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4 King Kong: The Story of Production Diaries
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 King Kong is about to die. Shoulders hunched, the great ape is perched atop the Empire State Building, 1,200 feet above Fifth Avenue. At that height, the skies are empty but for two Curtis Helldiver biplanes that swoop through the clouds. The planes arc toward Kong and strafe the beast with bullets, their silhouettes black against the Gotham sky.This footage, the public's first glimpse of the final scene of Peter Jackson's King Kong, was lifted from the server of a special effects shop in Wellington, New Zealand, converted into a short QuickTime movie, and posted online a few months ago. But the clip isn't the product of a studio leak or a hacker's wiles; it was created and released by Jackson himself. It's one in a series of so-called Production Diaries, which chronicle the making of Jackson's new motion picture.
The diaries started modestly last September as a way to give Jackson's Lord of the Rings fans a glimpse of his next project. Starring Naomi Watts as heroine Ann Darrow (the role made famous by Fay Wray), Jack Black as filmmaker Carl Denham, and Adrien Brody as writer and hero Jack Driscoll, King Kong is the most anticipated movie of the high-stakes Christmas season.
By the time the film is released in December, the director will have posted nearly 100 entries, with a collective running time of six and a half hours. Edited into broadband-friendly installments of three or four minutes each, they are basically snippets that viewers usually see on the DVD: a tour of the set, a roving camera introducing key players behind the scene, a peek inside the sound booth during last-minute dubbing. But the Kongisking journals are more than a mere tease. They have blossomed into a real-time documentary about the making of King Kong, the world's first comprehensive, downloadable study of how a $175 million movie gets made, down to the last fleck of modeling clay.
I am sitting across from Jackson and his editor Jamie Selkirk as they parse the Empire State Building sequence on a big-screen plasma TV. We're in the cutting room on the first floor of the director's funky Victorian production compound in the Wellington suburbs that serves as Jackson's headquarters. All around us are the spoils of Universal Pictures' largesse: room after room of Avid editing machines, 23-inch Apple monitors, top-end HP workstations. Outside, a small army of technicians synchronize sound files, incorporate effects shots, and enter data. Jackson has already shot about 2.5 million feet of film - more than 400 hours in all - and editing the footage is an epic task. On the monitor, the ape adjusts his grip on the Empire State's mooring mast and glowers at the biplanes. "He knows it's inevitable at this point," Jackson says to Selkirk. "It's the beginning of the end. Yeah, that one's good. Hold it in the bin."
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Jackson crashes on the couch. His head, a tangle of gray-streaked curls, rests on a pile of pillows. Newly slender - Jackson has lost about 70 pounds since he was last seen publicly in his Lord of the Rings glory - he is clad in his uniform of baggy pants, gray tube socks (no shoes), and a loose-fitting, half-buttoned dress shirt. At 43, he looks tired but merry, like a sleep-deprived road manager of some acid-rock supergroup.
For Jackson, King Kong is the culmination of a lifelong obsession with the 1933 film, and he wants his version to resonate with viewers as much as the original did with him. He knows he has a huge potential audience - the fans of his Rings trilogy. Turning them into Kong fans, he figures, means giving them a taste of the beast as early as possible. So Jackson wasn't about to rely on the traditional studio marketing strategy: stick a trailer online six months before opening day, buy lots of commercials, and open wide, in as many theaters as possible around the world. "When I heard the date that Universal was planning to launch the Web site" - about six months before the release - "I thought, my God, we have to wait until then before we can build awareness?"
No, he decided, we don't. And thus the diaries. An independent site run by Canadian techie Michael Regina (who also created Rings fan site .net/" \t "new" Theonering.net), Kongisking.net is a Hollywood workaround. Though intended as a gesture to core fans, the segments, taken together, form a unique historical record, a master class in filmmaking from one of the world's most original directors. Think of it as Project Greenlight on the Internet with an A-list cast and the best special effects money can buy. "It's a way of showing everybody what it takes to make a film in real time," Jackson says in one diary, "to do the making-of while we're making the movie."
The gambit is not without risk. With his diaries open to the world, Jackson - who ironically is among the most private of filmmakers (a cloistered group to begin with) - has made himself vulnerable to on-set scrutiny as no director has before. It's the sort of experiment any publicist worth her table at the Ivy should squash in an instant. Yet Universal has had little input on what gets posted online. And Jackson has been exhilarated by the chance to step into a digital confessional once or twice a week for 15 months, his sins broadcast to the world. "There were no publicists involved at any point in the making of the production diaries," Jackson assures me with a rueful grin. "It's the lunatics in charge of the asylum."
