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Still, one cannot avoid the fact that it is word about the film's spectacular effects that has attracted most of the prerelease interest in Kong, and will surely bring in the people early in the run. And, of course, troubles with the hardware have created most of the drama during Kong's filming. Indeed, it is fair to say that if there is something like a common denominator in the big bopper genre, it is special effects. Among the important elements drawing people to films as diverse as The Exorcist, Earthquake and Jaws was the sheer movie magic they featured. From the start it was generally, and to some degree falsely, understood that the new Kong would stand or fall on how realistic the big monkey would seem on screen. Producer De Laurentiis, being no fool, has stressed the expense of his efforts to satisfy the shrewdest eye as to Kong's believability, while playing up the drama of doing so against a self-imposed deadline of release before Christmas 1976.
That deadline arose out of De Laurentiis' passion for the picture, an obsession that came upon him suddenly one morning a couple of years back, when he still had his headquarters in New York. It was Dino's duty to awaken his daughter Francesca, then 15, to get her off for school, but as often as he performed that task he failed to notice the old movie poster in her room. Then one morning he had to return a second time to shake her into wakefulness, and that was the day he saw the poster—which advertised the original Kong. "I just slap my head and say, 'Oh my God, this is an inspiration.' I remake the old Kong."
His instinct was sound. "I study the big-box-office movies in the last 30 years," says De Laurentiis in an English fractured by enthusiasm. "Nearly all are family movies. I see Kong as the greatest love story ever made, a picture for everyone." The trouble was, when Dino fell in love with Kong, almost everyone he went to for financing told him he was crazy, that the only interest in Kong was purely nostalgic and that $10 million—his first, modest budget estimate—was too much to risk on that quasi-emotion.
But it is usually a bad idea to argue with De Laurentiis' instincts. They have served him well for 57 years. The son of a Neapolitan pasta manufacturer, he quit school at 13 to work as a salesman for his father, gravitated to movies first as an actor, then—quite quickly—as a producer. Eventually he produced Fellini's first two international hits, La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, stealing a portion of the latter's negative to prevent the director's including a long monologue that De Laurentiis was convinced slowed the picture down.