The Legend of King Kong (Bo Goldman's Script)

The Legend of King Kong

by

Bo Goldman

12-10-75

Final draft

FADE IN

EXT. PET SHOP - WEST 57TH STREET - NIGHT

The store window is trimmed in tinsel and silver balls and colored lights, the letters "Merry Christmas" draped across a cardboard Santa Claus and across a diapered cardboard baby the numbers of the incoming year "1933."

Divided into two parts, in the larger one, puppies, in the smaller part, a capuchin monkey rolling and swinging and tumbling through the excelsior with joyous abandon in response to a pretty set of fingers who tap and rap and wiggle against the glass. Suddenly a hand reaches in from the store side of the shop, lifts the monkey out, tucks him into a portable cage and hands it to a 12-year-old who beams up at her mother, a Park Avenue matron busy fishing in her pocketbook for cash.

REVERSE ANGLE - FINGERS

Frozen on the glass, they belong to Ann Darrow, in her mid-twenties, a lean and delicate beauty to her, a cloche and a permanent frazzled at the edge, a dickie and a shirtwaist and a faille skirt whose hem sags slightly, the run-down edges of a depths-of-the-depression lovely whose hollow cheeks and black circles reveal not a model, but an actress who hasn't eaten for a day.

She watches ruefully as the monkey heads east with its new owners, now she rises from her stooping position at the window, heads in the other direction, into the smoky scurry of the 5 PM Saturday shopping crowd.

ANOTHER ANGLE - ANN