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The Big Ape: Part One Week!

30 Dec

December 30, 2013

part one logo

July 11, 2011

from July 1, 2007

Back in the 1930’s, my great-grandfather had an idea. It wasn’t an original idea, no sir. Not by any stretch of the imagination. That wasn’t his style.

You see, Bradford B. Jacobs was President, Founder, and Chief Cinematographer of  Jacobs Colossal Studios, a shabby and financially shaky movie production company based out of Patterson New Jersey. Bradford B, (it is he for whom I am named), did pretty well for himself in the silent film era. JCS was known for nature films and documentaries. At the height of the silent era, JCS cameras roamed the world to bring home the most thrilling nature footage ever seen. From Emperor Penguins of the South Pole to shaggy llamas of Tibet, there was no place on Earth not lensed by a Jacobs camera. Most famously, he persuaded Harold Lloyd to cameo in a Borneo-filmed short featuring playful marsupials. Bradford also had a pretty profitable sideline making “exotic native features” available for private viewing, but the less said about that the better. Bradford accumulated a sizeable catalog of various shorts and features which he often sold for use as stock footage in longer “A” movies by various studios.

However, with the coming of the “talkie” era, Bradford B. Jacobs found himself without a market. No one would buy his soundless films, and few would see them when the wonders of sound were in the next theater. Jacobs Colossal Studios was forced to downsize, and Bradford fired most of his staff and sold most of his equipment. Throughout the 1930’s he limped along by making extremely low budget “B” and even “C” features starring Wolfie the Yiddish Hound. This was in the era of the ethnic comedy, and no one milked that market better than JCS. In one month alone, Wolfie starred in no fewer than 13 shorts, and had a cameo in two Stepin Fetchit films. There were few residents of the Lower East Side who had never seen a Wolfie short.

Sadly, the Wolfie product was barely enough to keep the creditors away. Bradford was looking for his next big animal star, and most of his ideas were not going to work. (Foremost among them was Seamus  the Squirrel, an Irish immigrant rodent who loved potatoes.) Often, Bradford would take his camera and wander, almost aimlessly, just to see what might strike his fancy. This resulted in Bradford amassing perhaps the most comprehensive collection of chorus girl footage on the East Coast. One day he found himself in Times Square and was awed by the sight of a movie poster. Rushing inside, he watched the film that would forever change his fortunes: King Kong.

I now quote from his 1967 biography, I Did It, So Sue Me:

I couldn’t believe my eyes. There was this ape on the screen, a great big ape. And as I sat there I was moon-struck by two things. First, look at the tits on that Fay Wray. Second, this ape looks fake. I got all this real footage of real apes locked away in my vaults. This Kong fella, he don’t look none too real to me. Look at what he does. Climbs buildings. Eats trains. Bullshit! I got footage of real gorillas that make him look like a nancy-boy.  My apes, they climb trees. They eat bananas. They fight each other. They throw their shit around. When did you ever see King Kong do that? My Big Ape, he threw his shit around in all three films I made in 1941!

Bradford B. Jacobs decided then and there that his company would produce its own big ape film that make King Kong look puny. Ingeniously called The Big Ape, Bradford’s film was shot on the cheap. Using most of his stock footage and cut in with real actors who always craned their necks to the sky, JCS marketed a film that promised to deliver “the thrills the 1937 theater-goers demand!”

On paper, it doesn’t sound like a good idea. The filmed characters would do all their acting with each other, but when it came time for them to be in the same scene as The Big Ape, the film would cut  to stock footage. There was a lot of pointing off-screen. However, Bradford had a lot of faith in his production. He knew that King Kong had stirred something in the public and they were starved for more Ape films.  He was determined that JCS would milk it for all it was worth.

