Hello everyone, and welcome and Forgotten Hollywood, your podcasts and memories of yesteryear.

My name is doug Hess and for Tuna and Forgotten Hollywood for the first time.

What I do on this podcast is take you on a journey back in time and share with you pieces of Hollywood that you may or may not know about.

And this episode we have Tom Schabella back on and he is here to talk about his latest book, King Kong Versus Godzilla, the most colossal conflict the screen has ever known.

Tom, Welcome back to Forgotten Hollywood.

Thanks for having me back.

I appreciate it.

When this book was out and I started going through potential podcasts to do and to do again, you know, obviously you're at one of the top of my lists, so you know it was.

It was a lot of fun last time.

So and obviously it's a topic that I love talking about.

Yes, well, thank you for thinking of us.

And like I said, welcome back.

And you know, as we do, we always like to ask the author to kind of give his own words of what this book is about.

Sure, so just a little bit of backstory on writing the book.

My original idea was to talk about well, number one, I wanted to talk about monster movies.

You know, I have two books out, one Primetime nineteen sixty six sixty seven, which is about the first season every show is in color on primetime television, and then James Bond in the sixty Spy Craze, which talked about James Bond films of the sixties and all the subsequent knockoffs and spoofs and everything in between.

And I'm a big monster movie fan.

I'm just a giant monster movie fan, and that's really my main focus of a lot of times.

And people always say to me, well, why didn't you write a monster movie book?

Why didn't write a book about monster movies?

And the first two it just didn't work out that way.

And I couldn't really think of anything that hadn't been discussed to death.

So I thought monster rally films, so where multiple monsters are in the same film, so Frankanstein meets the Wolfman, things like that, and I started writing it and actually wrote quite a bit, and I got to the Godzilla franchise and I got to writing about King Kong and Godzilla, and I realized it was taking up the majority of what I was doing, so I quickly abandoned ship on that and I used a I wound up using a lot of that previous book in this one.

But again, I just I just need this.

This was a story that needed to be talked about.

I think that it's something that certainly everybody in some way, shape or form, they know maybe something about the film.

They at least know the characters, They at least know at least they've heard of Godzilla, They've at least heard of King Kong.

So all the characters in the film are I think have a gigantic Q score.

But maybe you've never seen the film, maybe you've never really dove into it.

And I also wanted to talk about a singular topic, just one film, And much to my surprise, there's never been a book written about just specifically this film.

So here I am, which is kind of hard to believe as long as King Kong and Godzilla has been around and has really been a staple in movie history or cinema, that it really hasn't been studied or really talked about in such a format.

Right.

Yeah, I mean, obviously there's there's magazine articles.

There were even the Crestwood House books that I grew up with where talked about monster movies and things like that.

Yeah, there was never anything specific written about this off again YouTube videos and essays and things like that, but never a dedicated book.

Right.

Well, it's also kind of interesting, you know you talk about King Kong and Gonzela and how it's or how it's evolved over the years, you know, from the silent movies up to here regionally in the two thousands, and the impact that it's had on culture.

Sure.

Yeah, and that's one of the things that I absolutely had to get into.

I'm somebody, as just demonstrated, I'm somebody that just can't tell you just the facts of the story.

I have to give you the prehistory from the beginning of time till right now.

Like I have to say, well, there was a man named Thomas Edison who invented now and so you know, I had to get into that history of King Kong.

That King Kong, you know, was this Great Depression era monster and actually signaled coming out of the Great Depression.

It's it's signaled that people started going to movies again, that that movies could be these gala events once again, that that they were not in the last you know, several years and actually King Kong was released around the same time as the inauguration of President Roosevelt, so you know, there was kind of a good feeling around the time.

And then getting into Godzilla, I felt like I needed to really talk about that prehistory and the effects that the Japanese were still feeling post war and tensions of the Cold War and things like that, So I really had to get into that.

And also, again they're histories are just strangely intertwined.

Both movies well, obviously they got the Godzilla creators were inspired by Kong, but both movies had a very very quick turnaround for a sequel that it wasn't that great.

And again, these two just just as as I said multiple times in the book and on the back and everything I said, you know, they were introduced decades apart, two decades apart, two different continents, two different studios, but you know these two were on a collision course in history.

Yeah, and you know, you know, for me, you know, seeing the original King Kong and the cem of the cinema history, you know, climbing up the skyscraper and the airplanes around it, and then you fast forward to Jessica Ling's version in the seventies and how King Kong in particular has changed, but it hasn't really changed, if that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, you know, and certainly in all those years, it again, Kong is something that it's an iconic character.

He's a New York You can't go to New York without thinking, well, you know, okay, he was there.

He was on the Empire State Building.

A few weeks ago.

I was in the city and I passed an elevated train and I thought, maybe that's it.

Maybe that's where he came through.

I'm not sure, or even with the seventy sixth movie, you know, I don't I've never actually been to Shea Stadium, but I was in that neighborhood, you know, a couple of years ago, and I thought, wow, well King Colin was the area.

Yeah, but you're right.