DIARY 3: Day 6 - Principal Photography. On a rainy day, Jackson is taking his Kongisking.net audience on a tour of the SS Venture. The ship sits landlocked in the parking lot, surrounded by blue screens. "I get terribly seasick," Jackson says, explaining why he didn't shoot on water. "Of course, one of the skills of being an actor on this film is to pretend that you're on a ship. And so Adrien and Jack have been rehearsing their sea technique." Jackson turns to the actors. "OK and action!" The actors stumble down the gangway, bumping between the bulwark and the wheelhouse. "Well, that was all right," Jackson says, "but I think you need another drink." "Yeah," says Brody. "Agreed," says Black. "One more drink, and it'll be perfect."
A typical Hollywood production is an airtight environment sealed off from the world, organized like a covert military operation: Nobody and nothing gets in or out without multiple layers of authorization. This locked-down approach was perfected in 1975 by the producers of Jaws, who hired security guards to prevent nosy reporters from slipping into the Martha's Vineyard boat sheds where Spielberg's rubber shark models were stored. "We all believed that an audience's enjoyment of the picture would be severely diminished if they had read for months in advance about how the shark was just a mechanical contraption," Jaws screenwriter Carl Gottlieb wrote at the time.
Twenty-five years later, the closed set remained standard procedure for big-budget films. During Jackson's 1999 filming of Lord of the Rings, a correspondent from Theonering.net was charged with trespassing. "There was a complete blanket ban on any knowledge of the movie," says Richard Taylor, Jackson's long-standing collaborator.
With Kong, Jackson took the opposite tack; the paltry security was a running joke. When a spy supplied unauthorized snapshots to Kongisking under the alias Gandalf, Jackson paid tribute to the intruder with a diary entry in which he and Jack Black spend the day chasing the gray-bearded sorcerer.
Jackson isn't the first director to give an online audience a peek into the messy business of movie production. But no one has done the full broadband treatment (with BitTorrent downloads!) until now. (Inspired by his buddy Jackson, director Bryan Singer has started posting online production diaries for the forthcoming Superman Returns.)
Indeed, the approach defies conventional Hollywood wisdom. Which explains why, in the early entries, everyone looks like they've been caught passing notes in class. On day four, Naomi Watts and Jack Black are in costume shooting a pivotal scene. While technicians light the set, Jackson takes his actors aside to conduct an interview for Kongisking. "I can't believe they get to see me in costume and makeup," Black says. "Isn't that, like, verboten?"
I ask Jackson about the incident several months later. He flashes a mischievous smile. "Normally within the first few weeks of filming, studios release photos of the actors in costume. They try to give an exclusive to a magazine or a newspaper. And we just sort of blew it entirely for them by showing it on the video diary. It wasn't an event at all; it was just, like, here they are."
The diaries are primarily the work of Jackson's DVD producer, Michael Pellerin, and his cameraman and editor, Adam Harriman. They spent a year with the actors, prop masters, and effects artists, sometimes working 20-hour days to assemble the entries and post them to the Web site. "It's like the six o'clock news," Pellerin says, estimating that by the end of postproduction, he'll have some 3,500 hours of unedited footage.
The entries testify that moviemaking is often far from glamorous. One of the most frequently downloaded entries shows the art department concocting animal dung from brown paint, stale cereal, and rubber cement. The "31 Weeks to Go" diary shows Andy Serkis - the same actor who played Gollum in the Rings trilogy - in an elaborate blue Lycra suit, his body movements tracked with motion-capture cameras, making the gestures that a team of technicians will transform into a CGI Kong.
Jackson's unremitting fatigue is a recurrent subplot. The entry for day 100 is structured as a day in his life, beginning at 8:42 am and ending a few minutes after midnight as he oscillates from cutting room to set, struggling to stay awake before nailing one last shot of Watts in the jungle.
