Today's Glamour Starter --- Fay Wray

I had resolved to stay off King Kong till excitement over the remake died down, but then arrived art stills of Fay Wray and… well … here they are. This is but a few of them, as evidence shows many were taken. Long before there was a King Kong DVD, there was the King Kong Treasure. Or should we call it the King Kong Falcon, whatever term best describes a most desired of 16mm prints by collectors. I been begun in 1964, the year I first saw King Kong on Channel 3’s Picture For A Sunday Afternoon. My meager purse combined with those of two other boys in the neighborhood supplied eleven dollars needed to obtain 8mm "home movies" from the back pages of Famous Monsters (there are online discussion groups devoted to that magazine alone). Castle Film’s eight minute version of Dracula (more if you ran your projector slow) was okay by us, as was great dinosaur footage in Official Film’s condensation of the 1925 Lost World, these seared into our memories for life. King Kong, however, was not available on 8mm, at least not in 1964. If you wanted to see Kong, it would be via television, and by the mid- sixties, with color TV gaining foothold, old B/W features were increasingly passe, even great ones like King Kong pushed aside in favor Taza, Son Of Cochise, Ten Thousand Bedrooms, and the like. Our search for Kong became as frustrating as Jack Driscoll’s.

The first breakthrough came surprisingly in a theatrical revival, just after I’d turned seventeen in 1971. Janus Films of New York, they of foreign imports and art-house successes, picked up "The Mighty Monarch Of Melodramas" and added a spice to the program that would rock Kong fandom to its foundation. Rediscovered footage, long buried in a collector’s attic (why is it always the attic?), promised long suppressed, graphic footage that would make a former Kong look like a Marquis chimp. I ran out of the school building, drove ninety MPH through a rainstorm (the Lord does protect fools and children) in order to catch the 4:00 show at the Carolina Theatre in Winston-Salem, NC (an hour from home). I watched three times that weekend, and yes, should have been slapped into military school and taught real discipline, or at the very least, pressed to play junior varsity football, but praise be my parents weren’t like that. When a child has reached this level of disorder, what can one do? At least I’d seen King Kong again, and within a year, when I transitioned from 8 to 16mm film, it was in part to find and own King Kong. If you wanted to possess King Kong during those peak days of film collecting (that is, before DVD essentially wiped it all out), there were several ways to go. First was the "dupe" route. That’s just a print off a print … a muddy, bootlegged, unworthy thing. And you’d be clipped by at least $160 for that. Fair enough, but does it have the outtakes? After Janus' re-issue, no one wanted to see Kong again without the added footage. Try explaining an incomplete print to a surly audience in your parent’s basement.

They want to see Kong using natives for toothpicks, plus assorted mayhem in new York settings. What made your film collection special if you couldn’t give them that? The answer was to get a Janus print, at least a dupe off a Janus print. Those tended toward $175+, assuming one could be found. What about one of fabled "monkey" prints (so called because of the cryptic title etched onto leader negative), these recently uncovered in England, spirited perhaps aboard a clipper ship bound for the Americas? Could those be had? Perhaps, if you knew a collector who knew the collector who’d made such dangerous voyage, or knew someone who had. Collecting then, was all about who you knew. Monkey prints were supposed to be the best, their only superior an original Janus print, for which you’d have to commit robbery to get one (that’s okay, just tell us when and where). A Monkey print would trump even an original C&C (a note C&C prints were those generated for TV distribution after RKO sold its library in 1955). I can’t recall the number of King Kong prints we'd "check out" at collector cons over the years, but do have vague memory of the night I ran my (first) print of Kong in the smoke-filled den of a fraternity house back around 1974. We had mixed a lethal potion called PJ, a fruity, alcohol-laced concoction that put everyone in a proper festive mood for the big ape thriller. Drinking one's way to the bottom of such barrel made reel changes hazardous, fingers feel by then thick as bananas, being asked to repeat reels over and over again. All this is smoked meat now. The day King Kong was released on DVD, I dropped by Wal-Mart and gave $20 plus change for the absolute best presentation of the film seen in sum of life's experience. Rest assured irony was not lost on me. Decades of travel and expense in search of the perfect print of King Kong … and it all ends at a Wal-Mart store not half-a-mile from my front door. I guess that’s real progress.