I mean, it's whether you're in your nineties or if you're a teenager today, you know, King Kong and Godzilla.

It really just kind of speaks to every generation.

Every generation's kind of had their own version of King Cong or Godzilla if you will, for the most part.

And it's just really interesting how after all these years it's still an icon and something that we can all relate to.

I just hear that name.

Yeah, absolutely, And it's something that even those older films, growing up watching them on TV or renting them or whatever ever, I didn't care what year they were, right, you know, they're they're they're they're they're cool giant monsters that uh, they you can watch.

So you can watch them on a lot of levels too.

You can watch it on a level of especially the early ones, especially the early Godzilla is you can watch it as some kind of political commentary or you could you just have a lot of fun with them.

So I think that that's certainly an age thing that that helps with with certainly the Godzilla films and King Kong.

Yeah, you know, and a lot of them are products of their time.

I shouldn't say a lot of them.

Definitely, the thirty three King Kong is a product of its time.

You could spot out things that are again New York or great depression that that you could isolate.

And then the seventy six you know that that certainly has it has a different feel to it now.

And and also and even Constole Island I thought was a cool movie, and even though it was a period piece.

They said it during the Vietnam War, right, you know, you could still make some correlations to modern day, you know, and the Peter Jackson film was also a period piece and a remake.

But sure.

Yeah, it's just really fascinating how it still talks to us or we still have this interest in it all these years later and it keeps coming back up into our culture.

Yeah.

And when I I think it's really interesting when I tell somebody that I wrote this book or it's published or whatever, just the amount of people that, oh, you know, I'm buying it for Christmas from my uncle who really likes it.

Just just you know, everybody has somebody in their family that really loves these movies that would find them interesting.

And you know, yeah, that's that's really the cool thing about it, you know, where I think it has this class iconic lineage where you people just and they're they're they're interesting films uh to uh to talk about, and interesting films too, and certainly interesting films to read about.

And the one thing that uh, I've said a couple of times so far, you know, in any interview that I've done, I said, you know, at one point, I I at one point I was writing this book, and I thought, well, you know what, I'm not going to talk about the fact that people believe that there are two endings of this movie.

It's been done to death.

It's it's people have talked about it for one hundred years and or you know, one hundred years.

Yeah, you know city however long and it I'm just gonna maybe blaze over it really quick.

And anytime I was telling somebody I was writing this book, oh, you're you going to talk about the two endings?

Are there really two endings?

Are there two endings of this movie?

And I thought, well, oh, okay, well I guess I have to.

And I certainly remember renting this movie and thinking, oh, I wonder, I wonder what ending I'm going to get, not realizing I'm watching a movie in English.

But but yeah, you know, and and so long story short, there's not but uh somewhat, in the American version you hear both wars.

In the Japanese version you do only hear Godzilla.

However, the other thing that I found pretty interesting about that oftentimes it's compare.

It's brought up that the the suit actors who played King Kong Godzilla watched professional wrestling beforehand and said, okay, well we can kind of do something like this.

We could, we could do this.

And there's often been things written about the movie that says, well, King Kong is this, you know, represents America and Godzilla represents Japan in the film.

And but if you watch it, even the Japanese version, if you watch it with Japanese subtitles, if you know Japanese, which I don't, Godzilla is clearly the bad guy.

Clearly, clearly the bad guy.

There's anybody who's ever written that has no idea what they're talking about.

And Japanese Japanese professional wrestling, which I happen to be also a fan of.

Uh.

There's a trope called the guid Gin and it's an outside America, like a big American that comes in so in the late seventies, early eighties, like hul Cogan before he got to be you know, big, was the guidge it.

He was the evil foreigner coming in.

And they still do it to this day.

There's evil foreigners who come in every single day to take out you know, that's not the formula.

In this movie.

King Kong is there to defend against Godzilla, which later Godzilla kind of becomes the national monster of Japan, which which I thought was really interesting, and I really dive into this whole thing and again and on both continents, this movie is sold as a big fight.

You know, come see the big fight.

That's a it's a heavyweight fight.

So I thought that that was really cool in the marketing, and one of the things that I really liked diving into with this book, and one thing that I really dove into was the marketing films that it was paired with at times.

So pretty cool.

You've kind of hinted about this already, but just going to elaborate a little bit more.

What surprised you during the writing and the research of this book.

Uh, certainly that the amount of and again and and it's something that I never really paid attention to when when watching the film versus reading things.

I kind of said, yeah, okay, yeah, you know, Godzilla's this ah national monster of Japan, and it clearly was not at the time.

How long it played I thought was really interesting.

Just how long it played, it well into the seventies, it played a drive ins and kitty matinees and things like that.

Just how well it was received, you know, by by audiences for ten plus years.

You know, I thought was extremely interesting.

How the movie really influenced future Godzilla movies, I thought was extremely interesting.

And in the book, I have an inter interview with Linda Miller, who she played in the movie King Kong Escapes, which was the second Toho Studios King Kong movie, which has nothing to do with King congresus Godzilla.

They made a five year agreement with r KO to make King Kong movies and they only made two, which doesn't make any sense to me.

