英文书名：LIVING DANGEROUSLY: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper, Creator of King Kong
中文书名：危险人生：梅里安C. 库珀------《金刚》的编剧-----的奇遇故事

出版日期： August 2005

作者：Mark Cotta Vaz 

中文书讯：

随着Peter Jackson重新执导当年由梅里安C. 库珀编剧的《金刚》即将于十二月与观众见面，这本热闹、震撼心肺的有关电影先驱梅里安C. 库珀的传记定会引起世人关注-----1933的原版《金刚》就是由他做制作人和导演的。Mark Cotta Vaz（《“超人总动员”的艺术》的作者）很精准地捕捉到了库珀在电影创作上的神奇魔力，而库珀本人也是个传奇人物。他早年在美国海军学院读书，但后来中途退学了，1916年时参加了追捕墨西哥著名的革命党人潘乔·维拉的行动。1912年有一篇报纸文章是这样描述他的二战经历的：“要是拿所有的华沙人跟这位美国王牌飞行员比的话，他们就好象站在了巨人的脚下。他两次被击落，两次不得不忍受战俘营中的肮脏、悲惨境遇，两次被报道说已阵亡。”库珀和他的好搭档欧尼斯特B. 舍德萨克一起周游世界，拍摄了无数纪录片，1927年他因为拍摄了那部票房巨片《青稞酒》而获得了奥斯卡提名，之后就一百八十度大转变，开始戏剧电影拍摄。被大家戏称为“活人发动机”的库珀在接管了RKO制作室之后，在二战爆发时他加入了美国非虎队，后被晋升为美国空军准将。1952年，库珀开创了西涅拉玛型立体声宽银幕电影，他因此得到了1953年的奥斯卡荣誉奖。多亏Vaz的潜心研究和娴熟的写作技巧，这位生活在自己电影世界里的魅力无限的库珀将掀开他的神秘面纱，他不再是那位模糊、隐晦永远让我们感觉遥遥不可及的大人物了。

Peter Jackson在读完这本传记后是这样对编辑说的：

“我的确从头至尾得把这本书看完了，我很喜欢它，真是太棒了。能够最后了解到那么多年来一直围绕着这位电影大师的疑团和传奇故事的真相，我真得很开心。我相信要是库珀能够看到我们现在拍摄的电影的话，他一定会莞尔一笑，此刻的工作非常辛苦，但我希望过去的那种冒险和真挚情感能够被保留下来。”

序言：

作者：Peter Jackson（《指环王》导演）

在作品的开头，Mark Cotta Vaz提到了影响到梅里安C. 库珀早年生活的一个重要时刻。他把这个时刻称之为“转变一刻”，我很能理解这个时刻意味着什么，因为在我九岁的时候我也经历了我的“转变一刻”，那一年我看了梅里安C. 库珀拍的《金刚》。在我还未出生的28年前，库珀就拍了这部电影，但是这部电影的威力和魔幻色彩对于当时小小年纪的我产生的影响里是不可低估的，它立刻激发了我的想象力。从那一刻起，这辈子除了拍电影，我什么也不想干了，特别是要拍像《金刚》这样的电影。看了这部影片后，我开始发疯般得爱上了拍电影这个工作，也激励我去学习如何做视觉效果，这可是电影魔幻效果的关键。

三十四年之后的今天我竟然要自己重新拍摄这部《金刚》了，而且只剩下最后的一点点金之笔。其实说到拍《金刚》，还真实一波三折，几年前，在我拍完《恐怖幽灵》后，就曾想尝试拍摄这部电影，但后被封杀了，所以我们就接手了《指环王》。但在此之前，也就是我才十二岁的时候，我就尝试过了《金刚》。我利用静态动画技术，借用了妈妈的披巾、纸箱做的帝国大厦，还有旧床单上话的纽约市地平线下的轮廓，拍摄了一段《金刚》木偶剧。这些东西我至今都还保留着，这是我漫长人生之旅的情感见证，也让我一直记着这位我生平从未但给了我创作灵感的大师库珀。在看完《人猿星球》，我也大受启发----又是一部讲猿人的故事！我自己还特地用乳胶做了个猿人面具，一次在去学校的校车上，坐在最后一排，我就戴着这个面具。校车后面跟着一辆车子，我还对着车子做鬼脸，后来才知道开车的司机是学校的老师。当小车驶进学校院子的时候，这位老师也把车停了下来，正当我们要走下车的时候，她直冲车子跑来，强烈要求我把猿人面具并当场充公了面具。我想还是有些人完全无法领略电影的魅力。

