Sons of Kong

2025-11-22

Kong, chained on a stage platform under spotlights before a packed theater audience, in King Kong (1933)

Around this time of year, my thoughts always turn to my friend, Bob Young. November 22nd, 1924, was his birthday and this year there will be a memorial gathering for Bob at the Topanga Community Center in our beloved Canyon.

I was aware of Bob’s work long before I got to know him. As a teenager, I watched the NBC White Papers series and vividly recall seeing Sit-in with my family. If there was a magnet that pulled me into Bob’s orbit, however, it was Eddie Olmos who asked me to join the campaign he was putting together on behalf of The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, the wonderful film directed by Bob, produced by Moctesuma Esparza, and line-produced by Michael Hausman. We would joke in subsequent years that the film was the bastard child of the Sundance Institute – where all the principals first came together in the Summer of 1981, during the inaugural lab housed at Robert Redford’s spread in Provo Canyon, Utah.

A bearded man in a plaid shirt and a mustached man in a dark jacket talk across a wooden table strewn with papers, a black-and-white still from The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez — Photo credit: Kevin Bubriski

Meeting Bob for the first time, in 1983, I had just returned from working on a misbegotten production in Auckland, New Zealand, and Bob said to me, “you’ve got a bit of the wanderlust.” He smiled, and noted, “I’ve got it bad.” Working with Bob as his assistant on Extremities was a complete honor...driving Bob and cinematographer Curtis Clark, ASC to set every morning, listening to Bob modestly regale us with his adventures over the previous decades including his epiphany, on a troop ship in the South Pacific during World War 2, when he realized that he wanted to make films – “films that were real.”

It wasn’t until much later I discovered our mutual regard for a film that we both experienced as kids. His regard for this film explained so much to me about my friend and mentor. Bob did an interview with director Jeremy Kagan in 2003, for the DGA, in which he answered Jeremy’s query about films that influenced him. Bob somewhat hesitantly cited King Kong – the 1933 classic directed by Merian C. Cooper and his partner Ernest Schoedsack. Bob was nine years old when he first saw the film in New York City....and was mesmerized by it. He wasn’t alone in that regard.

Two older men smile at a restaurant table over iced drinks, one bearded in a plaid shirt, the other in black

The last time I had lunch with actor Tommy Bower and Bob he recounted meeting Cooper in the early 1950s when Bob was shooting Secrets of the Reef at Marine Studios in St. Augustine, Florida, at the park funded by Cooper’s financial partner, C. V. Whitney. A few years later, Cooper and Whitney’s company produced John Ford’s 1956 classic western in Technicolor, The Searchers.

Black-and-white portrait of a man in a suit with a pipe, head resting on his hand, above a montage of a giant ape wrestling a dinosaur

One could easily see the attraction between Bob and Cooper. They were both great ethnographic documentarians. I don’t know that it can be said that Cooper validated Bob’s desire to explore exotic cultures – but I suspect it did. Bob shared with Tommy and I that Cooper said to him, “you’re the son I never had.” Later in the 1950s, Cooper wanted Bob to direct two features that Cooper was developing for Whitney’s production company, films to be presented in dye-transfer Technicolor, stories Cooper had first made into documentaries in the silent era, Grass, and Chang.

One can only imagine Bob traipsing around exotic locations lugging a 35mm Mitchell camera and tripod over his shoulder. Kind of boggles the mind, but it does harken back to Bob’s love of King Kong and how that film sparked his imagination and fascination with different cultures and far-off settings...as did his time in the South Pacific serving as an aerial combat photographer.

Robert M. Young was an American treasure and a wonderful man.