Merian Caldwell Cooper (October 24, 1893, Jacksonville, Florida, USA — April 21, 1973, San Diego, California, USA, died of cancer) was an American aviator, American Air Force and Polish Air Force officer, adventurer, director, screenwriter and producer. Cooper's most famous film work was the 1933 movie King Kong. He was the father of Polish translator and writer Maciej Słomczyński and was married to Dorothy Jordan.
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Early life
Born to John C. Cooper and the former Mary Coldwell, Merian Caldwell Cooper entered the U.S. Naval Academy in 1912 but left in 1915 (his senior year). In 1916 he joined the Georgia National Guard to help chase Pancho Villa in Mexico.
World War I
Cooper was a bomber pilot during World War I. He was shot down and captured by the Germans, serving out the remainder of the war in a POW camp.[1]
Polish Independence
From late 1919 until the 1921 Treaty of Riga he was a member of a volunteer American flight squadron, the Kościuszko Squadron, which supported the Polish Army in the Polish-Soviet War. On July 26, 1920, his plane was shot down, and he spent nearly 9 months in a Soviet prisoner of war camp. He escaped just before the war was over and made it to Latvia. For valor he was decorated by Polish commander-in-chief Józef Piłsudski with the highest Polish military decoration, the Virtuti Militari. During his time as a POW, Cooper wrote an autobiography: Things Men Die For by "C". He turned the manuscript over to Dagmar Matson to type for publisher submission. It was submitted to G. P. Putnam's Sons in New York (the Knickerbocker Press) in 1927 and published that same year. Just after the book's release, he change his mind about releasing the personal details about "Nina" and asked Dagmar to buy up every copy she could find. She managed to acquire most of the 5,000 copies that had been released. Cooper kept a copy and Dagmar kept a copy, while the rest were eventually destroyed. Dagmar sent Nina money every month, on behalf of Cooper, until his death.
World War II
Though old enough to be free of service in World War II, he enlisted anyway, as a colonel in the U.S. Army Air Forces, serving in China as chief of staff for General Claire Chennault of the China Air Task Force, then from 1943 to 1945 in the Southwest Pacific as chief of staff for the Fifth Air Force's Bomber Command. Leading many missions and carefully planning them to minimize loss of life, he was known for his hard work and relentless planning. At the end of the war, he was promoted to brigadier general.
Film career
Cooper led movie production for RKO Radio Pictures before and after World War II. He frequently collaborated with Ernest B. Schoedsack. Cooper started his film career with documentaries for Paramount Pictures such as Grass (1925) and Chang (1927), which combined real footage with staged sequences. In Chang , he used this technique to create a memorable finale featuring an elephant stampede. His movie The Four Feathers was filmed among the fighting tribes of the Sudan.[1] Throughout his career, Cooper was a proponent of technical innovation. The film King Kong, which he co-wrote, co-directed, and appeared in, was a breakthrough in this regard. Additionally, Cooper helped pave the way for such ground-breaking technologies as Technicolor and the widescreen process Cinerama. Cooper was a good friend and frequent collaborator with noted Western director John Ford. In 1947, they formed Argosy Productions and produced such notable films as Wagon Master (1950), Rio Grande (1950), The Quiet Man (1952), and The Searchers (1956). He was nominated for an Academy Award for producing The Quiet Man in 1952, but lost to Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth. Cooper did however receive an Honorary Oscar that same year. Cooper has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (his name is misspelled "Meriam C. Cooper").
Pioneer in Aviation
He was a member of the board of Pan American Airways for decades and a pioneer founder in using airplanes.
Awards
In 1927, the Boy Scouts of America made Cooper an Honorary Scout, a new category of Scout created that same year. This distinction was give to "American citizens whose achievements in outdoor activity, exploration and worthwhile adventure are of such an exceptional character as to capture the imagination of boys...". The other eighteen men who were awarded this distinction were: Roy Chapman Andrews; Robert Bartlett; Frederick Russell Burnham; Richard E. Byrd; George Kruck Cherrie; James L. Clark; Lincoln Ellsworth; Louis Agassiz Fuertes; George Bird Grinnell; Charles A. Lindbergh; Donald Baxter MacMillan; Clifford H. Pope; George Palmer Putnam; Kermit Roosevelt; Carl Rungius; Stewart Edward White; Orville Wright. [2]
Trivia
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- In the 1933 version of King Kong, Cooper and co-director Ernest B. Schoedsack appear at the end piloting the plane that finally finishes off Kong. Cooper reportedly said, "We should kill the sonofabitch ourselves".
- In the 2005 remake of King Kong, upon learning that Fay Wray is not available because she's making a film for RKO, Carl Denham (Jack Black) replies, "Cooper, huh? I might have known."
- Cooper claimed that he got the idea for King Kong after he had a dream that a giant gorilla was terrorizing New York City. When he woke up, he recorded the idea and used it for the film.
- On 4 April and 11 April 2007, Turner Classic Movies premiered six films produced by Cooper at RKO but out of distribution for more than 50 years. According to TCM host Robert Osborne, Cooper agreed to a legal settlement with RKO in 1946, after accusing RKO of not giving him all the money due him from his RKO producer's contract in the 1930s. The settlement gave Cooper complete ownership of six RKO titles. Among the six titles are Rafter Romance (1933) with Ginger Rogers, Double Harness (1933) with Ann Harding and William Powell, The Right to Romance (1933), One Man's Journey (1933) with Lionel Barrymore, Living on Love (1937), and A Man to Remember (1938). According to an interview with a retired RKO executive, used as a promo on TCM for the premiere, Cooper allowed the films to be shown in 1955-1956 in a limited re-release and only in New York City.
References
- ^ a b West, James E. (1931). The Boy Scouts Book of True Adventure. New York: Putnam. OCLC 8484128.
- ^ (August 29 1927) "Around the World". Time (magazine). Retrieved on 2007-10-24.
- Cooper, Merian C. "The Warfare of the Jungle Folk: Campaigning Against Tigers, Elephants, and Other Wild Animals in Northern Siam." National Geographic Magazine, February 1928: 233-268.
- Janusz Cisek: "Kosciuszko, We Are Here!", McFarland Publishing
- I'm King Kong! -- The Exploits of Merian C. Cooper (2005), TCM documentary on Cooper, directed by Kevin Brownlow.
- Vaz, Mark Cotta. Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper, Creator of King Kong. New York, 2005.
See also
External links
Mini Bio with pictures of Merian C. Cooper as a teenager from JaxHistory.Com [1]