但那就是电影给你带来的变化，他们可以让你开阔眼界，让你敢于梦想。在这样的梦境中，只有碧蓝的天空和无限的可能性。

我觉得《危险人生》是有关电影和流行文化的文学艺术中的又一杰出之作，但就个人而言，这本书却让我真正认识了这位曾经创作了这样一部对我人生有如此大影响的电影的导演。我对库珀的生活不是很了解，而有关他的文章和作品非常稀缺，他的生平事迹也是只言片语。我也读了点有关他事迹的故事，他是战争英雄，两次被击落的飞行员，曾被大火包围，就是这样写的。我还知道他是个探险家和冒险家，但这方面的资料了解的不太多，因为你真的不可能知道这些情况。对于这样的传奇人物，留下的只有点滴。现在终于好了，Mark写了库珀传，这位传奇人物总算可以从阴影中走出来了。

我很想知道库珀的个人阅历对他编排《金刚》故事、情节、人物和地点安排上到底有多大影响。我想关键的线索就在我们面前，一艘为寻找神秘的金刚而驶向骷髅岛的“电影征途号”，这可不是一艘载满博物学家、探险家甚至捕杀巨型猎物的猎人。库珀和他的好搭档厄内斯特B斯柯德塞克为他们的一次又一次的电影征途而骄傲自豪，拍摄电影为他们的探险奇遇之旅大开红灯。我们多数人都不记得电影这个媒介给二十世纪初叶的人们带去了多大的启示，库珀和其他早期电影工作者仅仅是凭着一种冲动和使命感，扛上摄像机和胶卷把地球上的奇幻美景和异域风土人情拍摄了下了，制作成纪录片，然后在把他们拍摄成电影的东西带回来，这样观众们可以身临其境地感受他们奇遇冒险故事。他们开辟了新道路，是第一批尝试拍摄纪录片和探险电影的人，也为我们后人们留下了一段段珍贵的讲述那个失落世界的文档资料。

这一次我自己拍摄《金刚》，这样的经历让我进一步理解库珀和他麾下的那批才华横溢的拍摄组拍摄这部电影的时代大背景。我很有意识地把我的电影安排在原作的年代，就是上世纪三十年代美国大萧条时期。尽管这是一个经济萧条的十年，但这十年也是奇妙的十年，技术日新月异，即将改变世界的格局，原子的秘密破译了，电视生产技术正日见成熟，一幢幢崛起的摩天大楼正改变城市的面貌、现代人的生活。但是仍然有很多未解之谜一一出现在人们眼前，还有很多地方我们并不了解，等待我们去发现、探险，还有很多部落文化完全没有受到任何现代文明的影响。库珀已经亲身经历过这些异域风情，而他也把这样的纯粹感觉带到了影片《金刚》中。他知道海上航行的滋味如何，也知道在原始森林里探险、亲眼看一看异域味十足的部落祭祀仪式、生活在野蛮民族（其实比起受过文明驯化的现代人而言，库珀本人更喜欢这些野蛮人）真真切切的感觉。他还曾经去过一个远离人烟的小岛，在岛上他见到了巨型蜥蜴，这可让人回想起“失落帝国”！当然库珀也是相当了解纽约，身为早期航空业的一位行政人员，他穿梭在曼哈顿区的其他漂一族中。他就是卡尔·德那姆的化生，夸张的杂耍艺人挥一挥手变出了世界第八大奇迹，拉近了荒野和混凝土丛林之间的距离。就连金刚的死都多少带了点库珀的个人风格。库珀在一战的时候是轰炸机和战斗机飞行员，也参加过波兰抵抗俄战役，而在电影中库珀又回到了驾驶位上，厄内斯特斯柯德塞则坐在驾驶后座上，开起了战斗机，给金刚以致命一枪。（当然众所周知，金刚可不是死于飞机的子弹，杀死金刚的是那位美女。）

……

INTRODUCTION

by

Peter Jackson

Early in this enthralling book, Mark Cotta Vaz refers to a defining moment of Merian Cooper's early life. A "moment of becoming" is the way he describes it.  I know exactly what that means because I experienced my own moment of becoming at the age of 9 - I saw a movie Merian Cooper made called King Kong. That film was made 28 years before I was born, yet it's power and magic had such a profound and instant effect on my young imagination. >From that day on I wanted to do nothing else with my life than make movies - movies like King Kong. Watching that film propelled me into a love of making movies and learning how to do visual effects, the very stuff of movie magic. 

