If you were to go through your CD collection, how many movie soundtracks would you find? If you were to peruse your iPod, how many songs from movies would you come across? If you think that the number is significant, you should thank Merian C. Cooper, Max Steiner and the 1933 classic “King Kong.”
Before 1933, many movies used music in the background to help set the mood. When Cooper undertook the task of directing “King Kong,” he decided the movie would be benefited by a musical score which was brought more to the forefront of the movie viewer’s senses. Cooper contacted Steiner for assistance.
While Steiner has written music for movies before, he had never taken on a project like the composition of the original score for a full movie. No one had. The idea was unheard of in the early 1930s.
For the first time in movie history, a movie director and musical director worked hand-in-hand on the progression of a movie. Steiner changed his score for “King Kong,” while Merian C. Cooper changed scene edits to better fit Steiner’s score. While this is a common practice today, it was unheard of before Kong. Upon the release of “King Kong,” many of the movie studio executive realized they needed to take action to improve the overall excitement of their movies. They praised the duo for their vision.
Over the next few years, the importance of musical scores mostly changed for horror movies, and the quickly-emerging gangster movie genre. When asked about this change, Steiner stated that, “It will only be a few more years until all film music will remind everyone about what Merian C Cooper and I did in “King Kong.””
As the 1930s turned into the 1940s, movie-goers had become accustomed to the role that musical scores played in the movies. Today, very few of us think about a movie’s musical score’s influence on our emotions. You could say that the strides taken by Cooper and Steiner in “King Kong” are now taken for granted. Musical Scores have since been used to make great movies into classics that many of us will remember for the rest of our lives. Just think about what it would be like to watch “Gone with the Wind,” “Jaws” or “E.T.” without their original musical scores? Thank Cooper and Steiner for their work in King Kong for preventing this kind of loss.