The Kongisking diaries grew out of Jackson's fondness for Theonering.net, Michael Regina's Rings fan site. During production of the trilogy, Pellerin notes, Regina's site (and not the official studio site) was the de facto primary source of news and gossip for fans and crew. So it seemed natural to work with Regina on his Kong venture. Universal, which is footing the bill for the diaries, ultimately owns all the footage but has no control over the content or the Web site itself. "I said to the guys at the very beginning, it's going to be really boring if it's the whitewashed, studio-mandated sort of thing where everybody is smiling and saying nice things," Jackson says. "It's going to be really interesting to try to capture some of the stress and exhaustion and the difficulty. Because making a film is actually hard." If there's one studio executive who grasps the marketing potential of the production diaries, it's Marc Shmuger, Universal's bearish vice chair. Shmuger just happened to be the executive VP of worldwide marketing at Columbia TriStar when that studio released the last iconic-monster-movie remake, Godzilla, in 1998. The Godzilla campaign epitomized the old marketing paradigm in which secrecy, not transparency, was the operating principle. In the prerelease campaign, moviegoers were meant to be seduced by mere glimpses of the monster. But when the film opened, the giant lizard proved a letdown, and the movie bombed.
Shmuger, who now calls the Godzilla strategy a glaring mistake, supports Jackson's experiment. "We no longer live in a world in which Hedda Hopper is the purveyor of information that people are taking as gospel about the industry," Shmuger says, invoking the '40s gossip maven. "Studio central as mouthpiece doesn't work anymore."
But the diaries do offer the studio one clear benefit: They let Universal production executives keep close tabs on their $175 million investment. Even Shmuger, who's made several trips to Wellington, says he caught his first glimpse of the actors in costume on Kongisking.
DIARY 41: Day 105 - Principal Photography. Jackson is shooting Kong's rampage through New York. But no sets are visible, just wall-to-wall green screen. Naomi Watts is strapped into a giant green inner tube mounted above a rocking base. It pitches and rolls as a man in spandex prods her with a giant green foam finger. Watts looks exhausted but kicks her high heels gamely. Jackson watches from the sidelines, bemused, then stares into the camera and asks: "How many people out there would have liked a day in Kong's hand?"
Jackson first saw Kong as a 9-year-old in Pukerua Bay, New Zealand, when he stumbled onto a TV broadcast of the 1933 movie. He says the film reduced him to tears - and then inspired him to make his first movie, shooting plasticine dinosaurs with his parents' Super 8 camera. "It's the most perfect escapist film I've ever seen," Jackson says of the original. "It brought together my love of fantasy, of dinosaurs, of moviemaking. It all came together at that moment. From that point on, I wanted to do this with my life, to entertain people the way I was entertained."
The brainchild of aviation hero and globe-trotting filmmaker Merian C. Cooper, the original film is a crude tale. An out-of-luck actress named Ann Darrow (played by Fay Wray) is plucked off the streets of Manhattan by filmmaker-adventurer Carl Denham and taken to Skull Island, an uncharted isle west of Sumatra still populated by dinosaurs. There, Denham plans to shoot a movie with Darrow and the island's giant gorilla. Then he gets a better idea: haul the beast back to Broadway and exhibit it as the Eighth Wonder of the World. But Kong has fallen in love with Darrow, and when they get to New York, the creature breaks free of his shackles, rampages through the streets, grabs the blonde, and scales the city's highest peak before the Helldivers send him crashing back to earth. Just your standard beauty-meets-beast love story, with the requisite tragic ending.
What the film lacked in plot it made up for in innovative effects. Shot on a soundstage in Culver City, the movie is 100 minutes of trailblazing trick photography, 3-D dinosaur puppets, glass matte paintings, rear projection, and miniature landscapes. It all looks herky-jerky today, but the techniques laid the groundwork for an effects industry that would eventually give rise to Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, and George Lucas.
Released in the depths of the Depression, less than two years after the Empire State Building opened its doors, King Kong was an international sensation. The film sold out theaters from New York to Germany (Adolf Hitler said it was one of his favorites) to Japan (where it inspired the Godzilla franchise). King Kong yanked Hollywood out of the silent period and into a modern age of airplanes and skyscrapers. And it inspired decades of low-budget blockbusters about marauding monsters, radioactive insects, and blobs.
"I haven't been the same since I came out of that cinema," f/x pioneer Ray Harryhausen has said of Kong, which he also first saw when he was 9. "It changed my life." To Harryhausen's disciples, Jackson among them, King Kong was the film of its era, as seminal an influence as Citizen Kane was to the auteurs of the French New Wave.
In the years since, there have been innumerable cheesy remakes and spinoffs, from King Kong vs. Godzilla in 1962 to the bloated 1976 effort starring Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange, in which King Kong scales the south tower of the World Trade Center. Produced by the bombastic Dino De Laurentiis and billed as "the most exciting original motion picture event of all time," that movie was a taboo subject on Jackson's set. "We never talked about it or referenced it," Jack Black says. "Never. Not once."