The Big Ape was a smash hit. Maximillian Dubois was the male lead, and Doreen Vernon was the love interest, but it  was the stock ape footage that really shined. Bradford was right when he reasoned that a real ape would look better. On the big screen his old nature footage looked lush and vibrant. It really made King Kong seem drab. It also helped that Doreen Vernon was instructed to go braless in the jungle river scene, and in fact wore only the filmiest of tops throughout.

Despite having a plot that was lifted nearly scene-for-scene from Kong (the ensuing legal battle would drag on until 1958) and dialogue that consisted of things like “Look at that Big Ape! He’s bigger than that Ape I saw last year in that other movie,” the Big Ape made more money than Bradford ever dreamt of. (And this was no mean feat, as I remember growing up hearing stories of how my great-grandfather dreamed of enough money to overthrow Castro.)

Again, I quote from I Did It, So Sue Me:

I knew this would be big. It had a great formula:  rip off a good film, add a sexy blond (who later became ex-wife number three) and give the public Big Ape action. Kong ate a train? My Ape ate an Edsel factory. Kong fought airplanes? My Ape fought 92 airplanes. Kong had Carl Denham, my film had a Teddy Roosevelt impersonator. It couldn’t miss!

It didn’t miss. In fact, it was the biggest money maker of the decade. Bradford B. Jacobs had more money than he ever had. First, he decided that it would be a good idea to buy his own zeppelin. Then he put on his payroll anyone whom he thought might be fun to have around. Sure, he had 237 people on his personal payroll, and another 43 who worked at the movie studio, but it didn’t matter because the money was rolling in and he was hard at work on the first sequel to The Big Ape, The Son of The Big Ape. Just one problem- he had used all the gorilla footage he had in the first film.

Bob “Bobo” Bigguns, interviewed by Barbara Walters in 1973:

Da Boss had hit into a fortune with that flick. Da public was bonkers ’bout dat Ape. Mr. J, he was walkin’ ’round with a solid gold fedora on his head an a four or five thousand dollar pair of socks on his feet. He never did wear no shoes. The trouble was that he used all of da gorilla and monkey footage in dat first film and had nothin’ left for the next. Well, lucky for Da Boss, I owned one of the best gorilla suits in West Hollywood at the time. I had a little act outside of da Hollywood Bowl that made me a few bucks on the weekends. Dat was when Mr. J hired me. He liked the way I swung from the lamp posts. Dat Mr. J, he was always hangin’ ’round with colorful people.

Not only did Bradford B. Jacobs have the best gorilla impersonator in L.A., he also hired a team of people to take care of the suit. Before filming even started, he had hired two men to comb the fur, a man to shampoo the fur, and two women to blow dry the fur.

Later that month, alighting from his Zeppelin, “The Jacobs Zephyr,” Mr. Jacobs made this announcement to the crowd gathered at Forbes Field: “Folks, there’s a new Big Ape film coming out soon. See it!” He then turned around and took off. While the announcement might not have set the crowd abuzz, they certainly became excited when Bradford began tossing silver dollars from his zeppelin.

Son of The Big Ape was released the following month. Variety ran the headline “Big Ape Boffo in Great Lake” above a story about the film selling out the Michigan Ave. Cinema for thirteen straight weeks.

Despite being billed as Son of, this was clearly meant to be the same ape. This film began just as the first one ended. Laying on the cement after falling to his death, the Big Ape simply stood up, dusted himself off, and ate some police officers. This film, freed of needing to cut away for stock footage, had the ape leaving New York and swimming (yes, swimming) to Cleveland to destroy another city. Bradford choose to film in Cleveland because it was cheap. It was in this film that, in a scene thankfully deleted by the film censor board, Bradford tried to live up to his pledge of having the Big Ape throw feces.

Audiences again went wild and Bradford made so much money that he gave it away to anyone who would do a funny dance for him.