Another 34 years passed, and today I find myself putting finishing touches on my own remake of King Kong. It has been a case of third time lucky. I tried to remake it several years ago, after finishing The Frighteners, but it was canned, and we went onto The Lord of the Rings instead. But an even earlier failed attempt happened at the age of 12 when I made a small stop-motion Kong puppet - using my mother's fur stole, a cardboard model of the Empire State Building, and a New York skyline painted on an old bedsheet. I still have them - sentimental relics of a life long journey I've taken, inspired my a man I never met - Merian C Cooper. I also got inspired by Planet of the Apes—apes again!—and sculpted and molded a latex ape mask that I once wore while sitting in the back seat of the school bus on the way to school. I was making faces at this car following the bus and didn’t realize the driver was one of the school teachers. As the bus pulled into the school yard, she parked and stormed to the bus as we were getting out and demanded my ape mask, confiscated it right there.  I guess some people are impervious to the allure of movie magic.

But that’s what movies can do to you—they open up your mind, make you dream.  And in that dreaming you see nothing but blue sky, endless possibility.

I think Living Dangerously is a wonderful addition to the literature of movies and popular culture but, on a personal level, it allowed me to understand the man who made the movie that had such a powerful effect upon me.  I was vaguely familiar with the life of Merian Cooper, but there was so little written about him and then only fragments of a life story.  I'd read sketchy accounts of his being a war hero, an aviator twice shot down, once in flames, the stories went.  I vaguely knew he was an explorer and adventurer.  But you never really knew what to believe. There was only the shadow of a legend.  Now finally, thankfully, Mark has written the first biography of Cooper, and the legend comes out of the shadows.  

I was fascinated to learn how much of his personal experience Cooper brought to the crafting of the story, characters, places, and plot lines of King Kong.  I suppose, the big clue was always there, staring us in the face—it’s a movie expedition that sails to Skull Island in search of the mythical Kong, not a ship full of naturalists, explorers, or even big-game hunters.  Cooper and his partner Ernest Schoedsack gloried in their movie expeditions, filmmaking really was their passport to adventure. We forget what a revelation the moving picture medium was to people in the early 20th century. Cooper and other early filmmakers were simply compelled to head off with their cameras and film to document the wondrous peoples and places on the planet, then bring back what they had filmed so audiences could vicariously share in their adventures.  They blazed a trail, pioneering the very art of making documentary and adventure films and leaving for present and future generations irreplaceable documents of a truly lost world.

Making my version of King Kong has given me a deeper understanding of the times in which Cooper and his talented production team made their film.  I made a conscious decision to set my production in the time period of the original, back in the Depression days of the 1930s.  Although it was a decade of economic trouble, it was also an amazing era, with technology emerging that would change the world, from cracking the secrets of the atom to the development of television and the building of skyscrapers that began transforming city skylines and urban life.  But there was also mystery over the horizon, places still unknown and waiting to be discovered or explored, there were tribal cultures untouched by modern civilization.  Cooper had experienced those remote places and peoples and he brought that truth to King Kong.  He knew what it was like to be on a sea-faring expedition, to explore primordial jungles, to witness exotic rituals and live among “savage” peoples (which he seems to have preferred to the civilized variety), he had even visited a remote island where he saw giant lizard creatures that recalled a “lost” world! Cooper also knew New York, he moved among the movers and shakers in Manhattan as an executive in the early aviation industry.  He really was Carl Denham, the movie maker who bridges the wilds and the concrete jungle with the bombastic showman’s flourish of putting on display the “Eighth Wonder of the World.” Even Kong’s end had a personal Cooper touch.  He was a bomber and fighter pilot in World War I and in Poland’s war against Russia, and that’s Cooper back in the pilot’s seat, with Ernest Schoedsack in the rear cockpit, of the fighter plane that mortally wounds Kong in the film.  (Of course, as we all know, it wasn’t the bullets fired from the planes, but Beauty that killed the Beast.)

The world today has metaphorically shrunk, vast distances that took Cooper months to traverse can today be made within hours. We have communication systems that in the blink of an eye connect people on opposite sides of the planet.  We have orbiting space stations and robotic probes exploring other worlds by remote control or flying to the ends of our solar system—we’re living the stuff of the science fiction of Cooper’s day.  

It’s easy to become jaded by these modern miracles, lulled into losing our sense of adventure.  But it’s still a wide, mysterious world. Movies can still make one look at the world anew—maybe even inspire one to go out and explore it! Movies provide fabulous entertainment but the best ones, by the end credits, leave you a different person than you were before you began watching.  The best movies fire your imagination.

Which brings me back to the power of movie magic.  I was touched as a kid by King Kong—like the great Ray Harryhausen and so many other filmmakers, that movie changed my life.  I didn’t fight in a war or hunt man-eating tigers in the jungle, like Cooper did before he made Kong.  But I understand Cooper and feel very much at home in the world he created. It’s a wide, wild world and big enough to have allowed me to mount my own movie expedition, to scout out, explore, and bring back visions of a fantastic place that time forgot.  I went exploring with the enthusiasm of that boy beguiled by Kong and the experience of the adult filmmaker who gets to conjure worlds for a living. Ultimately, that’s what the world of King Kong represents to me—it’s the mystical, mysterious realm of Imagination itself.