If you told me, hey, you can make Godzilla movies for five or King Kong movies for five years, I'd be making every type of King Kong movie.

I can positive King Kong Go's to space, King Kong underwater, I don't know King Congress is whoever.

I'd be making him fight everybody for five years.

But they only made me.

And I was nineteen fifty sixty seven, and you know, she's lived in the United States and for decades had zero idea that people were a looking for her, b had any interest in this movie.

She was completely oblivious to any of this, and then fairly recently was contacted and asked to come to conventions and things like that.

And so she gave me a really great interview.

She was talked to me for a couple hours wow, and just talked about her career and things like that.

But the reason why I included her in the book was because that she could really give some insight to how things worked at Toho Studios.

So, you know, she's one of the few actresses in Hollywood to say that they were the King Kong's Desire long story short, you know, the she she was held in King Kong's hand.

You know.

So, uh so I thought that that was was really really really cool to talk about, and again that that gave me some some really cool insight.

And uh, I never did an interview for a book before.

I've done it for magazine articles and things like that, but never never in a book.

And I thought that this was a important thing to include because I had the resource there, you know.

And everybody said, no, she's great, she's plug and play.

She'll just you know, she'll she'll answer any questions and and and you know, and she was in uh she has speaking roles in one movie that she was in, The Green Slime, And then she was on a show in Japan and an episode of My Three Sons, So her acting career is not where well, you know, she could kind of get confused of which set she was on, right, you know.

It's gonna get hard to confuse.

Those right, Yeah, she was low but yeah it was The Green Slam was a real low budget movie.

You know, Tellho is a big budget movie.

King Kong for Christ's Sake and My Three Sons, I don't think so.

Yeah, absolutely, well, Tom, I know we're getting closer on time.

But one last question before we let you go was, you know, here we are in twenty twenty five, maybe looking your crystal ball, where do you think this King cong versus Godzilla?

Do you think we'll see more remakes in the futures or yeah, why do you think this franchise goes?

I think there's definitely going to be more into in the legendary franchise.

I I don't see Kong in the Japanese side of things, even though they probably could.

I think that I don't see it.

I see them kind of going a different direction with with their style of films.

It seems to be a little bit more serious, I guess for lack of a better term, but you know again, that could change, you know, they could have could decide to make some type of monster rally film.

I see right now, I see a lot of rumors swirling of does Godzilla fight another monster in h I think it's called Godzilla minus zero.

I think it's the new film.

You know, I've heard King Adora, I've heard the Smog Monster.

I've heard Oh Mathra, heard a lot of of Meca Godzilla.

I've I've heard a lot of of rumors.

Uh.

You know, I don't think anybody knows, but you know those those are the rumors going on right now as we speak.

So uh yeah, I mean I definitely see a lot of remakes.

There's definitely a lot of room.

And it's it's you know, criminal to me that it took them then that long to make it.

Uh so you know, finally we're we're here.

Yeah, and the way with you know AI and the green screens and all the visual effects.

I can only see it getting more intense and better when it comes to that, which will probably bring out more audience members as well.

Yeah.

Uh.

The one thing that I do note in my book also with those films versus you know, this current film, I think it was.

Leonard Malton pointed out at one point, even though something computer generated, you it looks real, but you know it's fake.

Where a man in a suit it looks fake, but you know it's real.

I know I can go and touch that monster.

The Also, these films I think bring us and King Kong and Godzilla has done this time and time again where the worst times in history, they have certainly helped you.

Like I said, King Kong coming out of the depression, Godzilla in Japan coming out of World War two, King Congress.

Godzilla was was released in the United States shortly after the Kennedy assassination, and we saw King Kong versus Godzilla or Godzilla versus King Kong released.

You know, it was the first movie I saw post COVID.

You know, it was the first movie I saw in the theater.

You know, this was that was the first time it was you know, people kind of said, well, it may be safe to go to the theater.

So it was certainly time and time again when we're given some type of tragedy in life or anything like that, a national tragedy and national uh something to overcome.

King Kong and Godzilla have been there for us.

Which is kind of weird to think that's com pretty right.

Well, Tom, as always, thank you so much for coming on and spending some time with us.

To our listeners, please go either go to your local bookstore or go on wherever you purchase your books and get a copy of King Coong Versus Godzilla, The most colossal conflict the screen is ever known.

We just touched the tip of the iceberg.

And if you're into monster movies or horror films, et cetera, this book is going to be right up your alley and so we strongly recommend that you go out and get a copy of this book.

And again, Tom, thank you so much for coming on spending some time with us today.

Thank you.

And again, yeah, wherever find books are sold, it's available everywhere.

Absolutely well.

Again, thank you for listening to this episode of Forgot in Hollywood.

Just search for dougcast forgott in Hollywood.

You can also find me on Twitter, Instagram at hest dog fourteen.

If you're listening to this podcast on iTunes another podcast service, please subscribe, rate and review this episode.

Tune in next time for let us episode of Forgotten Hollywood.

Thank you for listening and we will see you then