
Created by Matt Zoller Seitz
Directed by Judith Carter
NEW TO STORE:
Mad Men, Sopranos AND
Biography Collections
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
Haruki Murakami
THE ENTIRE EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF THE MOST POPULAR FANTASY FILM OF ALL TIME!—cover tagline
A rare, oversized, black-and-white paperback coffee-table book from 1975, issued to cash in on the remake that was released the following year, about the production of the original 1933 King Kong, with its stop-motion effects. Co-authors Orville Golden and George E. Turner take readers through the entire process, with thoroughly illustrated and annotated explanations of how the filmmakers created the studio jungle sets, the miniature island forests and mountains, and of course, the colossus himself. A chapter near the end even tells you about the different subsequent productions that re-used King Kong's sets and special effects plates. The list includes Gone with the Wind, which torched some of the movie's still-standing sets in 1938 for the burning of Atlanta sequence.
The tale begins with adventurer-filmmakers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, whose exotic films shot on location in such remote areas as Siam and Persia were prelude to their fateful voyage to Skull Island, years later.
Then, with narrative verve, impeccable research, and technical detail, authors Turner and Price give a full account not only of the original Kong's cast and crew, in particular famed special effects pioneer Willis O'Brien, but also the politics, pitfalls, and ultimate triumph that characterized the production.
Turner and Price also analyze the earlier gorilla, dinosaur, and jungle films that preceded Kong, like the notorious Ingagi, as well as the many that followed it, including Captive Wild Woman, The Lost World, Mighty Joe Young, the Kong remakes, and dozens more.
"Ladies and gentlemen, look at Kong, the eighth wonder of the world..."
NOTE: This book has been out of print for over 40 years and is only available in affordable versions via used booksellers. All copies are in good condition, but some ordinary wear-and-tear is inevitable.
MZS.Press is the online arts bookstore founded by author, critic, and filmmaker Matt Zoller Seitz and directed by Judith Carter. It offers new, used, signed, collectible, and rare books on film, TV, music, photography, and the visual arts. The store was launched in 2019 on a different platform and has expanded to incorporate arts books published by MZSPress's private imprint: titles currently include Seitz's The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon and Dreams of Deadwood, about the HBO Western, and Walter Chaw's A Walter Hill Film.
Our deepest wish is to promote, encourage, and distribute work by small presses, academic presses, and individuals. Extraordinary work tends to get swallowed up on giant platforms like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The store's inventory of nearly 1000 volumes is currently in the process of being reconstructed after its relocation from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Dallas, Texas. The titles featured here are personally selected by a group of curators and advisors, including Seitz, Carter, and an array of critics, artists, journalists, educators, publishers, and arts mavens who are known for their ability to suss out what Seitz's jazz musician dad liked to call "the good sh*t."
“Please. Have mercy. I’ve been wearing the same underwear since Tuesday.”
Matt Zoller Seitz
Critic, Author, Filmmaker, MZS Press Creator
Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large and film critic of RogerEbert.com; a staff writer for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. His writing on film and TV has appeared in Sight and Sound, The New York Times, Salon.com, The New Republic and Rolling Stone. Seitz is the founder and original editor of the influential film blog The House Next Door, now a part of Slant Magazine.
Seitz has written, narrated, edited or produced over a hundred hours’ worth of video essays about cinema history and style for The Museum of the Moving Image, Salon.com and Vulture, among other outlets. His five-part 2009 video essay Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style was spun off into the hardcover book The Wes Anderson Collection. This book and its follow-up, The Wes Anderson Collection: Grand Budapest Hotel were New York Times bestsellers.
Other Seitz books include the New York Times bestellers The Sopranos Sessions and Mad Men Carousel; TV (The Book), The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon, and the forthcoming The Wes Anderson Collection: The French Dispatch. He is also an interviewer, moderator, and film programmer who has curated and hosted film and TV presentations for the Museum of the Moving Image, IFC Center, San Francisco's Roxie Cinema, and other venues. He is currently working on a memoir about his marriages and a feature-length documentary about his father, jazz musician and composer Dave Zoller.
His hobbies include exotic dancing, moonwalking, and affixing masking tape labels to every food item in the refrigerator, including eggs. He has the attention span of a gnat.