Cooper and Schoedsack used "The Three D's" to characterize their films: Distant, Difficult and Dangerous. Cooper, a former merchant marine and fighter pilot, and Schoedsack, a WWI newsreel cameraman, met in Vienna in 1918 and, four years later, began traveling together on photographic expeditions led by Captain Edward Salisbury. Opting to create an ethnographic film of their own, Cooper and Schoedsack traveled to Persia, where they photographed the annual migration of the Bakhtiari tribe in Kurdistan. The resulting film, Grass (1925), became such an unexpected critical and popular success that Jesse Lasky of Paramount Pictures agreed to finance another cinematic voyage of their choosing.
Journeying to the Siamese village of Nan, they befriended its inhabitants, learned the regional customs, then conceived a simple narrative about a family struggling to maintain its home and rice crop amidst the dangers of the treacherous jungle. The cast was made up of local villagers and the plot largely defined by the wildlife they were able to catch on film: pythons, tigers, leopards, monkeys and water buffalo.
But the most intriguing creature of all was the deadly "Chang," which seemed particularly ominous in the minds of the locals. The filmmakers preserved the mysterious nature of Chang throughout most of the film, until revealing its true identity near the climax: massive elephants that roam the jungles and trample any hut or field that happens to lie in its path.
The elephants were owned by (and under the protection of) the King of Siam and, just as in the film, the beasts were allowed to wander freely, at great risk to regional inhabitants. Payment of a considerable sum to Prince Yugala (the king's brother) enabled the filmmakers to rent the elephants for the production, and Chang was thus given the spectacular ending it so richly deserved. The elephants were rounded up and coaxed into a stampede, which Schoedsack filmed from within an underground bunker so that the herd presses down upon the viewer - a sequence that ranks as one of the most daring feats of location photography and still maintains its power to amaze.
Although Chang was filmed on location with a non-professional cast, it is not a documentary, at least not by contemporary definition. Unconcerned with ideas of objectivity and authenticity, Cooper and Schoedsack freely shaped the narrative, staged scenes and rebuilt the interior of the family hut to enable better filming. Comic relief was provided by Bimbo, a small trained monkey that was cast as the family pet. Their intention was not to make a purely ethnographic film but to craft a dramatic spectacle utilizing untamed natural resources. In fact, issues of objectivity were seldom discussed at the time since the term "documentary" had only been created the previous year, in a review of Robert Flaherty's South Seas drama Moana (1926), written by critic John Grierson (who would later become a documentarian himself).
When Chang was originally released, it was often presented in "Magnascope," a process in which the theater is outfitted with an enlarged screen and a wide-angle lens is attached to the projector. During climactic scenes - in this case, the elephant stampede - the curtains surrounding the ordinary-sized screen were parted to reveal a vastly enlarged image. Although Paramount's Adolph Zukor proclaimed it, "the greatest advance in projection during the past twenty years," Magnascope was never widely used. A handful of the studio-owned theaters employed the device sporadically for more than 25 years, until the invention CinemaScope became the industry standard for large-screen projection.
Six years after Chang Cooper and Schoedsack made a slightly autobiographical film about their adventures in exotic filmmaking. The ominous jungle creature at the end of this expedition was not a herd of elephants but a giant gorilla. In place of Chang there was Kong. Although they will always be remembered for producing and directing King Kong (1933), Chang better represents their true passion: not special effects created on tabletops in studio workshops, but effects achieved by placing a camera within reach of a fierce tiger or beneath the feet of a herd of elephants. In tribute to the film that sealed their reputations, Cooper and Schoedsack placed a tiny banner advertising Chang on the side of one of the subway cars seen during Kong's rampage through Manhattan.
In 1929 Chang was honored in the first Academy Awards ceremony ever held, nominated for the most prestigious award: Best Picture (Unique and Artistic Production). Curiously, the naturalistic Chang was competing against two brilliant Hollywood films that were so stylized and "constructed" on Hollywood backlots that one could almost call them synthetic: F.W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927) and King Vidor's The Crowd (1928). If nothing else, it proves that great cinema is not dependent upon material resources but upon the capable hands of imaginative filmmakers.
Produced, Directed and Edited by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack
Titles by Achmed Abdullah
Translated by Kru Muang
Cinematography: Ernest B. Schoedsack
Music Composed and Conducted by Bruce Gaston (1991), Performed by Fong Naam
Cast: Kru (The Pioneer), Chantui (His Wife), Nah (Son), Ladah (Daughter).
BW-69m.
by Bret Wood
