Back in Los Angeles, I got right to work, teaming up with the very capable Paul Pepperman to cowrite the screenplay for The Beastmaster. Paul had never written a screenplay before, but on my first three films he had served in almost every other capacity. His knowledge of movies and movie history was vast, plus he understood what I was shooting for story-wise and started pitching great plot ideas immediately. It was going to be a great collaboration.
I think our basic mantra in writing this story was to meld the heroism and honor of a Japanese samurai film with the fun and sentimentality of a Disney animal movie. As a kid I was a huge fan of what were pejoratively referred to as “sword and sandal” movies. The muscular actor Steve Reeves starred in many of my favorites, including Hercules, Hercules Unchained, and Goliath and the Barbarians. The plots were always the same—one powerfully built lone warrior rallies the repressed people to overthrow the bad guys. The Beastmaster would tell the tale of this lone warrior, his entire home village slaughtered by marauding barbarians. On his trail of revenge, he would discover an innate ability to communicate with animals and create a clever and robust fighting force consisting of himself, a black panther, a brown eagle, and two cunning ferrets. Storming pyramids, battling hordes, and saving damsels in distress would ensue. On paper it was perfect.
One would think that after directing a horror film with such worldwide critical and box office success, I would have been inundated with offers from Hollywood to finance my next film. Unfortunately, this was far from the case. I’m still not certain if it was the slow regional rollout of Phantasm or the fact that the distribution was handled by an indie distributor like Avco Embassy, but its success did not seem to resonate much with the Hollywood powers-that-be. I received a few oddball horror offers to direct films like Death Ship and The Beast Within, but nothing mainstream from a studio. I guess it was a different time. There was no Sundance Film Festival yet, and the major agencies were remnants of the old guard; nobody was chasing independent directors the way it’s done now. I never imagined that finding the funding for The Beastmaster would be so difficult, but it certainly was. An entire year would ensue of seeking funding and waiting for studios and investors to decide the fate of this film.
One of the first places we solicited was the Walt Disney Studios. A forward-thinking executive over there had contacted me with the intent of bringing in different types of filmmakers than the company traditionally worked with. It sounded like a solid plan: The Beastmaster was probably the tamest, most family-friendly project I had ever worked on. The executive was able to set up a meeting for Paul and me with the man who had inherited control of the studio when Walt Disney had died. The president of the studio was now Walt’s son-in-law, Ron Miller. It was our first time on the Disney lot and wow, was that ever fun! We headed up Snow White Boulevard, hooked a left on Minnie Avenue, a right on Dopey Drive, and we arrived at the Animation Building where the executive offices were. We were escorted into Mr. Miller’s spacious office and introduced.
Tall and athletic, Ron Miller had starred at USC on the football team, married Walt’s daughter Diane, then played a season with the Los Angeles Rams before joining Disney. As Paul and I made our pitch to Miller and his brain trust, we could quickly tell that it was falling on deaf ears. This caused us to push harder and we genuinely sold our hearts out. Unfortunately we were wasting our time pitching to this crippled regime, which was just two years away from being ousted by Walt’s other side of the family and strong new management. Disney was still making G-rated films at this time—the entire company was reputed to be suffering from hardening of the arteries and a general lack of direction and creativity. At that point, the prospect of Disney Studios financing a film that had any swordplay or barbarian hordes was remote, despite the animal content. Ron told us so directly. We submitted the screenplay anyway and received an official pass a few days later. This was again another case proving that nobody knows anything. Walt’s son-in-law couldn’t visualize it, but The Beastmaster would go on to solid financial success and spawn two sequels and a television series.
We approached a contact at MGM. They read the script but their response was not what we were expecting. They described The Beastmaster as “an interesting piece of juvenilia, but not for us.” The rejections were getting me worried.
We even tried going back to our old stomping grounds at Avco Embassy Pictures. In the intervening two years, the success of Phantasm had not only brought Avco back to financial health but had also introduced them to an entirely new business model. Avco Embassy was now known as the “House of Horror.” After Phantasm showed the way, Avco Embassy distributed a slate of modestly budgeted genre films to great success, including John Carpenter’s The Fog and Escape From New York, as well as Prom Night, Scanners, and The Howling. Figuring the perfect place for us would be back with the gents we teamed up with on our last movie, Paul and I scheduled a meeting with Bob Rehme, who had so capably masterminded the successful distribution of Phantasm.