Big Ape fever went so wild that these next films were all released by Jacobs Colossal Studios over the next three years. Shockingly, they all made money:

  • The Big Ape vs. Giganto the Super Dinosaur
  • Island of the Big Ape
  • The Big Ape Escapes
  • The Big Ape Meets Dracula
  • Death to The Big Ape!
  • The Big Ape Takes a Wife
  • The Big Ape Goes to Washington
  • The Big Ape vs. Nazi Ape

Around this time, the public, which loved both The Big Ape and its oddball creator, began to wonder why the quality of the films was starting to drop. Internally, many suspected it had to do with the fact that JCS had rushed out ten films in a four year span. Even the suit was beginning to look ratty.

Bradford B. Jacobs had also become a little, shall we say, eccentric. It became clear that he loved being rich. He wore a tuxedo wherever he went. If he had to drive, it was in a car which he claimed he won from FDR in a poker game. If he had to fly, he did it in a zeppelin. If he had to walk, he didn’t. He spent money as fast as he made it, which wasn’t a problem since the Big Ape films were guaranteed many makers. Famously, he once bought the Brooklyn Bridge and was later forced to sell it back to New York City. At a profit.

But as much fun as he had being rich, he was as bored making the Big Ape movies. After ten films, he sold the rights to the Big Ape to another studio, Maxwell Picture Corporation, headed by Luther Maxwell. Bradford B. Jacobs would never make another Big Ape movie.

For the first time. Jacobs was not the creative voice behind The Ape.

However, Luther Maxwell wasn’t alone with the franchise. Unbeknownst to him, Bradford also sold the rights to MGM, Paramount, RKO, Cinescope, Tohoscope, Artes D’France, and, without exception, every major or minor movie company in the world.

The lawsuit would drag on for decades but in the meantime, every one of those companies made  Big Ape movies, television shows, cartoons, puppet shows, etc.

Film critic Jeffrey Lane:

You’d logically expect this flood on the market to lead to the end of The Big Ape, but such was the love for that character that every single thing made money. Meanwhile, Bradford B. Jacobs was fast becoming a fixture on the national scene. It didn’t matter to him that the quality of the Big Ape films ranged from genius (1963’s romantic Passions of The Big Ape) to moronic (1951’s Satan’s Sadists vs. The Big Ape.) From Christmas specials to political thrillers, there was not a genre untouched by the Big Apes furry paws.

 TO BE CONTINUED IN PART TWO: THE BIG APE RISES TO GLORY

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My Bus Ride to… More Bus Ride: Part One Week!

28 Dec

December 28, 2013

part one logo

from June 1, 2008

I left Lafayette High School about a half hour late. I was traveling to Boston on a bus with thirty-four well-behaved kids. Their only problem was that, on the whole, they didn’t speak much English. I also knew only a couple of their names and some of them I’d swear I never even saw them around the school before.

I wasn’t alone. It wasn’t even my trip. This was a group of kids in a Saturday program that goes on educational trips. The program was run by Liz and Maria and they were on the bus, along with Ray, a para.

This was supposed to be a college tour. On Friday we were going to Boston, where we’d have dinner at the Hard Rock Café, then check in at the hotel. Saturday was college day. After breakfast and checkout, we’d drive to Boston College and walk around the campus and see the library, etc. Then we’d take a tour of Boston, have lunch, tour Harvard University,  (excuse me, Haavaad Univuhsity), and drive back, stopping in Connecticut to see Yale University and have dinner. Simple!

This turned into the Bataan Death March of Bus Rides. By the end of the trip I had compared the bus to those refugee ships that got out of Germany just before the war started. Don’t get me wrong, I had a very fun time, but even before we got to Stamford we were discussing which kids we’d eat if it were the end of the world.

I took the front seats on the passenger side. Liz had her usual spot in the seats behind the driver. Maria camped behind her and Ray was behind me. In fact, even know as I type I have a hard time looking to my left and not seeing Liz. We spent about 13 hours on the bus out of the whole 32 hour trip. That’s about 40% of the trip, making my time with Liz one the more significant relationships of my life. Even at lunch, where did she sit? On my left.

