Trivia

Ado Kyrou wrote that Schoedsack met Ruth Rose in the Brazilian jungle of Amazonia, when they were conducting separate exploration projects ("Amour Erotisme et Cinema", Le Terrain vague, Paris; page 239). The truth is that in 1925, they were engaged respectively as cameraman and historian by the Cooper-Schoedsack Productions (with Merian C. Cooper, who was director of the department of tropical research of the New York Zoological Society from 1919) to film the exotic the Galapagos Islands (Ecuador) with a linear narrative, as Schoedsack had done in Persia and Siam. Theirs was a case of love at first sight; they married in 1926.

Schoedsack's eyes were severely damaged during World War II when he dropped his face mask during a high altitude test of photographic equipment. El gran gorila (1949) was his only post-War directing project. He retired after working with his wife Ruth Rose on "This Is Cinerama".

Schoedsack entered the film industry as a cameraman for Keystone. He served with the U.S. Signal Corps during World War I. After the war, he took on several journalistic assignments and later helped relief efforts in Poland following the Armistice. From 1926, Schoedsack worked in tandem with an old army acquaintance, Captain Merian C. Cooper, under contract to Paramount on the documentary dramas Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life (1925) and Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927), shot respectively in Persia (Iran) and in Siam (Thailand). After going solo on another documentary, Rango (1931), filmed in Sumatra, Schoedsack was hired by RKO from 1932 to 1935 to direct documentaries, starting with The Most Dangerous Game (1932). He then worked (uncredited) with Cooper on King Kong (1933), and later directed the (unofficial) sequel El gran gorila (1949) with the same production team. Schoedsack's sparse output as a director also includes the classic live action/miniature science-fiction drama El doctor Cíclope (1940).

He passed away about a year and a half after the passing of his wife of more than fifty years, writer Ruth Rose.

Appears as a character (usually brooding) in the 1998 novel Dinosaur Summer by Greg Bear, who establishes his novel to be a quasi-sequel to both the 1912 novel The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle and the Harry Hoyt-directed The Lost World (1925), treating Doyle's novel as though it were factual and adding the filmmakers involved with King Kong (1933) into the adventure. In Bear's novel, Schoedsack becomes a hero, rescuing others when they are about to be eaten by dinosaurs.

Child: Peter

He has directed three films that have been selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant: Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life (1925), King Kong (1933) and Esto es Cinerama (1952) (uncredited).