King Kong (1933) & Fay Wray: The Making of the Original Scream Queen — RKO, Damsels in Distress, and Hollywood's Impossible Spectacle

Patrick Rankin (0:00)

A quick content note before we begin. This episode includes brief discussion of inappropriate behavior toward a minor and suicide. These moments are handled with care, but we want it to give you a heads up. Also, just a reminder that every episode of When They Were Making It is built to bring you into the story from the beginning. You don't need to know King Kong, Fay Wray, or any of the other people behind the film to enjoy the episode. Thank you.

Culver City, California, Spring 1932 Inside Stage 12 at RKO Pathé Studios, a jungle has taken over. Fog hangs over a shallow swamp. Artificial rock rises toward the rafters. There's a cave, a ravine crossed by a huge log, tropical trees crowding in from every side. A woman and a man are running through this jungle. They're panicked, breathless, and seemingly running out of places to go. Because somewhere behind them, in the dark beyond the trees, is a monster, and they are the prey.

The film they're making is called The Most Dangerous Game. It's an RKO thriller about a Russian aristocrat, the monster in question, who hunts shipwrecked strangers through the jungle for sport. Made quickly, three weeks on the schedule, a little over $200,000 on the budget, it's the kind of picture Fay Wray, the woman running through the jungle, knows well.

Wray is 24 By now, she has appeared in dozens of pictures, comedies, melodramas, westerns and thrillers just like this. The following year, she will have 11 more pictures released. The Most Dangerous Game is just another film on a crowded schedule, and there's no reason to think it will be anything more than that. Except, it's not the only film using this jungle. Around the edges of the shooting day, a second crew begins to gather on stage 12 The picture's associate producer, Merian C. Cooper, has been trying to persuade RKO to take a chance on another project. He needs a test reel, just a few minutes of film, to do it. So, he's been borrowing Fay Wray to help him with this project. The jungle is still there. The swamp, the cave, the trees crowding in on every side. But, for a little while, it will belong to another island. Cooper is not shooting a feature. Not officially. The project has no approved budget and no final title. On the studio books, it is production 601 Its first working title was The Beast. Shooting starts on this second project. The camera finds Ray in the jungle again. A blonde wig now covering her brown hair. And this time, the monster she's in fear of is not a man. It's an ape. One that actually isn't there.

Eventually, when the second crew is finished with her, Ray will take off the wig and go back to the most dangerous game. Back to a packed schedule, a long day on set, and the relentless rhythm of an established working actress' career. Well, not exactly. What seems, at the time, to be only a few borrowed hours in the middle of another picture, is, in fact, something else. Something much bigger. Something that will eventually change her life, whether she likes it or not.

Fay Wray doesn't know it yet, but she's just filmed test footage for the picture that will one day make her immortal. And it won't be called The Beast.

Welcome to When They Were Making It. I'm your host, Patrick Rankin, and this is the podcast that dives deep into the glorious, often messy and utterly human stories behind Hollywood's greatest films and the legends who created them. To begin our October Halloween run, we're exploring the making of King Kong and the life of its leading lady, Fay Wray.

King Kong, the extraordinary RKO production that turned one film, one young actress, and one giant ape into movie history, helped redefine what movie spectacle could be, and helped transform Fay Wray into Hollywood's original screen queen.

Vena Fay Wray was born on September 15th, 1907, on a ranch outside Cardston, Alberta, Canada. She was known simply as Fay. Her name, Vena, came from her mother, Elvina Marguerite Jones, the daughter of a prominent Mormon family in Salt Lake City. Fay's father, Joseph Heber Wray, had been born in Hull, England, but had come to America as a child, and ended up in Utah. Fay's parents had both been married before. Elvina had left her own marriage for Joseph, and together they had gone north to Alberta to start again. For two Latter-day Saints, it was a scandal. But in southern Alberta, far from Salt Lake City, they made a home for themselves. They bought 156 acres of land outside Cardston. Joseph built a large two-story house and a sawmill. At the gate, the name of the property was carved into a stone. Ray Land. By the time Fay was born, there were already three other children in the family, her older brother Vivian and her sisters Vada and Willow. The family had land, they had a house, they had the sawmill. This was not a poor childhood. Not yet. But it wasn't exactly an easy life. The winters could be punishing. Fay would later remember being snowed in for weeks at a time. Her father, she said, didn't really know that much about farming. Her mother was too genteel to be a country wife. And gradually, the family began to come apart. Elvina struggled with depression, made worse by the isolation and the long winters. Joseph sent her to a hospital, and the children were placed with local families while she was away. Fay was still only a toddler. For a time, she lived with a local doctor's family. When Elvina came home, she found her children scattered across Cardston. The family did not stay at Rayland much longer. In about 1910, Joseph sold the ranch and the sawmill, and took them south, first to Mesa, Arizona. He tried farming again. It failed. After a few years, the family moved back to Salt Lake City. By then, there were six Ray children. Fay's two younger brothers, Richard and Victor, had been born. Now Joseph was often away looking for work. Elvina took whatever she could find, including sewing. There was simply not enough food to eat, and the children were often left hungry. When Victor had been born, Elvina reportedly gave the doctor her wedding ring as payment. This was where Fay's real childhood began, in a crowded household with very little money, and a family trying to hold itself together.