but it's generally accepted that this novelisation was written more from the original Edgar Wallace screenplay, which differed a little from the finished result.
This is untrue - at least according to the Modern Library edition's introduction and preface by Cooper biographer Mark Cotta Vaz and Greg Bear. It claims Lovelace based his book on early versions of the Creelman/Rose script.
Now, of course, they could be wrong; Bear regurgitates the age-old myth about the spider scene making it into a preview screening, of which no proof has been found. He describes it as "sending the audience into screaming fits," which sounds dubious. Most of what I've read claims that the scene was excised before reaching the theater, and not because it was too scary, but because of pacing issues (i.e. Cooper felt that it was just a big waste of time drawing out the doomed sailors' fates). This is apparently also why the asphalt morass and triceratops scenes got the axe (although nixing the styracosaurus preventing them from simply going back across the log was a mistake).
However, one mistaken repetition of a popular myth doesn't make the entire article incorrect, and the folks at the Modern Library generally know their stuff, or generally get people who
do (editor Edmund Morris' rambling and somewhat incomprehensible introduction for
The Day of the Triffids notwithstanding). And so if they say Lovelace started writing the novelization after James A. Creelman and Ruth Rose had entered the picture, I believe them.
And for what it's worth, since they spend a lot of time discussing the process of the screenplay(s) as well, Vaz and Bear do let us in on what Wallace's script was like. Bare bones, it's the same story as what Creelman and Rose ended up writing, except:
-Jack Driscoll is John Lawson, Carl Denham is Danby G. Denham and is much older and an adventurer rather than a film director, and Ann is named Shirley Redman.
-Skull Island is called Vapor Island.
-Englehorn is described as a young man, and is the one who knocks Kong out with the gas bomb. (Presaging the young Englehorn who does precisely that in Jackson's version).
-There is no scene of Shirley being given to Kong (annoyingly, they don't elaborate on how, then, she ends up in his clutches).
-For some reason there's a bunch of convicts involved, but we aren't told how or why. Just that this explains why the men are wearing numbered uniforms in the famous pre-production illustration for the spider pit. Since they're described as "intruders," I assume they arrive on Vapor Island independently of Denham's group. I'm also wondering if this use of criminals as monster fodder might not have been the inspiration for the same thing in
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad years later.
-Kong is exhibited at Madison Square Gardens, instead a theater.
-And lastly, Kong does climb the Empire State Building, but instead of being shot down by airplanes, he's... struck by a bolt of lightning. Wow.
Cooper apparently disliked this script, and to some extent I can see why, as it sounds like a jumbled mess. Nevertheless, I would've enjoyed reading a novelization of it. It makes me wish that had been what Joe DeVito and Brad Strickland had attempted rather than just redoing Lovelace's version. But I'd imagine Wallace's script is difficult to come by, and their
King Kong is an obvious cash-in they clearly spent almost no appreciable amount of time on.
On unrelated note, Denham has no first name in the novel. The name "Carl" isn't mentioned even once. If it is, I never saw it, and after noticing that Lovelace apparently didn't bestow a first name upon him, I did actually search for it!
