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

Striding purposefully west, but we can see, with no real destination as she passes fur shops and dress shops, painfully checking them out of the corner of her eye, and now Charles & Co., the fruiterer, just in time to see half a dozen Golden Delicious lifted from their red tissue beds, and then a bottle of marrons whose cap is quickly unscrewed and one of the contents popped into a mink-hatted mouth.

She pushes on, past more apples, but this time the fruit is on the curb side, sitting in shallow boxes which are slung over the shoulders of vacant-eyed fedoraed men, their overcoats pulled up against the Christmas cold which seeps in from the street, and out from the decorated store windows.

'''EXT. CARNEGIE HALL'''

Ann walking by posters which read "Paderewski," "New York Philharmonic, A. Toscanini, Conductor," "Tuesday, Mary Baker Eddy Lectures" and still another "Journey to Adventure with Carl Denham," a banner "Today!" pasted across the last.

On the corner by the newstand, is Weston, a theatrical agent slashing through a copy of Variety he has just bought, pausing momentarily to crack a chestnut, also just purchased from a huddled vendor on the corner stoking coals under a pan.

ON ANN

Watching the vendor adjust his chestnuts carefully, turning them over one-by-one, Ann swallowing, almost salivating, her trance suddenly distracted by Weston's shells pitching down on the sidewalk beside the Vendor. One has not been completely eaten, she fixes on it, and now Weston, having checked the grosses, tosses Variety into the corner trash basket, and hustles through the Carnegie Hall stage door.

Ann waits until Weston has cleared, now she stoops for half-eaten chestnut, and in the same one smooth motion, snatches the Variety out of the mesh basket, and her shoulders straight, heads on down Seventh Avenue, popping the remains of the one chestnut into her mouth.

'''INT. CARNEGIE HALL'''

In the darkness and through the rustle, a voice booms off a movie screen competing with frenetic music scoring the death duel between a cobra and a mongoose.

DENHAM (o.s.)

'And so this remarkably agile little mammal gets its prey again. He darts in for the kill....'

It is a stunning duel, something today's audiences are long used to, but the footage is good, the exposures are clean, and the camera is in close. But the music underlines every bite and wriggle.

DENHAM (o.s.)

'The hapless cobra spreads its hood one last time, the mongoose strikes just below the sac where the reptile is most vulnerable, and it is all over.'

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