This feature was published in conjunction with the screening of The Gorilla at SFSFF 2024
From acting to stunt work to selling hot dogs outside a studio gate, there was more than one way to make a living in Hollywood. So Charles Gemora reasoned: why not carve out his own super-specialized niche? Born in the Philippines in 1903, Gemora ran away from home after his father died and his brother seized the family’s fortune. At age fifteen he stowed away on a ship bound for San Francisco and eventually wound up in Los Angeles. His remarkable talent for sculpting and drawing led to working in set design at Universal for The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Yet one singular skill became his specialty: impersonating gorillas. The five-foot-four Gemora could easily wriggle into the small, hairy costumes, and his pioneering work in designing gorilla suits turned him into the most in-demand “ape man” in the industry.
A Career Is Born
Gorillas were a quirky trend in silent films and tended to pop up menacingly in haunted houses or escape from labs to chase terrified comedians. While chimps and monkeys in films were often the real deal, the demand for gorillas was frequently filled by diminutive actors in hefty fursuits. Gemora’s first brush with faux primates happened during the production of The Lost World (1925), for which he helped design Bull Montana’s “ape-man” suit. But after creating a suit for The Gorilla and then seeing the actor’s amateurish performance, Gemora felt he should’ve played the role himself. Before long he was nabbing roles in films like Benjamin Christensen’s Seven Footprints to Satan (1929), where his snarling creation is heralded with the title: “Beware! The Beast of Satan has escaped!”
A Better Gorilla
Gemora’s gorilla costumes evolved quickly throughout the years as he worked to make them look increasingly realistic, padding them out to authentic proportions and engineering features like movable lower jaws and curling lips. The flexible rubber mask fit snugly and allowed his actual eyes to peer through, making the impersonation seem more alive. His daughter Diana, her father’s frequent “sorcerer’s apprentice” when he worked at Paramount, recalled how yak hairs were crocheted on the suits three strands at a time. Once finished, they could weigh up to sixty pounds and were stiflingly hot. Nevertheless, Gemora took acting in them very seriously, spending hours at the San Diego Zoo studying and sketching its captive mountain gorillas.
A Natural Comedian
Several men in Hollywood were adept at impersonating primates, but when it came to combining that talent with comedic timing, Gemora was in high demand. He appeared in a number of comedy shorts and features opposite Wheeler and Woolsey, Andy Clyde, Edward Everett Horton, Thelma Todd, Our Gang, the Marx Brothers, and Laurel and Hardy. One of his most well-known was Swiss Miss (1938), with Stan and Ollie attempting to haul a piano across a rickety rope-bridge—what else would they meet on that bridge but a gorilla?
Scandal!
One of Gemora’s trickiest feats was playing the animal star of Ingagi, an exploitation film about supposed encounters with “gorilla worshippers” in the Congo but actually shot in Los Angeles. Gemora’s performance was mixed with stock footage of real gorillas, helping the film get passed off as a quasi-documentary. While it was a smash hit at the box office, skeptical reviews soon started pouring in. The resulting scandal over fakery got the film pulled from theaters, and Gemora ended up signing an affidavit admitting he played the gorilla. In the end the disgraced Ingagi did have one lasting impact on film history—its success reportedly helped pave the way for 1933’s King Kong.
Frankengorilla
The Monster and the Girl (1941) is an unusual B movie about a gorilla who gets a brain transplant from a man wrongly convicted and executed—an experiment the scientist vaguely described as possibly having “infinite importance to the human race.” A dramatic mixture of court drama, horror, and noir, it gave Gemora a chance to stretch his acting skills, convincingly playing an animal with a human soul. He also raised the bar for realism with this gorilla suit, which still draws admiration today. As was the case for most of his appearances, he wasn’t even listed in the screen credits–although he never seemed to mind.
Beyond Gorillas
While best known for being “King of the Gorilla Men,” Gemora’s artistic skills were vast. Aside from creating exceptional portraits and sculptures, he frequently worked as a makeup artist and devised many techniques for “aging” actors and for better blending prosthetics with an actor’s features. By the 1950s, sci-fi costumes were another specialty, his most famed creation being the Martian in The War of the Worlds (1953). His daughter once recalled watching him at work in his laboratory/studio: “He is always one step ahead of himself; his eye sees the process steps ahead, and he goes at it so feverishly, you’d think he was working from a blueprint.” Sadly, his devotion to work affected his health, the years of acting in the hot gorilla suits eventually required him to use an oxygen tank between takes. In 1961, after decades in the business, he died from a heart attack, far too young at fifty-eight. Yet his legacy lives on in the multiple Planets of Apes, the endless riffs on King Kong, and performers like Andy Serkis who operate in the shadow of this humble, imaginative innovator.