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De Laurentiis is not likely to miss Universal's share too much. What he must begrudge his rivals, however, is the hasty start their maneuverings imposed on him. To be sure, Lorenzo Semple had been set to work on his script some months before. Dino had signed British Director John Guillermin, 50. It was a shrewd choice. Guillermin had demonstrated his ability to handle large-scale action on The Towering Inferno, as well as more intimate projects like Guns at Batasi. Hard-driving and hot-tempered, Guillermin is a technical perfectionist. According to associates, he is also a man temperamentally suited to withstand the frustrations of a production that was, as one of them puts it, "just day after day of coitus interruptus." Everything—notably the mechanisms that controlled Kong and parts of Kong —kept breaking down.
The schedule forced Guillermin to start shooting before anyone had a clear conception of how Kong should look and how he should be made to work. Though the new Kong's technicians correctly hold the first Kong's special effects —magnificent for their time—in high esteem, no one wanted to duplicate what had been done then (as well as in hundreds of inexpensive monster pictures since): build a miniature model of the ape, place him in scaled-down sets, animate him through the use of stop-motion photography, and then blend this footage with that employing live actors.
From the first, De Laurentiis had, characteristically, leaned toward the colossal. When he was talking Guillermin into signing on for the project, he had cried, "For you, John, I make 100-ft. monster."
Well, almost. On Stage 17 at Metro there rests a creature 40 ft. tall when fully assembled, supported by a 3½-ton aluminum frame, his flesh made of latex and covered by 1,012 Ibs. of horsetail hair purchased from an Argentine supplier, every hank of which was sewn into place individually. His innards consist of 3,100 ft. of hydraulic hose and 4,500 ft. of electrical wiring. He is animated by a team of 20 operators each working a lever that controls a single movement. The cost: $1.7 million. Though this mighty construct was used extensively in only one sequence, he was worth every penny. "He's Dino's Fort Knox gold," says a production associate, since he served as an earnest of the producer's realistic intentions. And it is impossible to tell in the finished product where his work ends and that of more mobile and manageable representations of Kong take over.