IT CAME FROM THE BOTTOM SHELF!

Have you ever wanted to see a gorilla pull a gun on Boris Karloff? Well, you’re in luck!

Eric Grayson (a.k.a. Dr. Film) has been working for years on restoring the talkie serial, King of the Kongo (1929). The 10-episode cliffhanger is notable both for being the first serial produced after the advent of sound and for being the first substantial role for Boris Karloff in the talkie era. The restoration project is nearing completion, but Mr. Grayson needs your help to pull it across the finish line.

To finalize the challenging restoration work and bring the film to Blu-ray, Eric Grayson has created a Kickstarter. I encourage you to watch the video embedded above and help bring this Blu-ray to life. Mr. Grayson does terrific work, as evidenced by his previous Blu-ray release of Little Orphant Annie (1918).

Help support this worthy Kickstarter project here: King of the Kongo (1929): Restored Complete 35mm Serial

Below is a summary of the project from the Kickstarter page:

Kickstarter:

The King of the Kongo is a 1929 cliffhanger serial, designed to be seen in a theater– one episode every week. This was the very first sound serial. In those days, the sound was not recorded on film in the way it would have been just a couple of years later. It was recorded on shellac discs and carefully shipped to theaters.

Boris Karloff plays the leader of the villainous gang in King of the Kongo. Karloff was a supporting player at the time and was doing several pictures a year, his fame not cemented until 1931 with the release of Frankenstein. King of the Kongo is the first picture in which he has more than a few lines of recorded dialogue.

Because of its antiquated sound format, King of the Kongo was never reissued after 1929. Theaters that had purchased a print could continue to run it, but by about 1931-2, very few disc releases were being run and the film fell into obscurity.

In the 1950s, a group of kids found a 35mm print and made what are called reduction copies, from 35mm to 16mm. 35mm prints are the gold standard of quality and what was used in theaters. 16mm was used for schools and smaller venues. These kids did not find any of the sound discs, but the print they got was the sound version. To date, every copy of King of the Kongo on the video market is from one of these inferior 16mm copies and with no sound.

The serial was designed to be part talking and part silent with music and sound effects. Whenever a talking sequence occurs without the accompanying sound, a big chunk of the plot is missing. Because of this, King of the Kongo has developed a reputation as an incompetently made, bad film. While it’s not a classic picture, it certainly does not deserve the reputation that it has.

Later in the 1950s, the same 35mm print that was used in the 16mm reductions was sold and resold a number of times. It was apparently in England for a while, where a comedian named Bob Monkhouse included it in a series he made. Some owners chopped footage out of it and sold it for stock shots in other films. For example, the chase at the beginning of Chapter 7 is used in The Days of Thrills and Laughter (1961) and that footage was excised from the sole existing 35mm print.

The footage has also had a spotty storage record, so some of it is in very poor shape, with nitrate deterioration that makes restoration difficult. Film restorationist Eric Grayson has spent months going over all of the surviving footage, piecing together just what survives and where. In short, we have the following:

a) Several reels of projection prints for the serial, most of which is in decent shape but is missing key sequences.

b) Several reels of original camera negative, most of which is affected with moderate to severe nitrate decomposition.

c) Several reels of the silent/foreign version of the serial, in camera negative, which is also rotting. This often is radically different from the sound version that many of us have seen. However, it sometimes contains useful footage that can be used for restoring the sound version. Roughly half, or maybe a little less, of the silent version survives.

d) A 16mm made by the group of kids in the 50s. This is complete for the most part (although they used poor negative stock and there are splices in it) and it contains all of the shots that are missing or deteriorated in other prints.

We also have accessed a “highlight reel” from the Museum of Modern Art that contains some footage that had deteriorated in existing prints. ALL of this material has been used in the restoration thus far. We are hoping to access Bob Monkhouse’s protection material to grab a few shots, although this is expensive.

Eric Grayson got a generous grant from the Efroymson Fund in 2018 to restore King of the Kongo. He could not have known at the time that the film was in the kind of shape it is in. This has required new computer equipment and assistants to run it.

In addition, we have been fortunate to find most of the sound discs for the film. Each chapter had two 10-minute discs, with the first chapter having three instead of two. We are now missing only six of the discs.

We’re also fortunate to have retained Seth Winner, the gold standard of audio engineers, to re-transfer all of the sound material. Seth is using state-of-the-art technology to make this sound the best it can.

But Seth doesn’t work for free. And when we found these discs, it was both a joy and a responsibility. It was a joy because now we have the vast majority of the film’s sound, and a responsibility to the history and the restoration of the film that we had never anticipated.

We have obtained the script for the film from a couple of sources and we are hoping to cover the missing sound discs by hiring actors to read the missing dialogue. This, too, is proving to be a challenge, since the film’s dialogue does not always match the script. We are hoping to use lip readers for this and have contacted the forensic lip readers that were used for Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old. They are standing by, but they don’t work for free, either.

During our massive restoration project, new sound discs, film elements, and consequently, new expenses materialized that used up the resources of the initial grant. We still need funding for another computer motherboard and Blu-ray mastering.

This is a serious restoration in association with the Library of Congress. They have scanned every scrap of film they have, and the final product will reside with them in a permanent digital form.

I’m hoping to include commentaries by several people who are experts on Mascot Serial history, plus some extras about the restoration.

We are working with a consultant to start a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Your support for this project not only helps get Kongo restored, but it will help us as well with the initial planning for a non-profit organization that extends our work to important future film restoration and preservation projects. Thank you for supporting this time-sensitive project!