Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness

Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, Paramount, 1927, shot in northern Siam with a Lao family, Kru and his household, and the animals that raid them. A tiger, an elephant drive, a house on stilts. They staged hunts the way Flaherty had staged an igloo: enough truth to photograph, enough arrangement to survive. Nominated at the first Academy Awards in the Unique and Artistic Picture category that Sunrise won. The title is the word for elephant. King Kong is the fiction they made from this method six years later.