William Stout was just three years old when his parents took him to see his first movie – a rerelease of the 1933 version of King Kong – at a drive-in theater in Reseda, California. From the backseat of the family Ford, Stout watched, saucereyed, as dinosaurs rampaged and Kong battled for Fay Wray's affection, every moment made more dramatic by Max Steiner's evocative score.
To say that King Kong changed Stout's life would be an understatement. The movie instilled in him a fascination with dinosaurs that would later make him one of the most respected paleo artists of his generation. His first book, The Dinosaurs: A Fantastic New View of a Lost Era, was an inspiration for Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, and his paintings and murals of prehistoric life can be found in museums of natural history throughout the United States. Stout's introduction at age three to the magic of motion pictures also led to a career in the film industry as a storyboard artist, set designer, concept designer, and creature designer on such films as Men in Black (1997), Pan's Labyrinth (2006), and The Prestige (2006).
Stout wouldn't learn until much later that the movie he had watched that warm summer evening in 1952 was not the version that had terrified audiences on its initial release 19 years earlier. The version Stout saw had been edited to remove scenes subsequently deemed too horrific or risqué, such as Kong eating an island native and crushing another under his foot, and Kong removing Ann Darrow's dress and dropping another woman to her death from a Manhattan skyscraper. This was the version
