06/08/2026
Iowa Time Machine ⏰: On June 7, 1893, Ernest Beaumont Schoedsack, co-director of the 1933 film King Kong, was born in Council Bluffs. He brought a cameraman’s eye trained in war and remote landscapes to some of the most influential adventure and fantasy films of the twentieth century.
Schoedsack entered film work in the silent era, joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps as a cameraman during World War I, and learned to shoot under the practical constraints and dangers of the Western Front. After the Armistice, he remained in Europe, working on war relief efforts in Poland and developing a documentary sensibility that led him to expeditions that pushed cameras into jungles, deserts, and borderlands far from studio sets.
In the 1920s, he joined forces with Merian C. Cooper, another veteran and traveler, at a moment when American audiences were hungry for “true” views of distant places and when nonfiction feature films could still play alongside narrative dramas. Their collaborations produced a string of films that blended ethnographic ambition with staged drama, including Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927) and The Most Dangerous Game (1932).
These experiments culminated in King Kong in 1933, co-directed by Schoedsack and Cooper, with a screenplay crafted in part from their shared experiences, producing an iconic film that combined stop-motion effects, studio craftsmanship, and documentary-inspired framing in ways that changed the vocabulary of fantasy cinema. Though Schoedsack’s eyesight declined in later years, he continued working into the 1940s on films that explored science fiction and spectacle, including Dr. Cyclops (1940), one of the earliest live-action features filmed in Technicolor.
