Wallace wrote the initial 110-page first draft for "The Beast" (the film's original title) over five weeks, from late December 1931 to January 1932.Between the Cover. In all, there were three draft versions, another titled "Kong". Kong was rejected as the film's title because it was too similar to another Cooper film, Chang, released in 1927, and because it sounded Chinese. Wallace suggested the title King Ape. His diary described the writing process for this draft: Cooper fed aspects of the story in conferences and phone conversations; Wallace then executed Cooper's ideas, the latter approving the developing script on a sequence-by-sequence basis. While working on the project, Cooper also screened various recent films for Wallace to put him in the right mindset, including Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931). One of Cooper's main aspirations with the story was to use as much footage of an abandoned RKO picture with a similar premise, Creation, as possible. He showed Wallace the fragments that were to be reused in the current script.