We gave Bob the pitch and told him we would be willing to make our epic on a very lean budget. In the meeting we were stunned to learn that Rehme and his Avco Embassy team had decided to give the Beastmaster project the thumbs-down. All he would offer was that if we could raise the funding to make the film independently, Avco would be happy to distribute the film for us, but they would not be able to invest any money in the production. This response was extremely disappointing. I felt we had taken a genuine risk in putting our faith in a failing company with some likeable and enterprising executives by licensing Phantasm to them for no up-front money. That risk paid off handsomely for both of us, and in the process Phantasm saved their company. Now that Avco Embassy was back in the black, they were funding movies for a lot of other filmmakers but, for some unknown reason, they would not return the courtesy to me. I refused to let this series of rejections diminish my faith in the project. I firmly believed I could make a great film of The Beastmaster, I just needed to find a way to get some money.
Paul and I went back to the drawing board and started rethinking The Beastmaster. Could we make it on a lower budget as an indie film? Coincidentally, an international distributor who had been very successful distributing Phantasm in France and Germany approached us. He wanted to know what my next project was. Paul set up a meeting for us with this man at his estate up in Bel Air, an opulent section of Los Angeles adjoining Beverly Hills. I didn’t know it then, but this meeting would lead to The Beastmaster getting made—and at the same time almost destroy my career.
* * *
CLICK, CLACK, CLICK, CLACK. The first thing I noticed about our future financier of The Beastmaster was the annoying clatter of the worry beads he was fingering in his hands at all times. Whenever we met with him, he would be running these damn wooden beads through a string on his finger and making that irritating noise. His mansion was on the north side of Sunset Boulevard with a sweeping view of the Bel Air Country Club. He was of Lebanese descent and had married an heiress to a German beverage fortune. He was loaded. As we were ushered into his gaudy living room to discuss the project, the first thing I noticed, other than the sound of his beads, was an odd sculpture that depicted a small telescope peering up into a statue’s naked human ass. To this day I’m still pondering the meaning of it.
Our moneyman introduced himself by telling us of his path into the movie business as a director much like myself, describing himself as one of the greatest television commercial directors in Lebanon. Paul and I started referring to him as the Commercial Director (CD). He also told us that he had made a lot of money distributing Phantasm in Europe. The CD said he liked our screenplay and believed he could secure funding for it from overseas. Then he brought up the title of a movie that would bedevil The Beastmaster until this very day.
“I hear that Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis is moving into production on Conan the Barbarian, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The timing is perfect for your film.” From a financial perspective this man was right. There was only one Conan movie, and in every international territory there would be other distributors who wanted to get into the resurgence of the sword and sandal business. Once we agreed to financial terms he smartly attended the inaugural edition of the American Film Market in Los Angeles in order to license out international distribution on a territory-by-territory basis. He had an excellent market there and sold out the world distribution rights to The Beastmaster, gaining significant financial commitments.
* * *
I need to pause this narrative right here and explain some facts about something I believe I have been unfairly accused of. Due to the unfortunate coincidence of The Beastmaster being released three months after Conan the Barbarian, The Beastmaster was immediately, and forever, branded as a “Conan rip-off” by ignorant reviewers and imitative commentators. How could one ever write, direct, film, edit, and release a film in three months? It’s not physically possible.
As I write this today I am placing my right hand on a copy of the Bible and I hereby swear to you dear readers: I have never in my life read a book or comic book written by Conan author Robert E. Howard, including Conan the Barbarian, nor have I ever read any of the literary adaptations of his work. I never read the John Milius and Oliver Stone script for Conan the Barbarian. I didn’t see Milius’s Conan the Barbarian movie until July of the year it was released, which was well after The Beastmaster was completely finished. I did see a few of Frank Frazetta’s epic Conan paintings, but frankly I was more influenced by his non-Conan paintings, of which there are many brilliant examples. Both Beastmaster and Conan of course follow the traditional “hero’s journey,” or monomyth, as espoused by mythologist Joseph Campbell, as do many popular films (including Star Wars). There are many significant differences from Conan, including the Beastmaster’s unique ability of communicating with other species and the allied concept of reliance on a fighting team composed of animals. In addition, our hero is not a hulking, monosyllabic thug but an earnest young man, quite inquisitive and loquacious, who is trying to make sense out of his life and to do the right thing. All right, I am certain Wm. Shakespeare is now calling to me from his grave telling me that I doth protest too much. But when you endure the agony I did to finish a movie on the epic scale of The Beastmaster, with less than a quarter of the budget of Conan the Barbarian, and then to have it casually and constantly dismissed as a Conan rip-off, it really hurts. The Beastmaster may be a movie with serious flaws, I will cop to that, but it is not a fucking Conan rip-off!
