Which street adjoining the Empire State Building was Kong supposed to have landed in?
Fall Steet.
I haven’t seen the new version, and it’s been years since I saw the old one, but the Empire State Building is at the corner of 34th St. and 5th Ave. It is sandwiched by other buildings and looks nothing like it did in Independence Day, for example (they made it look like it was “free-floating”, with nothing surrounding it).
The ESB (or, at least, the one featured in the movie*) takes up the almost entire block between Fifth and Sixth Avenues** and 34th and 35th Street. It could be any of those four streets, depending on where Kong fell.
*The original Empire State Building is at 640 Broadway, at the corner of Bleeker Street. It’s 9 stories high and is currently home to a Swatch Watch shop. It was built long before the better known counterpart, but is unknown, partly because the name has been covered up.
**As they called it at the time the movie is set.
Oops – make that 33rd and 34th Streets
The position of the sun—it was near dawn in the finale of the remake—might be able to give us a clue to which street he fell on, I imagine.
There’s a shot of King Kong falling to the street that wasn’t used in the original, unfortunately, because the effect kept bleeding through. There’s a still from it in Turner and Goldner’s book on the making of King Kong, and a study of it might help.
The long shot in the original shows (IIRC) Kong falling off the right side of the building (the samec side he climbed up) on a shot taken of the north side of the building (you can see the Battery end of Manhattan in the background). Since the Empire State Building lies between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, and Sixth would be on the right in that shot, it seems to me that’s where he would’ve ended up.
So in the original Kong, it looks like he landed in Sixth Avenue. That’s The Avenue of the Americas to you tourists. I haven’t seen the new version yet, but hope to this weekend.
(By the way, in the original the scene has to be taking place at dawn, but the sunlight’s all coming from the wrong direction. Still looks cool, though.)
No.
It was Slap-Bryan Ekers-With-A-Wet-Trout Street.
While I won’t argue what the movie depicted, the ESB does not take up an entire city block. It does take up the block between West 34th and 33rd Streets on 5th Avenue, but it’s less than half of the distance to Broadway (which has just barely crossed 6th Avenue at this point).
So if Cal’s observations of the movie are correct - and they may very well be - Kong would have had to fall towards the west over a few buildings to land on Broadway/6th Avenue. I’d wager the shot was flipped, or perhaps they didn’t think much of it, and he’s really supposed to be on 5th Avenue.
See here for a bird’s eye view of the ESB. It’s fairly dead center and “pointing” to the left of the frame. Fifth Avenue is on the right, W34th on the top, W33rd on the bottom. To the left you can see a few buildings before you come to the diagonal (which is oriented close to top-to-bottom in this shot) street which is Broadway. Sixth Avenue (of the Americas) is crossing it.
Another batch of questions:
How did they haul the unconscious Kong onto the ship and take him back to New York? How did they get him up onto the deck without capsizing the ship? He would not have fit belowdecks, nor would they have been able to squeeze him through the stairway.
How did Ann manage to look blow-dried, styled, and hardly smudged at all even after hours of running or being carried through the jungle, attacked, and so on?
(I know, I’m overthinking things.)
How did she manage to not have her spine snapped in seven places after being shaken like a marimba?
Having seen the new film, it looks as if now Kong lands on 34th street.
This is why it’s convenient to use a jump cut from Skull Island to Broadway – you don’t have to answer questions like that.
Gold Key did a comic book adaptation circa 1969 in which they showed the Venture sort of towing a floating (and presumably sedated) Kong. In the 1976 version they showed him in the hold of a supertanker (ridiculous on all sorts of levels, not the leastt of which is that fumes in the hold probably would’ve done Kong in.)
IIRC, there was talk at one time of doing a picture showing Kong breaking free en route and getting recaptured. If they did that, they’d’ve answered the questions.
Best guess – a BIG raft for a sedated Kong.
I don’t know if the Delos W. Lovelace book answers any of this – I’ve never read it.
The 1933 movie has Denham saying “We’ll build a big raft and float him to the ship”. Then it fades to broadway.
So we know a big raft was invovled, but other then that, I’d say “Very carefully”.
…if you caught Andy Serkis and co getting the special award at the Broadcast Critics Awards, you would have seen special footage of how Kong got back to New York: they showed Kong pushing the Venture with the hold full of bananas.
But for the serious answer, the clues, like most everything else in the movie, are laid out in the movie. In the background while Jack and Carl are talking there is a photo of the Venture with a crane lifting an Elephant onboard. When Choy is talking to Jack about the Venture’s hold, he mentions what creatures they’ve had in there, including a rhino. Carl reminds the good Captain that his crew specializes in capturing exotic animals, (including Sumartran Rat Monkeys,) and they are the best at their job. Denham mentions the voyage back to New York will take “months”, which means if they couldn’t fit Kong onto the Venture, they had time to bring in another ship. Peter Jackson mentioned in the Production Diaries that the hold is big enough to fit Kong.
So it isn’t quite spelled out for us, but there is enough clues to let the audience make a pretty good guess if they so desired.