That's because Jackson so revered the original and dreamt of doing his own remake for so long. Jackson broke into directing with the ultra-low-budget 1987 alien zombie movie Bad Taste. But he came into his own after his offbeat true crime story, Heavenly Creatures, received an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay in 1995. Then he wrote, directed, and did the effects for The Frighteners, a Universal horror movie produced by Robert Zemeckis, who was fresh off Forrest Gump. The early buzz on The Frighteners was so spectacular that Universal found itself in a bidding war for Jackson's next project before the movie was even complete. Among the offers: a Planet of the Apes remake at Fox, The Lord of the Rings at Miramax, and his dream project, a King Kong remake at Universal.
He chose Rings and Kong - and Kong was first on tap. Weta, the production company Jackson helped form in 1994, began work on concept art and early effects. Then, disaster: First The Frighteners bombed at the box office. Then Godzilla and another giant-gorilla movie remake, Mighty Joe Young, ramped up production and started creating buzz of their own. Suddenly Universal's project looked like an also-ran, and the studio pulled the plug. "It was devastating. Peter went from the studio praising him as the Second Coming to being asked off the film, in less than a year," his manager, Ken Kamins, says. "It was the first time he truly saw the dark underbelly of the studio system."
The collapse, of course, sent Jackson back to the Tolkien trilogy. Some $2.9 billion in worldwide box office receipts and 17 Academy Awards later, Jackson is now part of an elite club of directors who get automatic green lights in Hollywood. And in 2002, with a different regime in place at Universal, a group of executives came to Wellington begging Jackson to return to Kong. His terms: a deal worth $20 million against 20 percent of the box office gross. It's the kind of contract Tom Cruise or Tom Hanks generally gets, but it's unheard-of for a director. (The contract also covers the contributions of Jackson's longtime partner and collaborator, Fran Walsh, who cowrote and produced Kong, and screenwriter Philippa Boyens, who also cowrote the Rings trilogy.) Kamins explains that the contract was in some respects "a giant kill fee" to prevent the studio from canceling the film again.
This time, Jackson has the resources to perfect his vision - and that means a King Kong not unlike the 1933 movie that captivated him when he was a kid. His dinosaurs are cumbersome tail-draggers, a dramatic departure from the velociraptors of Jurassic Park. "I wanted to go back to the more old-fashioned idea of dinosaurs," Jackson says. "The modern, archaeologically correct dinosaurs are a little bit less dramatically interesting than the old movie ones." (Take that, Spielberg.)
Jackson turns giddy when he talks about the engineering that goes into his film. He gets completely absorbed in the minutiae of military hardware, architecture, costumes, weaponry, and concept art - all developed in his Weta Workshop, all designed from scratch. His Depression-era Manhattan cityscape has been digitally fabricated using archival footage and the original architectural sketches for the Empire State Building. To create the civilization of Skull Island, Jackson researched ancient Peru and Cambodia's Angkor Wat temple. There were no Curtis Helldivers left anywhere in the world, so Jackson had them built using blueprints from the Smithsonian. And, determined that his Kong move like a giant version of a silverback gorilla, Jackson sent Andy Serkis to a Rwanda animal preserve to observe the apes in their natural habitat.
That Jackson reveals all these details in the video diaries is a boon to digital effects fans - especially those who are tinkering with filmmaking. "These are pioneering days," he says. "You've got to assume there will be a phenomenal flood of techno-savvy young kids who are going to have a desire and an appetite to make movies. To have all these computer- and filmmaking-literate kids out there making stuff is going to be really fascinating."
DIARY 69: 19 Weeks to Go - Pickups. Unsatisfied with the rough cut, Jackson is standing in a thicket on the Skull Island set, painstakingly reconstructed on a claustrophobic Wellington soundstage for two weeks of reshoots. Jack Black and the rest of the cast hang out as gaffers, electricians, and assistants fuss over the set, struggling to fudge continuity with scenes that were shot in a different location nine months earlier. At last, Jackson grabs the final shot of the day and the actors scatter, leaving the director alone with his audience. "Only two or three more days shooting on King Kong, and then we're done," he says, staring hard at the camera, a manic glint in his eye.