We were well-prepared. There was water and juice, and even sandwiches allegedly personally made by the Principal. But this being New York, of course we hit a glitch- traffic. So we left late, became later due to traffic, and then made an unexpected stop for gas somewhere in Connecticut. (This stop may have been made up by the driver just as an excuse to get out and pee.) This made us even further behind schedule.

We got back on the road. We’d been talking, laughing, and joking, and even though the weather was overcast we were in good spirits. We were probably all a little tired, but not much. It came as a little surprise then when, at some point on the ride, Maria wondered aloud “what would we do if it was the end of the world and we were all that was left on this bus with the kids?”

Up to this point I really had no intention of blogging this. It was all going to be a nice relaxing trip with a good bunch of kids and some people I like. The only notes I wrote were “pay credit card bill,” etc. But when I heard “what if it was the end of the world?” my blog-ears perked up.

large_bus

Anyway, we were just outside of a gas station in Connecticut when Maria came up with her apocalyptic question.

Well, we were all, um, taken aback by this. More accurately, we all thought she was crazy. (In fact, we all know she’s crazy. But this one was far out even by her standards.) She had some idea of all of us writing this story. (I pointed out that I’m not a writer and got the reaction I expected from Liz) and we actually discussed what would we do. OK, Maria discussed it and we all went along on her crazy-ride. Of course, we’d have to turn the bus around to get back to Brooklyn to find Liz’s daughter. Maria was worried about the kids on the bus. They’d look to us for guidance. I pointed out that if the end of the world really came while we were on the bus, I was no longer a DOE employee and it was every kid for themselves.

Someone said that, if the end of the world really did come, and we were stuck on the bus, far from home, with 34 ELL students, then we may have to eat the kids to survive.

I’m really not sure which of us said it. It may have been Liz, but I am very afraid that it may have been me.

So that’s what we discussed. Which kids were too thin and would be thrown off the bus. (Chicken Wing would be the first to go.) Which kids had enough meat on their bones. Who would be dinner and who would be lunch. And we discussed what we would say to the parents. (“That was a very tasty daughter you raised. What did you feed her?”) We were sure we would be well-within our rights to eat them: Liz had permission slips! I’m sure that I read, somewhere on the bottom, that in the event of an emergency the parents give us permission to eat their children.

This went on for, I’m sure, twenty minutes at least. And while we were cracking up and divvying up the kids into meals, not one of them said anything to us. Oh, they heard us. Many of them even understood us. But none of them said a thing to us. I think they were afraid to. And for the next thirty hours or so, we would go back to this topic again and again. This is what happens when you put me and Liz and Maria together.

So the slow ride to the end of the world went on and on and the day became night and we all became tired and the wheels turned and the driver drove and we went on and on and at some point we realized that we were over an hour late for our dinner reservations. We were scheduled to be at the Boston Hard Rock Café at 8:45. Somewhere close to 10:00 we wondered “our reservations were for when?” So Liz called the Hard Rock where the girl offered to “rock her world” and Liz, rather than taking her up on what could have been a very interesting offer, merely asked about our reservations. The girl put her on hold and when she came back, said that she’d “do her best” to seat us. As the driver pointed out, Friday night at the Hard Rock should be pretty busy.

It wasn’t. When we got there around 10:30 the place was empty. Seriously, it was about 85% empty. It was a lot of loud noise and overpriced food. (The Hard Rock Café’s motto: We promise you, the rock and roll customer, loud music and overpriced food. And they live up to it.) The kids sat in tables of 2 or 4 or 5 or 6, and in true ELL fashion, they rearranged the tables and seats. Don’t ask me why, but they did that all weekend. We went to the Hard Rock, they moved the furniture. We ate breakfast in the hotel, they moved the tables. I would have loved to see them in action at McDonald’s where the tables and chairs are bolted down. I bet they still would have tried. (And speaking of furniture, some of them wanted to bring a table with them to the hotel. I bet they were looking forward to moving it all around the room, taking pictures with the table by the door, then the table by the window, in the morning light, etc. What is with these kids and tables? It must be a non-English speaking thing. This is why we were looking forward to eating them)

