Kong is a tough interview, reports Los Angeles Correspondent Leo Janos. "In fact, he makes some legendary tough ones that I've encountered, like Marlon Brando and Katharine Hepburn, seem easy."

For this week's cover story on the making of the 1976 version of King Kong, Janos talked with Producer Dino de Laurentiis, Director John Guillermin and many members of the film's cast and crew of thousands. They were no difficulty. The hard job, literally, was making contact with Gorilla Mime Rick Baker, who stood in for the 40-ft. "audioanimatronic" Kong in scenes that were shot in miniature.

When Janos came upon Baker on a Paramount sound stage last week, the actor was still in full Pongidaean regalia: from hairy ape costume down to the special contact lenses he wore to simulate the smoky, mysterious eyes of a gorilla. "You need eye contact with a person you're interviewing," says Janos. "And those apelike eyes were chillingly disconcerting." He finally decided to talk with Baker after hours, when they could meet man to man, so to speak. Sighed Baker as his interviewer departed: "Now you know what it must have been like to be King Kong--so powerful and so lonely."

Janos has been covering the show-business beat for two years, working on cover subjects as varied as Jack Nicholson and Mary Tyler Moore. He came to TIME in 1968 after serving as a speechwriter for L.B.J. and then Veep Hubert Humphrey. Says Janos, a former Houston bureau chief who has also reported on space shots and astronauts' moon walks: "Even a superspectacular like Kong is pale stuff compared with watching a rocket lift off at Cape Kennedy."

The cover photograph and color pictures that accompany our King Kong story were taken by John Bryson, former assistant picture editor of LIFE magazine, who was on the set for much of the last year. Richard Schickel, who wrote the story, is a movie historian as well as a critic. In fact, he has just completed a nine-month stint as coproducer and writer of Life Goes to the Movies, a three-hour TV retrospective of movies made between 1936 and 1972, which will be shown on NBC Oct. 31. "I saw hundreds of old movies for the LIFE project," says Schickel, "and was reminded that there was an innocent exuberance in the making of them that showed up in the final films. Today's movies tend to have the smell of cost accounting." But, after seeing an hour and a half of the '76 Kong, Schickel reports: "The people who made it weren't counting pennies and were clearly having fun. Their enthusiasm shines through."

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