San Sebastian Festival Sets 'King Kong' Directors Retrospective

The Spanish fest will celebrate the works of Hollywood Golden Age filmmakers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack.

A retrospective of the works of Hollywood Golden Age directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack will be part of this year’s San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain, organizers said on Wednesday.

"Acclaimed for generations as the masterminds of the iconic King Kong (1933), Cooper’s and Schoedsack’s contribution to fantasy cinema didn’t stop at this chef d’oeuvre," festival organizers said, citing the film’s contribution to stop-motion animation.

Using the stop-motion techniques pioneered in the film, Schoedsack went on to direct two other big monkey movies, Son of Kong (1933) and Mighty Joe Young (1949).

The pair was also responsible, either jointly or separately, for other classics, such as The Most Dangerous Game (1932), Dr. Cyclops (1940) and The Four Feathers (1929), and two documentaries that are considered masterpieces: Grass (1925) and Chang (1927).

Cooper later went on to produce the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical Flying Down to Rio (1933) and in the 1940s formed the small, independent company Argosy Pictures with director John Ford, which produced some of John Wayne’s most popular films, such as Fort Apache, Rio Grande, The Quiet Man and The Searchers.

The schedule for the retrospective will be announced later and will coincide with the publication of a book on the two filmmakers. The 63rd edition of the San Sebastian Film Festival runs Sept.18-26 in the northern Spanish coastal resort city.