The Team

2 adventurers becoming filmmakers

Cooper, Harrison, Schoedsack during "Grass", 1923

About Merian C. Cooper:

attended Annapolis, left before graduating, joined the army and spent time on the Mexican border chasing Pancho Villa.
Reaching France in late 1918, he saw service as a pilot in the Signal Corp., and just before the war ended he was shot down by the Germans and was in a German prison hospital when the Armistice was signed.
He left the army and joined the Poles, flying with the Kosciusko Flying Squadron. Shot down again, he spent ten months in a prison camp near Moscow before escaping.
Returning to New York, Cooper worked as a reporter for the New York Daily News and The New York Times. When he learned that explorer Captain Edward A. Salisbury was planning a world cruise, he applied for and was chosen to join the expedition. When the expedition's cameraman absconded after a typhoon, Cooper suggested as his replacement a young combat photographer he had met in Poland.

About Ernest B. Schoedsack:

Schoesack was a photographer and a cameraman for Mack Sennett at Keystone. During the war he had served as a combat cameraman for the Signal Corps. After the war ended, he remained in Europe as a newsreel cameraman, and in Vienna he met pilot Merian C. Cooper. He was cameraman all his lifes, with movie, block busters (as KING KONG), documentaries, etc.