I'm confused: I keep hearing ...
Everything new is old again: Peter Jackson's eight-legged freak
Question: I'm confused: I keep hearing people talk about the "spider sequence" in King Kong, but I don't remember any spiders in the old movie. Is it something that was added for the new version and, if so, what exactly is it?
Answer: The legendary "spider pit" sequence was shot for the original King Kong (1933) and, like several other scenes, was later trimmed. Most of the excisions, including a scene in which Kong curiously peels off some of Ann Darrow's (Fay Wray) clothes, as well as several violent scenes (including a moment when he grinds a Skull Island villager into the ground and another involving a sleeping woman he plucks from her high-rise bedroom window and then carelessly drops to her death when he realizes she's not Ann), were done when Kong was re-released in 1938, and then saved by the editor who actually cut them out of the negative. But the spider-pit sequence was taken out of the rough cut on the directions of coproducer/codirector Merian C. Cooper, who felt it slowed down the action (not, as the rumor has it, after a test audience freaked out), and appears to be lost forever, though Kong fanatics still hold out hope that it will turn up in some archive or collector's attic. It comes right after the scene in which a panicky group of sailors is fleeing a rampaging dinosaur and runs across a log that spans a ravine. Unfortunately for them, Kong is on the other side, and angrily picks up his end of the log and shakes them off. What was cut is a scene in which the men who fall are attacked and killed by a disgusting array of spiders and scorpion-like creatures that scuttle out of the mud and out of crevices in the ravine walls. There are two extant photos that whetted fans' appetites when it appeared in Famous Monsters of Filmland in the 1960s; there's also surviving original conceptual art and the sequence was fully scripted.
There are two reasons people are talking about it now. One is that Peter Jackson included an extremely icky version of the sequence in his three-hour remake of King Kong (2005). The other is that Jackson also re-created the original sequence, which is included as an extra on the new Warner Bros. DVD version of the original King Kong. Jackson, a bona fide fanboy with a huge collection of Kong-iana, along with his effects artists, re-created the technology available to Willis O'Brien and his crew (among other things, Jackson owns a model dinosaur that was made for Kong but not used, and he x-rayed it so they could duplicate the internal armature). The team built their own miniature sets, acquired costumes that matched those of the actors in the footage that leads into the sequence (the effects guys took over the roles), and filmed a new sequence in B&W. Jackson's sound team located outtakes from composer Max Steiner's Kong score and spliced them together in a very viable soundtrack for the new footage. The result is an amazing labor of love; frankly, you could cut it into the original footage and many viewers would never realize it had been created seven decades later. But you have to feel for the guy who, as Jackson first outlines the project and enthuses about how much fun it will be, says, "So it's not enough that we're doing your King Kong — we have to finish the old one, too?"