In mid-May, seven months before Kong is to hit theaters, the director is deep in postproduction, holed up in his Wellington cutting room for eight hours a day. With its creaking floorboards, flea market furniture, and enough movie memorabilia to equip a museum, the house is just the sort of homey, hobbity place you'd expect Jackson to hunker down in. "Preproduction is an adventure in which you're exploring the potential of your movie," he muses. "In production you have to shoot what you need to shoot, and survive and stay on schedule and stay on budget. Postproduction is a process of discovery. You have to reconcile what you were imagining with what you ended up shooting, and really craft the movie out of that."
Most directors prefer to cut their movies in Howard Hughes-like seclusion, but on Kongisking you can peer over Jackson's shoulder in the editing room. You can watch him pad around in his socks and fall asleep in a rumpled pile on the cutting room couch. You can follow his editors as they roll footage backward and forward on the Avid deck at 24 frames per second, then faster, then slower. To be honest, it's all pretty boring - but that's the verité of cinema.
The tedium of editing is only one reason why Jackson is so exhausted these days. He is also the sole overseer of a rapidly expanding movie empire. Wellywood, as it's known to Jackson groupies, encompasses some 1,300 crew members, 7,500 cast members and extras, and hundreds of thousands of square feet of facilities, including soundstages, a motion-capture studio, a props and costume shop, and an antique airplane factory - all scattered across block after block of the Wellington suburbs. When you hire Jackson to direct a movie, Kamins says, "you're making a deal with a biosphere. With a community."
The centerpiece of Jackson's empire is the Weta Workshop, the 65,000-square-foot facility on the site of a former water park outside Wellington. Named after a prehistoric cockroachlike insect indigenous to New Zealand, Weta is an umbrella company encompassing the workshop proper, the f/x shop, and a merchandise company. Lord of the Rings veteran Elijah Wood has called Weta Workshop "Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, but without the candy."
One of the great treats in the diaries is how they pull back the curtain on Weta - and recognize the hundreds of artists laboring behind the scenes. As the diaries illustrate, satisfying Jackson's demand for detail requires infinite patience. A sign on an effects supervisor's door reads When hell is full, the dead will go to work at minis.
A peek inside Wellywood was one of the highlights of the Lord of the Rings DVDs, too - indeed, it was a main selling point. Which raises this question: With so much of Weta's Kong work already in the production diaries, what will be left to include on the DVD?
It was Jackson, after all, who raised the bar for obscene DVD extras with the $120 Platinum Series Special Extended Edition of Lord of the Rings, a 12-disc set with dozens of bonus featurettes and documentaries. All together, the many Lord of the Rings DVDs have generated more than $1 billion in domestic revenue to date. In fact, Jackson's share of ancillary profits from those discs and licensing fees in other media have become a nasty point of contention. Last winter, the director sued New Line, the studio behind the trilogy, claiming he'd been shortchanged. So Jackson is well aware of the stakes when he waves off the notion that the diaries could cannibalize Kong's DVD prospects. If the diaries prove to be an effective draw for theaters, he argues, the DVDs will still have plenty of appeal to a broader base of fans. What's more, the diaries will have achieved something that the studio PR department could have never pulled off alone: converting the millions of Lord of the Rings fans into King Kong fans. "He trusts them enough to share so much about his picture in its incomplete form," Universal's Shmuger says. "They trust him as an arbiter of truth, a guy who's not trying to spin them."
On a rainy evening at Weta's postproduction compound, Jackson is sitting in an empty suite. All around, work continues at a blistering pace. Weta Digital still has more than 1,000 effects shots to complete. Less than a mile away, Serkis is in his motion-capture suit, perfecting his scowling and chest-beating rendition of Kong. "We don't have a roar unless we understand why he'd be roaring," Jackson says "Andy has to have an emotional reason for doing what he does when he performs Kong."
Finding that emotional resonance has been a central challenge of the film. In contrast to the 1933 movie where Kong is a force of destruction, Jackson is adamant that his ape come across as vulnerable, a creature taken out of his environment and exposed against his will. "Kong is a frightened, hunted animal," Jackson says. "It's the city that turns on him."
Sitting with the director, an ocean away from Los Angeles, it's hard not to think of Jackson when he talks about his monster. Like Kong atop the Empire State Building, the director is at a professional apogee, and his diaries have put him on display, in the crosshairs of an industry that rejoices in spectacular acts of self-destruction. But there's one difference between the director and his monster: Peter Jackson isn't about to tumble anytime soon.
By Jonathan Bing
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King Kong website is created and designed by Zebra Publications International, © 2006
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