Ernest B. Schoedsack
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Biography
Born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, Schoedsack is probably best remembered for being the co-director of the 1933 film, King Kong.
Schoedsack was fascinated with the mechanics of film photography long before taking his first movie job with the Keystone Studios in 1914.
During World War I, he worked as a Signal Corps cameraman, and after the Armistice he worked on behalf of Polish war relief, helping thousand of Poles escape the Russian occupied territories.
While in Ukraine in 1920 he met Captain Merian C. Cooper, who, like Schoedsack, was a fervent anti-Bolshevik and also an aspiring film director. The men renewed their friendship after the hostilities, collaborating on several documentary films, Grass (1925) and Chang (1927). Still in partnership with Cooper, Schoedsack co-directed the fictional adventure film The Four Feathers (1929), then, after another documentary, the Cooper-Schoedsack team helmed RKO's The Most Dangerous Game (1932), which featured Four Feathers leading lady Fay Wray.
Concurrently with Game, Schoedsack and O'Brien launched their most ambitious project to date: King Kong (1933), also with Wray. Ruth Rose, Schoedsack's wife and an adventure lover in her own right, collaborated on the Kong screenplay.
When Merian Cooper assumed leadership of RKO Radio, he took Schoedsack with him as a contract director. Some of Schoedsack's projects were sedate domestic comedies like Long Lost Father (1934), while others were along the spectacular lines of The Last Days of Pompeii (1936).
Schoedsack and Cooper parted ways in the late 30s, Schoedsack moving to Paramount, where he returned to the live action/miniature combo that had served him well on Kong for his first Technicolor production, Dr. Cyclops (1940). His eyesight was severely damaged in World War II, yet he contined to direct films afterwards. Still on the cutting edge of technological advances in the 1950s, Schoedsack directed the in-your-face prologue of the 1952 box-office hit This is Cinerama.
He and Rose are interred together at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.
