Source: Futility Closet
Edgar Wallace died after completing a rough draft of King Kong, and James Ashmore Creelman’s script was slow and dialogue-heavy. So Merian C. Cooper gave the job to Ruth Rose, the wife of his co-producer. Rose had never composed a script before, but she knew how to write tightly — the opening line of dialogue, “Hey!
Is this the moving picture ship?”, replaces several pages of exposition with seven words. After Kong is subdued on Skull…