Background
Willis O’Brien was born on 2 March 1886 in Oakland, California, United States.
Willis O’Brien was born on 2 March 1886 in Oakland, California, United States.
As a boy, he was a clever drawer and an experimenter with models. That led to work as a sculptor and as a cartoonist for the San Francisco Daily News. To that end he made a series of toy dinosaurs and then experimented with stop motion—frame-by-frame advancing of the action—on a movie camera. Two months' work led to a five-minute film, The Dinosaur and the Missing Link (14). Edison purchased it and advanced O'Brien the money to make ten more films. That in turn led to The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (19), which was a great hit.
O'Brien was developing all his processes toward greater sophistication, as shown in The Lost World (25, Harry Hoyt). That was the picture that intrigued Merian Cooper and Ernest B. Schoed- sack in the halting development of King Kong. By then, O'Brien had gone over to rubber models, and he had found several different versions of matte work and miniature projection that could many the model work and the live action.
Pedantic schoolchildren are sometimes heard to complain that you can see (and feel) the flickering trickery in King Kong. Well, yes, you can; it’s the trembling poetry of the magic. Kong is still one of the most compelling special effects movies, in large part because it is not perfect, and because the seams that show (so to speak) are the friction of one reality against another.
The story of King Kong's production is of struggle and battles (with Cooper generally having the clearest sense of where they were going), but O Brien—or Obie—was the boffin who answered all the impossible problems. He worked just as hard on Son of Kong (33, Schoedsack), and just before that film opened his estranged wife murdered their two sons.
He was deeply dismayed, and he put aside or forgot many favorite projects. But there were other credits: The Last Days of Pompeii (35, Schoedsack); Mighty Joe Young (49. Schoedsack)—after which O’Brien was awarded an honorary Oscar. The story for The Beast of Hollow Mountain (56, Edward Nassonr and Ismael Rodriguez); The Animal World (56, Irwin Allen), with Ray Harryhausen as his assistant; The Black Scorpion (57, Edward Ludwig); The Giant Behemoth (59, Eugene Lourie); The Lost World (60, Allen); It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (63, Stanley Kramer).
Special effects have undergone another revolution since Cooper spoke— that of computer assistance. But O'Brien's place is still unquestioned, just as his role in that great testament to collaboration, serendipity, and blind chance—the making of King Kong—has been made clear by the film's several scholars. And there is more still to O'Brien's story.
Quotes from others about the person
“O'Brien was a genius." said Merian C. Cooper, "Kong is as much his picture as it is mine. There was never anybody in his class as far as special effects went, there never was and there probably never will be."