I am very sorry for this rant. Let’s continue and I’ll try not to interrupt again …
* * *
From the outset, Paul and I could sense that we might have made an error in entrusting the funding of our film to the Commercial Director. The creative interference started immediately in casting. I asked that we make an offer to the great German actor Klaus Kinski to play Maax, the villain of our movie. We heard back that Kinski’s price was five thousand dollars more than our budget for his role. I asked that we raise our offer and promised I would find a way to offset his cost somewhere else in the budget. My request was denied.
The next hint that there might be problems was more troubling. It came to be known as the black eye incident. The CD had hired an assistant named Jeff as “president of production” for his company. It was Jeff’s job to supervise Paul and me, and also the other film their company had in production. That film was a very low-budget affair about a kid who could summon demons and cast spells using his desktop computer. Evidently there were problems in the shooting of that movie and Jeff was sent to the set to meet with the director. Jeff came back the next day to the office with a big black shiner on one of his eyes. He told us the director had punched him. Jeff was a friendly guy and was probably just relaying an unwelcome message to the director from his boss, who, I guess, was more than happy to let Jeff be the punching bag. Evidently the contents of that message were so inflammatory they caused the director to erupt like a volcano and punch the messenger. Was I going to be getting messages like that too?
When we made The Beastmaster, digital visual effects were not possible due to the very limited processing power of the computers at that time. Consequently, all that animal action implied in the title would have to be done the old-fashioned way, with trained animals. But could we get the featured animals to perform the action as the screenplay described? Paul and I started interviewing animal trainers and learned a surprising fact. These animals we wanted to feature could not really be taught any tricks. They would go to where the food was. That was it. And if they weren’t hungry, then shooting would be over for the day.
We wanted to be mindful of animal safety and selected a talented and well-respected animal trainer by the name of Steve Martin, who had a company called Working Wildlife. Steve conceded that it would be a big challenge to get his black panther to do all the action required, but felt with enough lead time and a few trims to the script it probably could be accomplished. We gave Steve the go-ahead and he started lining up the animals. About this time our moneyman intervened again. He had been at dinner with a film producer he knew who recommended a friend of his who was an animal trainer. We tried to explain to the CD that we already had secured the services of an excellent trainer and wanted to stick with him. Again, we were ignored; Steve Martin was unceremoniously sacked and the new trainer was hired in his place. The new trainer insisted that we replace the panther with a tiger as he told us they were easier to train. He informed us that the tiger could be easily dyed black to appear like a panther and that he just happened to have access to four mature tigers. I would have preferred featuring the black panther as originally intended, but I had been removed from the animal decision-making process.
From the outset, The Beastmaster was intended as an epic-size film, made on a minimal budget. We quickly determined that we would need to shoot in our backyard of Southern California and that we needed some inexpensive but resourceful collaborators.
At first we tried to make the movie Phantasm-style and were lucky to bring our longtime collaborator Roberto Quezada on board as production supervisor. Then we started scouring the local film schools to seek out hungry young talent. One of our first hires was Frank K. Isaac Jr., a recent film school grad from USC who was resourceful, hardworking, and bright. We immediately assigned Frank to supervise our makeup effects crew. Our film required a huge amount of prosthetic effects, and Paul and I had taken a risk on a skilled artist who had no experience supervising an entire film. Deadlines were being missed and the entire project was put in jeopardy. Within a couple of weeks Frank, just out of film school, had to personally fire that entire crew, secure and remove the molds and other work-to-date, and then interview and hire an entire replacement effects team. It was a trial by fire but Frank stood strong. We immediately rewarded him with a battlefield promotion to assistant producer.
