A group of five Merian C. Cooper scrapbooks concerning his early films and travels through Asia, 1922-1927

Comprising 5 black leather multi-ring binders, 4to, with typed and numbered labels to spines, with matching typed labels pasted to inner front covers: "'Expedition in Siam' / (1922-1927, With:) / 'Major Mirian [sic] C. Cooper:' / All Photographs by / 'Ernest B. Schoedsack.'"
Vol. 1: 34 pp, 20 black and white photographs, gelatin silver prints, mostly 8 x 10 in., including frame blowups depicting the elephant stampede and a charging tiger from Chang, images of natives, Siamese temple, Siamese performers, monkeys, an ascent into snowy mountains, and many clippings related to Chang.
Vol. 2: 12 pp, 4 photographs, gelatin silver prints, various sizes, including a portrait of Cooper holding Bimbo the Monkey from Chang with caption in ink; an image of Cooper, his wife, and Schoedsack smoking a hookah; a photograph of Delos Lovelace, gelatin silver print, signed and inscribed, "To Coop / In memory / of the collar box / days from / Delos W. Lovelace," housed in a vintage cardboard mount; a typed carbon manuscript of an article for the National Geographic Society by Merian C. Cooper, 27 pp, signed ("Merian C. Cooper"), bound with four staples to top margin, annotated in pencil in Cooper's hand, a corrected typed carbon manuscript of same article, 33 pp, with 2 original transmittal envelopes to Frances Warner of American Management; 2 strips of 35mm film; a map, a condensed English-Turkish dictionary, and a booklet on French Africa all used by Cooper.
Vol. 3: 24 pp, approximately 38 smaller black and white photographs, silver gelatin prints, including images of Haile Selassie and his court; 5 larger photographs, silver gelatin prints, 8 x 10 in.; a typed letter signed ("Haile Selassie") from Haile Selassie, 1 p, May 24, 1923, Addis-Abeba, Ethiopia, to Cooper re: his visit with Selassie, clippings.
Vol. 4: 24 pp, approximately 39 photographs, silver gelatin prints, most 4.25 x 6.5 in., depicting Cooper, his wife, and Schoedsack, Bedouin caravans, French Foreign Legionnaires, natives, etc.
Vol. 5: 26 pp, 52 black and white photographs, gelatin silver prints, depicting mainly Bedouins and natives, holy men, sacred religious texts, and several clippings.
Before director Merian C. Cooper made his greatest film, King Kong (1933), he filmed dangerous, semi-documentary adventures on location in far-flung locales in collaboration with his King Kong co-director Ernest Schoedsack. (In many ways, King Kong's protagonist Carl Denham is based on Cooper himself.) These scrapbooks mainly relate to Cooper's earliest films, both in this vein: Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life (1925) and Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927). Grass is an important ethnographic documentary on the arduous mass migration of the Bakthari people from Angora to Persia in search of decent grazing land. Chang included many elements later worked into King Kong, including a jungle safari, natives, and a simian costar; the film's climactic elephant stampede also inspired Kong's rampage through a native village. At the time, Cooper's method of filming fierce jungle wildlife close up was a major filmmaking breakthrough. These volumes mainly focus on chronicling the year that Cooper and Schoedsack spent in Siam making Chang. They appear to have been prepared by someone other than Cooper at a later date and contain numerous rare photographs, many featuring Cooper, his family, and/or Schoedsack, including candids, frame blowups from their films, their visit to Emperor Haile Selassie, and images of the exotic locales they traveled to, including Siam, Ethiopia, and Tahiti, and of the natives they encountered. Of particular interest is a rare portrait photograph of Delos W. Lovelace, author of the King Kong novelization, signed and inscribed to Cooper. Also present are two drafts of an article Cooper wrote for the National Geographic Society in the 1920s about his travels in Siam, one of which is heavily annotated by Cooper. Among the clippings on Cooper's films included here, an article about Solomon Island natives features body painting not unlike the natives in King Kong.
In 1929, Chang received an Academy Award® nomination for Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Production at the very first Academy Awards® ceremony, but was beaten out by Sunrise.
15 x 11 x 6 in.