The 8th Wonder of the World

NEW YORK — It took him more than 30 years, but at long last Peter Jackson was able to play with the toys he wanted in the way he dreamed back when he was 9.

The result? "King Kong" — Jackson's dream-made-real movie, which opened in theaters on Wednesday.

With a budget of more than $200 million and a media profile bigger than, well, an 8,000-pound gorilla, "King Kong" is no mild-mannered movie. Yet, it also harkens back to the original 1933 black-and-white Merian C. Cooper film of the same name and demonstrates the impact it had on that little boy in New Zealand.

"The original Kong, to me, is a wonderful piece of escapist entertainment," Jackson told the Deseret Morning News. "It has everything that's kind of really cool about movies — like a lost, remote island; a giant ape, dinosaurs, and it also has this wonderful heart and soul. It has this empathetic creature who, you know, when I was 9, I cried at the end of the movie, when he was killed. That moment of shedding tears for him has stayed with me."

Jackson said the film literally inspired him to become a filmmaker. "Absolutely. To such a profound effect that I saw the original Kong on TV when I was 9 on a Friday night in New Zealand, and that weekend I grabbed some plasticine (modeling clay) and made a brontosaurus. I got my parent's Super-8 movie camera and started to try to animate the plasticine dinosaur. That ultimately led to becoming a filmmaker."

That youthful project didn't make it far beyond the first weekend, but Jackson was on his career path, which would ultimately result in co-writing, directing and co-producing one of the biggest and most highly acclaimed film series in movie history with his vision of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" films. The climax of the series earned 11 Academy Awards (tying the record held by "Ben-Hur" and "Titanic") and grossed more than $1 billion worldwide.

It also put Jackson in a position of being able to choose any project he wanted, and he immediately returned to the film that was always closest to his heart — the project that actually led him to the "Lord of the Rings" films in the first place.

When Universal Studios pulled the plug on a "Kong" remake in the late 1990s, Jackson and his business partner, Richard Taylor, and co-writer Fran Walsh decided to look into filming "The Lord of the Rings" — which, of course, turned into a daring trilogy financed by New Line Cinema and completely changed Jackson's status in Hollywood from a director with promise into a director with power.