Roberto and assistant Daniel Peterson went to work searching for someplace to shoot our Bronze Age production. Right out of the box they hit the jackpot, stumbling upon a ranch on the northwest side of Simi Valley just forty miles from Los Angeles. The property had almost every exterior location we needed—a huge desert bowl surrounded by towering cliffs where we could build the massive pyramid called for in the screenplay, and small microclimates throughout the place with different types of geography and vegetation. Paul struck an incredible deal with the owners of the property, the Union Oil Company. Union agreed to give us access to the entire ten-thousand-acre parcel for almost a year at the meager price of just a thousand dollars a month. Roberto and Dan then went on an extended scout of Arizona and Nevada for more exotic locations, with the idea that the production could travel there for just a couple of days. They found several spectacular locations at the Valley of Fire State Park outside Las Vegas and on the Arizona side of the Colorado River just north of Willow Beach. We now had a smart low-budget plan in place to shoot the bulk of our film interiors in a warehouse in North Hollywood, most of our exteriors in nearby Simi Valley, and a very short road trip for scenics on the Nevada/Arizona border.
The Beastmaster required some serious world-building. In addition to the many interior sets the screenplay also required several massive outdoor constructs including the walled city of Aruk and Dar’s home village-on-stilts, Emur. Our production designer, Conrad E. Angone, worked round-the-clock with his team of craftspeople to accomplish this feat. They built a huge city gate with bridge and surrounding tar moat. The centerpiece of the city was an immense pyramid, which Conrad cleverly built around an existing hill on the Union Oil property. I gave Conrad some photos of the great Mayan pyramid at Tikal and told him, “Build us something like this.” And he did. It was a simply magnificent set, with one flaw. Much of the action took place on the pyramid steps and to get the grand vertical appearance of the Tikal pyramid, the steps up the front had to be very narrow. Climbing up the pyramid for the crew was a terrifying experience. Most of us had to crawl on our hands and knees to get to the top. With my size 12 shoes I was no exception. To choreograph a swordfight on those steps would be insanity. The problem was solved when we found an actor to play the Beastmaster who had the athletic agility to run up those steps, swinging a sword all the way.
* * *
One of the greatest hires of The Beastmaster was our terrific, Academy Award–winning cinematographer, John Alcott. After doing the cinematography on my first three films and essentially learning on the job as I did it myself, I was simply thrilled at the prospect of working with John and learning from him. John was Stanley Kubrick’s loyal go-to lighting cameraman. He took over from Geoffrey Unsworth and shot a large chunk of my favorite film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. He photographed spectacular Kubrick classics like A Clockwork Orange and The Shining. In 1976 John was honored with an Academy Award for his cinematography on Barry Lyndon, arguably one of the most gorgeous films ever shot. When I learned that John had left the employ of Kubrick and was shooting an indie horror flick up in Montreal, I put Paul and Frank on the case. Within days John was signed on and ready to move out to shoot his first film in Hollywood … well, in close proximity anyway.
On the surface, John was a quiet man, very laid-back, but inside he had a steel spine and would not brook any inattention or mistakes from his camera crew. There was an “upstairs/downstairs” level of discipline that he expected, and in his quiet way he would train his assistants like a drill sergeant. I noticed it that first day at lunch. During the lunch break, before they were allowed to eat, his camera assistants would scramble to serve John and his camera operator Doug O’Neons their meal on a table in the camera truck. Once I even noticed a camera assistant making like a sommelier and pouring them wine from a bottle into wineglasses. It was all very upper crust.
John was a master of shooting in low light. He loved the shallow depth-of-field this style created, which he used to great effect in his classic Barry Lyndon. John brought along a special briefcase to the set, and one day I looked inside to find dozens of small flashlights of varying sizes and wattages. He liked to augment the actor eyelights with these flashlights. Frequently during a shot there would be John, with one of his small flashlights in hand, aiming at the actor’s face, providing just a glint of additional light in their eyes. John also taught me about what he called “negative light.” He would use black surfaces and place them near to the actor’s face to absorb light. For years I had been working with reflected light but had never even thought to try this opposite subtractive technique.
Working with John were the best times I had on The Beastmaster. With him it was always about creativity and hard work with a shared artistic goal. Not everyone on this huge crew would be as like-minded as John. There would be serious—and for me, unimaginable—challenges ahead.