I was intent on finding an actress for the Beastmaster’s love interest who had the physical skills necessary to handle the required stunt work and who could also bring some sort of reality to the enslaved princess role as described in our screenplay. I interviewed a lot of actresses and none seemed right. Time was getting short when one of our assistants suggested we meet an eighteen-year-old aspiring actress he knew who was married to a rocker friend of his. The guy raved about her. I was told she was looking for her first movie role and so, despite her inexperience, we brought her in. She was terrific. I was hooked and wanted her for the role. She was a slim brunette with a surprisingly smoky voice for such a young woman. Her name was Demi Moore.
We quickly scheduled a callback so we could get the Commercial Director’s approval. Demi came back and gave another reading for him, which was even better than the first. I looked over to Paul and he shot me an approving nod. Bingo! Then, after some rumination and worry bead clacking, the CD weighed in and made his decision known that we would not cast this young woman. He told us that he had consulted with experts and was told her voice was too deep and low to be picked up by the microphones and recorded. Paul and I just sat there dumbfounded.
Our moneyman wanted to see another actress, one that the major talent agency CAA was pitching to him. A couple days later, Paul and I drove in to his office to meet her. When we arrived we learned that her name was Tanya Roberts. What? The Tanya Roberts from the cheesy television series Charlie’s Angels? You had to be kidding. None of the Angels were considered great actresses, and Tanya’s reviews when she debuted as the newest Charlie’s Angel were not the best. However, the CD was not particularly familiar with American TV so our complaints fell on deaf ears. Tanya was surprisingly nice and certainly one of the most amazing beauties any of us had ever seen, but once she walked into the room, the executive producer was instantly smitten and she was cast.
So, no Klaus Kinski and no Demi Moore. As for me, I had no choice but to deal with it.
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My backup choice for the evil villain Maax was Rip Torn. Rip was one of the truly great stage and movie actors to come out of Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio in the late 1950s. Before I was making films I had seen his towering performance in his critically acclaimed indie film Payday. Rip was notorious for his irascibility and our moneyman had concerns about my ability to handle him at my young age of twenty-seven. What I learned quickly was that Rip didn’t need to be “handled.” I treated him respectfully and he did the same with me. (There’s a good lesson there.) Paul and I became great friends with Rip. After the movie was finished we would meet him out in Malibu for frequent sushi lunches. After The Beastmaster, Rip went on to great commercial success, starring in Men in Black and receiving an Emmy for his superb comedic work on The Larry Sanders Show.
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Before we settled on the great John Amos to play the role of the young king’s man-at-arms Seth, there was an unknown, aspiring Chicago actor we interviewed for this Beastmaster role. I first saw him in a trailer for his upcoming first movie and he looked fantastic. Paul and I got the production to fly Laurence Tureaud out to Los Angeles to audition, but before we did so, I wanted to see him on film. We were alerted to a technical screening of his new movie that was scheduled to screen over at MGM. A friendly postproduction exec asked the director if Paul and I could sit in for the purpose of evaluating the actor and he said okay. Pretty cool because the director was Sylvester Stallone. Paul and I kept a low profile in the back of the screening room as Sly bantered with the editors and gave notes to composer Bill Conti while they watched Rocky III. Laurence, under his screen name of Mr. T, gave a ferocious performance in the role of Clubber Lang. Excited by seeing his film work, we paid for Mr. T to travel to Los Angeles for an interview.
Despite the incredibly intimidating presence he created on-screen, Mr. T was reserved and gentle in person. His neck was loaded with his trademark gold chains, but he was a genuinely nice guy. Rocky III was his first acting role and he said he was appreciative of Mr. Stallone taking a chance on him. I asked if he was going to do any sightseeing while in Los Angeles, and he said no, he would return to his hotel room and spend some time with his Bible. We asked him to read for the role and he performed the scenes capably, and of course his look was fantastic. Why then did we not cast him?
When we were writing The Beastmaster we fell into the same trap every writer seems to when writing screen stories based in prehistory or fantasy. These genres all appear to demand “arch” Shakespearean dialog, preferably delivered with that quasi-British accent. Why? You got me there. You can hear it in all the sword and sorcery films from that time and even more recently in the Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit, and the Game of Thrones franchises. None of them are set in Shakespearean England but they all sound like they should be. So without conscious thought about it, I just bought into this conceit and could not imagine casting an actor in my film who was more comfortable speaking in a Chicago “street” patois. In the audition I tried to guide Mr. T into that style of delivery, but he probably thought my direction was idiotic. In any case, we passed on Mr. T and instead went with a much more seasoned actor in John Amos, who was absolutely terrific in the role.
I can only imagine what Mr. T might have said a few years later about his experience auditioning for The Beastmaster—probably something like, “I pity those poor fools who rejected me for The Beastmaster so I could join The A-Team and become the biggest star on TV!” And he would be right.