The Hard Rock was fun. Ray had a corona and was disappointed that he couldn’t go out and drink more. Liz had a Margarita something-or-other and stopped at one (by the way, she sat on my left) and Maria and I had soft drinks. OK, Maria with a few drinks her scares me so I was glad she didn’t drink. Liz could have been really interesting with a few in her. Me? I didn’t need one. I was singing along to Green Day (Which song? Warning. “This is a public service announcement this is only a test.”) so you know that I was in a good mood. I even bought a Hard Rock t-shirt, so if I was willing to lay out $30 for what was basically a long sleeve tee I had to be happy.

So dinner was going along, and the kids were in no danger since we were full and not inclined to eat any of them, and eventually we noticed that the driver hadn’t returned and no one knew where the bus was. We got off the bus a block away from the place while we were stopped in traffic and Driver Raymond said he’d find a spot to leave the bus. After we were in the restaurant (OK, I know, it was the Hard Rock. I have a lot of nerve calling it a restaurant.) he popped in and told us what to order for him and went back to the bus. We had one kid who had nowhere to sit (and apparently no friends on the trip) so he was going to sit with the driver. The driver never came back and it became his job to protect the driver’s rapidly cooling food from the other hungry kids. We had no idea where the driver went. Liz called the driver’s cell but got his voicemail. (If Liz was calling to ask him what he was doing after the kids went to bed he’d have answered in a heartbeat. He was that kind of player.) We looked outside the window and saw another bus and wondered why our driver just didn’t park behind that bus.

So Liz and I went out to look for our bus. You may have noticed, or you will, a trend of me and Liz doing things and pairing off Ray and Maria. This was not accidental. First of all I like Liz and consider her a friend, not just a work friend, second of all Maria can be, um Maria, and thirdly, screw Ray. He and Maria work together all the time anyway (Maria: “Raaaaayyyyy.”) so it was a natural. Plus I think Liz and I wanted to be around the kids less than Maria did. Hell, the Indian kids henna’d her feet on the bus. There is nothing as good as leaving responsible kids alone, at least until the end of the world comes and you have to eat them. (When will that joke become old? Sooner than you think.)

Liz and I walked all over. We circled the place, walked around Faniel Hall, walked this way and that, that way and this, and returned to the Hard Rock only to find out that the bus we were looking at all night was our bus the whole time. (I know you saw that coming, oh Patient Reader.) Liz had the name of the bus wrong and I didn’t know it at all- hey, I knew it was big and white, give me a break.

We got back on the bus and felt like it was all just a great big tease. (Not you, Liz, the trip. Ha ha, it’s a joke, I’m so dead.) We drove almost 6 hours to Boston, got  out and went straight into a generic Hard Rock, walked around the market for almost ten minutes (during which Liz and I were offered carriage rides, violin serenades, and asked to donate to some kind of charity) and saw one of the best place’s to eat, Durgin Park, right across the street. All this time to a great place and I was in a rare mood, and I had to get back on the bus for what turned out to be a 35 minute ride away from Boston to the hotel. (As I look back on it, better for Liz, because if I got her on a carriage with some liquor in her….)

So we were back on the bus and I knew we were staying outside of Boston but I had no idea it was so far. Lowell is about 35 to 40 minutes outside of town. I really felt like I was cheated. Here I was in a town I love and with people I like for only an hour and then I had to leave. Hell is sort of that kind of tease.

We rolled into the “city ” of Lowell and I was all motor mouth. On and on, yada yada, about how if Lowell is a city then so is my ass, they’re about as big, and even funnier stuff. Or at least it seemed it was funnier, hey I was tired. I am from New York, and in all seriousness, Lowell may technically be a city, but they have a lot of nerve advertising that fact. The center of town was a flashing yellow stop light and a Dunkin’ Donuts.