 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY: 
With Peter Jackson's King Kong remake due in December, this boisterous, chest-thumping biography of film pioneer Cooper (1893–1973), producer-director of the original 1933 film, is certain to attract attention. Vaz (The Art of the Incredibles; etc.) captures the mythic magic of Cooper's cinematic creations, and Cooper himself emerges as an equally legendary character. He attended the U.S. Naval Academy, but left before graduating and joined the 1916 hunt for Pancho Villa. A 1921 newspaper article tallied his WWI experiences: "All Warsaw is at the feet of the American ace who was twice shot down from the clouds, twice endured the squalor of prison camps, twice was reported dead." Cooper and his partner Ernest Schoedsack traveled the world shooting documentaries, scoring a box-office hit with the Oscar-nominated Chang (1927) before moving on to dramatic filmmaking. After "human dynamo" Cooper took over as RKO studio chief, he joined the WWII Flying Tigers and received a U.S.A.F. brigadier general promotion. Launching Cinerama in 1952, he was awarded an honorary 1953 Oscar. The charismatic Cooper, "a man living his own movie," is no longer an obscure, remote figure, thanks to Vaz's exhaustive research and skillful writing. 90 photos. Agent, the Joe Spieler Agency. (Aug. 2)

Peter Jackson writes to the editor: 

“I did finish the book and loved it, so well done. I really appreciate finally knowing the facts behind all the myth and legend revolving around Cooper. I hope Coop will be smiling when he sees our movie - it's bloody hard work at the moment, but hopefully the sense of old fashioned adventure and heart will be there.”

Quotes: 
"Merian C. Cooper's life reads like an adventure novel, as Mark Vaz proves perfectly with LIVING  DANGEROUSLY."--Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451

"They were the adventurers--Cooper, the voluble visionary, Schoedsack, the self-styled 'strong, silent one.'"--Fay Wray, on the start of production for King Kong

"No film has captivated my imagination more than King Kong. I'm making movies today because I saw this film when I was 9 years old."--Peter Jackson

"Come on, hit us, bring us down if you can--if we are going to die, OK, but if this crate falls I'm going to put it nose down, full throttle, and bend it around a street.  I'll take plenty of you bastards with me when I hit."--Merian Cooper, "unconventional report" on the Doolittle Raid

Description: 
Merian C. Cooper was a filmmaker, an adventurer, a war hero, and a man who liked to live dangerously.  Over the course of his lifetime he:

Created and produced the original King Kong 
Served in the Army Air Corps during World War I, and was shot down in flames 
Traveled the world in the 1920s, making documentary films in exotic, remote locales that included Persia and Africa 
Filmed the famed Ethiopian king, Haile Selassie, and his armies 
Organized relief work in the Carpathian Mountains 
Spent time as a prisoner of the Cossacks 
Served as chief of staff to the Flying Tigers during World War II, going on missions in the South Pacific (at the age of 50!)

Served as studio chief of RKO Pictures 
Collaborated with John Ford on some of his most famous Westerns 

And there's much, much more.  In short, Cooper's life reads like a novel, including being shot down in flames over Germany, and fighting the Bolsheviks along side the Polish Army.  And as a bonus, Peter Jackson has announced that the next film he plans to release--for Christmas 2005--is a remake of King Kong.  So the time is perfect for the adventures of Merian C. Cooper.

作者简介：Mark Cotta Vaz 创作了很多作品，有《纽约时报》畅销作品《论星球大战前传2：克隆人全面进攻的艺术》，《工业照明到不可思议的数字领域.》 、《无形艺术》《黑暗骑士：蝙蝠侠五十年人生》、《解秘化名人》、《蜘蛛侠的面具》。

他还在电影杂志《Cinefex》发表了很多作品。Vaz在旧金山湾区长大，并一直生活在那里。

 Mark Cotta Vaz has written more than a dozen books, exploring the Star Wars Universe in the New York Times bestseller The Art of Star Wars, Attack of the Clones, the world of special effects in Industrial Light and Magic: Into the Digital Realm, the magic of matte painting in The Invisible Art, the streets of Gotham City in Tales of the Dark Knight: Batman's First Fifty Years, the mysteries of the spy game in Alias Declassified: The Official Companion, and the world of the web-spinner in Behind the Mask of Spider-Man. He has also been a major contributor to the film industry magazine Cinefex. He grew up and currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.