With the help of one of the most significant historical discoveries since the wreck of the Titanic was located by oceanographer Robert Ballard in 1986, here at last is the complete story of the real-life inspiration for the classic Hollywood film King Kong. The recovered archives of pioneering adventurer-filmmaker Carl Denham reveal the true tale of his strange voyage and the enigmatic monster ape that he attempted to exploit -- with notoriously disastrous results -- in 1931.
A newly discovered cache of Carl Denham's film and papers, unseen for more than seventy years, has provided author John Michlig and documentary filmmaker James Mansfield the startling answers that historians and cinema buffs have long awaited regarding the legend behind King Kong. And, for the very first time, readers are privy to shocking events on the mysterious island from which Denham claimed to have taken his star attraction -- an island whose particulars had been both widely dismissed as a construct of Denham's formidable publicity machine and famously misinterpreted by, for example, Nazi-era ethnologists.
Indeed, the facts behind Denham's capture and exhibition of the Eighth Wonder of the World are often stranger than the fantasy films they spawned.
- ISBN10 0786715944
- ISBN13 9780786715947
- Publish Date 10 October 2005
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Carroll & Graf Publishers Inc
- Format Paperback
- Pages 256
- Language English