We were scheduled to be there at 10:30 but actually arrived at nearly mid-night. The hotel was nice. So nice that I decided to be a pain in the ass. On the phone, the woman promised Liz there would be cookies waiting for us. (Again, here is a woman coming on to Liz, even going so far as to bake her cookies, and nothing comes of it. Nothing!) So after Liz got the keys, I started ball busting about the cookies. Really, I was out of town, tired, and having fun. Who cares if a hick from Lowell has to suffer? But I got the cookies. I think she spit in mine.

We got the kids to their rooms where the immediately moved the tables, and went to the room I shared with Ray. (I waited for a knock on my door all night. Maria never showed.) Nothing went on with Ray. We were in (separate) bed and asleep almost as soon as the door closed. It did occur to me, sleeping across from a strange man, what a gay town Boston is, with neighborhood’s called North “End” and “Back” Bay.

Next morning we got up and breakfasted. The kids were amazed by the ducks and, after moving around the tables, ran out to take some pictures of the rather bored looking bird. Seriously, there was little they didn’t taker pictures of. All the way up there was not a bridge, truck, tree, or blur that didn’t get snapped. It is really too bad film is gone or Kodak would have made a fortune.

We left the hotel (late) and it started to rain. Maria, the weather Queen, guaranteed that it would stop and hold off until at least three o’clock. She was sure. She knew. She would do it.

Eventually we got to Boston College. “Eventually” because we had some trouble finding it. And by “us” I mean “Driver Ray.” Let’s call a spade a spade- he didn’t know where he was going. The highlight was when he made a u-turn across trolley tracks on a very narrow street. Well, we were over an hour behind schedule, didn’t know where to enter the college, and Driver Raymond had no idea where the Museum of Science (our next stop) was, so we cut BC off the list and moved on, driving 35 minutes back to Boston. “Kids, if you look out the right side of the bus, you’ll see Boston College. Everyone see it? Good, we’re going back to Boston.”

That was the first of the about 5,097 colleges we saw on the tour. Pass by MIT? Check, we saw it. Stamford School of Advanced Auto Repair? It counts. See that billboard for CSI? That’s good. Hey, that car has a bumper sticker for Louisiana State University. Put it on the list. Did I say that we were a little punchy?

YouAreHere1123

We got to the Museum of Science pretty much on time, and they had, inexplicably, a statue of Red Sox outfielder Carl Yastrzemzki. (No, my head didn’t just hit the keyboard, that’s his name.) It was here that Liz and I found (and survived) the Total Perspective Vortex.

From Wikipedia: The Total Perspective Vortex, in the fictional world of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is the most horrible torture device to which a sentient being can be subjected. Located on Frogstar World B, it shows its victim the entire unimaginable infinity of the universe with a very tiny marker that says “You Are Here” which points to a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot.

The machine was originally invented by one Trin Tragula in order to annoy his wife. Because she was forever nagging him for having no sense of proportion, he decided to invent something that would show her what having a sense of proportion really meant. Unfortunately the shock of being placed in the Vortex destroyed her brain, but Trin Tragula’s grief was tempered by the knowledge that he had been right and she had been wrong. The Total Perspective Vortex had proved that in an infinite universe the one thing sentient life cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

 Liz and I stood in front of a model of the Earth. We pressed a button and a tiny lit up, with a sign reading “You Are Here.” Next was a model of the solar system, with a tiny light and a sign, then the galaxy, then finally we stood in front of a 3D model of the universe. I pushed a button and a tiny light came on with a sign reading “You Are Here.” I was prepared to die, happy, but luckily, my mind survived and Liz and I moved on, safely away from the Total Perspective Vortex, to the famed Boston Duck Tour.

END OF PART ONE
PART TWO HERE

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