Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture

Notes

notes Preface to the second Edition 1. Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in EastandWest (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 174–88; and Merrill Schleier, “The Empire State Building, Working-Class Masculinity, and King Kong,” Mosaic 41, no. 2 (June 2008): 29–54. 2. Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926–1931 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Robert Spadoni, Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and Martin Rubin, “Movies and the New Deal in Entertainment,” in American Cinema of the 1930s, ed. Ina Rae Hark (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 92–116. 3. Jonathan Bing, “Return of the King,” Wired, October 2005, 126; and Ray Lilley, “‘Rings’ Director Jackson Plans Complex ‘Kong,’” Ann Arbor News, 10 September 2004, E4. 4. Bing, “Return of the King,” 124. 5. Ivette M. Yee, “Comic Book Buff Says He Has Proof Classic Scene from ‘King Kong’ Was Never Shot,” South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 6 January 2006. 6. Fan posting at www.imdb.com, 18 August 2007. 7. Fan posting at www.imdb.com, 28 September 2007. 8. Fan posting at www.imdb.com, 23 April 2007. 9. Fan posting at www.imdb.com, 25 June 2007. 10. Barry Keith Grant, “Bringing It All Back Home: The Films of Peter Jackson,” in New Zealand Filmmakers, ed. Ian Conrich and Stuart Murray (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007), 323. 11. Fan posting at www.nytimes.com, 14 December 2005.| 257 258 | Notes to Introduction 12. Fan posting at www.imdb.com, 26 January 2007. 13. Fan posting at www.imdb.com, 6 February 2007. 14. Fan posting at www.imdb.com, 9 February 2007. 15. Fan posting at www.imdb.com, 9 February 2007. 16. Fan posting at www.imdb.com, 10 February 2007. 17. Fan posting at www.imdb.com, 18 February 2007. 18. But note that some reception scholars juxtapose fan responses with their own interpretations. See, for example, Annette Kuhn’s Dreaming of Fred and Ginger, an ethnographic study that captures British subjects’ memories of filmgoing in the 1930s. In addition to viewer responses, Kuhn includes film interpretations of her own. 19. Stuart Hall, “Encoding/decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, ed. Stuart Hall et al. (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 128–38. 20. For a different view of loving King Kong while recognizing its racism, see Joshua David Bellin, Framing Monsters: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 21–47. Introduction 1. Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (New York: Methuen, 1987). 2. Helen Taylor, Scarlett’s Women: Gone with the Wind and Its Female Fans (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio, eds., The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero andHisMedia(New York: Routledge, 1991); and Henry Jenkins, TextualPoachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992). 3. See, for example, Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 157–91; and Dana Nicholas Benelli, “Jungles and National Landscapes: Documentary and the Hollywood Cinema of the 1930s” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1992), 30–120. 4. Jacqueline Bobo, Black Women as Cultural Readers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 5. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 1. Notes to Introduction | 259 6. Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945; reprint, New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1986), 19. 7. I am grateful to Barrett Watten for this insight, which was addressed generally to the question of black male spectatorship and King Kong. 8. See, for example, Mary Carbine, “‘The Finest Outside the Loop’: Motion Picture Exhibition in Chicago’s Black Metropolis, 1905–1928,” Camera Obscura 23 (May 1990): 9–41; Gregory A. Waller, Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896–1930 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 161–92; and Charlene Regester, “Stepin Fetchit: The Man, the Image, and the African-American Press,” Film History 6, no. 4 (1994): 502–21. 9. Donna Haraway, PrimateVisions:Gender,Race,andNatureintheWorldofModern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989); and Donna Haraway, “The Promises of...