russian language. He did this based on the fairy tale “Crocodile,” which was then printed in huge quantities and distributed free of charge. In Chukovsky's poem there is words: “The wild Gorilla / Dragged Lyalya / And along the sidewalk / She ran at a gallop. / Higher, higher, higher, / Here she is on the roof, / On the seventh floor / Jumping like a ball.” The vivid image remained in the director’s memory, and soon Cooper had a dream where a gorilla was already climbing the Empire State Building. After returning to the United States, the future director retold this story to Edgar Wallace, with whom they began working on the script. This is how the course of events is described in article 2006 from the Ukrainian newspaper "Business" - the earliest source we found that talks about the connection between "King Kong" and Korney Chukovsky.

A year before the publication of the note in the Business newspaper, American film historian Mark Vaz published his book “Living in Danger: The Adventures of Merian K. Cooper, Creator of King Kong,” where he examined Cooper’s biography and the process of creating his main film. According to Vaz, who, unlike Ukrainian and Russian journalists, worked with archival documents, the future director became interested in monkeys as a child. When Cooper was six years old, he was given the book “Discoveries and Adventures in Equatorial Africa.” Its author, French explorer Paul du Chaillu, retold local legends about gorillas who carried away unfortunate girls from villages. This and other fascinating stories gave the boy a thirst for travel, and two decades later he went to the front.

After finishing his military service and returning home, Cooper continued to travel to other countries, but began filming at the same time. In the mid-1920s, together with his colleague Ernst Schoedsack, he prepared two documentaries for the American Geographical Society. Then they went back to Africa to film The Four Feathers. At this time, Cooper read a book by traveler William Burden about monitor lizards from Komodo Island. Young people made friends and talked a lot. In his letter to Burden in 1964, the director remembered: “Then, after one of my conversations with you, I thought: why not film a gorilla? I had an idea to make both my gorilla and your "dragons" huge. However, I have always believed in keeping the audience focused on one main character, and from the very beginning I wanted to make this hero a giant gorilla, no matter what I surrounded her with... In my head, I had already placed her on a prehistoric island with prehistoric monsters and now I thought that she should destroy the most sophisticated thing I can think of in connection with civilization... My original idea was to put a gorilla on top of the Empire State Building and shoot her from airplanes.” This thought came Cooper hit the roof in February 1930 when he walked out of his office and saw a plane flying directly over a skyscraper. “Without any conscious effort of thought, I instantly imagined a giant gorilla at the top of this building,” the director later said (though he was inspired not by the Empire State Building, but by another New York skyscraper).

The existence of any connection between Cooper’s film and Chukovsky’s fairy tale is also denied by literary critic and leading researcher at the State Literary Museum Pavel Kryuchkov. The expert, who has been working at the Korney Chukovsky House-Museum for more than 30 years, gave an interview in 2018 to mark the centenary of the publication of Crocodile. Answering a journalist’s question about “King Kong,” Kryuchkov stated: “Yes, a year ago this story with Cooper was covered in an article dedicated to him in the popular Wikipedia. But now this topic is not there, it has disappeared. An employee of our museum, an expert in languages ​​and music, Kirill Ioutsen... ordered biographies of Cooper from America. There's not a word about the "Crocodile" plot. <…> Probably, this story is still waiting for further confirmation, but for now we have to attribute it, as Akhmatova said, to “people's aspirations.” We cannot but agree with the specialist - at the moment there is no evidence confirming Chukovsky’s influence on the cult American film.

Fake

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. M. Vaz. Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper, Creator of King Kong
2. https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/4005
3. https://www.inverse.com/article/28816-king-kong-original-story
4. K. Chukovsky. Crocodile