“One of the most popular movies on cable television of all time.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Do you know what HBO stands for? Hey, Beastmaster’s On!”
—Billy Crystal, Saturday Night Live
I can’t sleep on planes. I was on a return flight from Sydney, Australia, to Los Angeles. Fourteen-some hours of mind-numbing tedium, perfect to contemplate my future. The opening of Phantasm had gone great, it was a certifiable hit in the great Down Under. In fact, Phantasm was now a worldwide box office phenomenon and, amazingly, a critical success to boot. Heady times for a struggling twenty-five-year-old indie filmmaker! What to do next? I immediately ruled out a sequel to Phantasm. The film had a very distinct ending with the demise of the hero. How could there possibly be a sequel? (Little did I know that I would ultimately write and direct three sequels and produce a fourth.) No, it was time for something new. And with the financial success of Phantasm it should be something big.
For a number of years an idea had been knocking around in my head. In sixth grade there was a bookmobile library, basically a big van full of books that would pull up to my elementary school. I read every science fiction novel in their collection, including books by Robert Heinlein, Andre Norton, and Isaac Asimov. Norton had written one book that had a title that stuck with me over the years. The Beast Master was written in 1959 and Andre Norton was a popular young-adult author of the time. The Beast Master told a somewhat wonky tale about a Navajo hero named Hosteen Storm with a telepathic link to a team of genetically altered animals. This “Beast Master” and his crew are shipped out on a spaceship to an alien planet in another galaxy to herd livestock. Meanwhile, Earth is destroyed by an evil alien race. The intergalactic scale of this book was obviously a bit large for me, but could there be a way to tell this story on an earthbound budget? What about moving the setting from outer space to someplace more earthly? Perhaps the prehistory of the Bronze Age? Loincloths are certainly a lot cheaper than spacesuits.
On that flight home, the saga of the Beastmaster began as I furiously started jotting down the first outline on paper. Little did I know that this would be the beginning of an epic adventure for me that would be both thrilling and ridiculous, terrifying and heartbreaking, and that there would be wonderful and disastrous consequences for my filmmaking career.