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

On the Internet, the opinion is that the “godfather” of the cult American film office was a children's poet Korney Chukovsky, because director Merian Cooper read in the fairy tale “Crocodile” as “Wild Goril Lyalya dragged”. We checked how reliable this version is.

The film made in 1933 Merian Cooper "King Kong" Enters Among the best films in history by Rotten Tomatoes. In this time for its time, a technically revolutionary picture, which became one of the symbols of pre -war Hollywood, a lot of people see a domestic influence. Allegedly, the director came up with the title hero under the influence of the fairy tale “Crocodile”, in the text of which “Wild Gorilla” dragged Laly on the roof of a tall building. Texts in support of this version can be found on a variety of resources: from "Living Journal" And regional media to Radio Sputnik - Units "RIA Novosti".

Before engaged in cinema, the future creator of King Kong Merian Cooper served in aviation. In 1919, he entered the volunteer squadron, which supported the Polish army in the war with Soviet Russia. A year later, the Cooper’s plane was shot down, and the American himself was captured. It is claimed, then with the merchant, in particular, Isaac Babel spoke, described In his diaries, a meeting with the pilot Frank Mosher. Although the writer called the conversation "endless", Cooper himself about him I did not remember. In 1921, shortly before the end of the war, Cooper was able to flee to Latvia.

The authors of publications telling about the influence of Chukovsky on the future blockbuster claim: for the months the Cooper tried to learn the Russian language for months. He did this according to the fairy tale "Crocodile", which was then printed in huge circulations and distributed for free. In the poem of Chukovsky there is words: “Wild gorilla / Lyalya dragged / and on the sidewalk / ran to jump. / Above, higher, above, / here it is on the roof, / on the seventh floor / jumps like a ball. " The bright image was deposited by the director in his memory, and soon the merchant had a dream, where the gorilla was already climbing the empire-standing. After returning to the United States, the future director retold this story to Edgar Walles, with whom they began to work on the script. In this form, the course of events is described in article In 2006, the Ukrainian newspaper "Business" is the earliest of the sources we found, which tells about the connection between King Kong and Korney Chukovsky.

A year before the release of the note in the newspaper "Business" American historian Kino Mark VAZ Published His book “Living in Dangers: Adventures of Merian K. Cooper, creator of King Kong”, where he examined the biography of Cooper and the process of creating his main film. According to the VAZ, who, unlike Ukrainian and Russian journalists, worked with archival documents, the future director was carried away by monkeys in childhood. When the merchant was six years old, he was presented with the book “Opening and Adventures in Equatorial Africa”. Its author, French researcher Paul du Shayu, retold local legends about gorillas that took away unfortunate girls from the villages. This and other exciting stories originated in the boy a craving for travel, and two decades later he went to the front.

After the end of military service and returning to his homeland, Cooper continued to travel to other countries, but began to shoot at the same time. In the mid-1920s, along with his colleague Ernst Schödsaku, he Prepared Two documentary films for the American geographical society. Then they again went to Africa to shoot the paintings of The Four Feathers. At this time, Cooper read the book of the traveler William Birden about Varan from the island of Komodo. Young people Frusted And they talked a lot. In his letter to Burden in 1964, the director I remembered: “Then, after one of the conversations with you, I thought: why not remove the gorilla? I had an idea to make my gorilla and your "dragons" huge. However, I always believed that the audience needed to focus on one main character, and from the very beginning I wanted to make a giant gorilla with this hero, it doesn’t matter what I will surround her ... In my head I already placed it on the prehistoric island with prehistoric monsters and now I thought that it should destroy the most sophisticated thing, which I could think about my civilization ... The initial idea was to place the gorilla on the top of the empire-promot-boiling and shoot it from airplanes. ” This thought Came Cuper in the head in February 1930, when he left his office and saw an airplane flying directly above the skyscraper. “Without any conscious effort of thought, I instantly imagined the gigantic gorilla at the top of this building,” the director later said (though he was not inspired by the Empire-promoting book, but another New York skyscraper).

The existence of any connection between the Cooper’s film and the tale of Chukovsky is also refuted by a literary critic, a leading researcher at the State Literary Museum Pavel Kryuchkov. The expert, who has been working in the House-Museum of Korney Chukovsky for more than 30 years, in 2018 gave an interview to the centenary of the publication of Crocodile. Answering a journalist question about King Kong, Kryuchkov declared: “Yes, a year ago, this story with the merchant 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, a connoisseur of languages ​​and music by Kirill Ioutsen ... ordered Cooper biographies in America. About the plot with the "crocodile" there is not a word. <...> Probably, this story is still waiting for its additional confirmation, but for now it is necessary to attribute it, as Akhmatova said, to "folk aspirations". " We cannot disagree with the specialist - at the moment there is no evidence confirming the influence of Chukovsky 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