In short
Stuff You Should Know’s “movie edition” covers Roar (1981), widely dubbed “the most dangerous film ever made,” despite no deaths on set. It explains why the production was perilous, how it was made, why it failed to get a U.S. release, and what happened afterward.
Guests
No guests. Hosts are Josh, Chuck, and Jerry.
Guest/host backgrounds
Not applicable (no guest interviews). Hosts are the podcast’s regular hosts.
Key claims
The danger came from purposefully filming fully grown big cats with minimal training and limited animal wrangling, using many cameras and expensive film stock, and writing/plotting around animal behavior. About 70 cast/crew were injured; Melanie Griffith needed 50 stitches and cosmetic surgery after a clawed eye; Tippi Hedren had a lion bite leading to skin grafts and fractured an ankle after an elephant incident; Jan de Bont was scalped (220 stitches). The film’s message (“be friendly to wild animals”) is contradicted by repeated on-screen attacks. It cost about $17M, grossed about $2M worldwide, and had no U.S. distributor.
Notable examples
Life magazine’s 1971 photos of a 400-pound lion in their home; the 1978 flash flood damaging fencing; Alamo Drafthouse’s 2015 re-release; the Roar Foundation/Cats of Shambhala preserve continuing today.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOExploring the Movie Roar
1:41 to 4:00
Introduction to the legendary movie 'Roar' and its dangers.
“And this is a good old Stuff You Should Know movie edition, which usually, I have to say, have generally been pretty good.”
The Making of Roar
4:00 to 12:14
The story behind the making of 'Roar' and its challenges.
“So, all right, Charles, let's tell everybody what we're talking about.”
The Story Behind Roar's Filming Challenges
15:05 to 18:59
Discover the unique challenges and adventures encountered during the filming of Roar.
“Real-time updates are available on the iOS mobile app.”
The Dangerous Set of Roar
19:00 to 23:10
Explore the dangers faced by cast and crew while filming with wild animals.
“I'm sure they were like, what is wrong with everybody between not raising financing or getting a star?”
Injuries and Incidents on Set
23:11 to 28:00
Learn about the injuries suffered by the cast and crew during the making of Roar.
“rather these animals in ways, you know, that they weren't prepared for either.”
The Perils of Filming Roar
28:00 to 29:10
Discover the real-life dangers faced by cast and crew during the filming of Roar.
“There were two cases of gangrene from, you know, getting bitten by infected cat mouths.”
Natural Disasters and Delays
29:10 to 30:56
Learn about the natural disasters that hindered the filming of Roar.
“I know Noel got a bite on the hand trying to break up a fight between lions and started bleeding.”
Financial Struggles of Roar
30:56 to 34:18
Explore the financial risks and challenges faced by the creators of Roar.
“But yeah, I think that's just part of a problem when you have hundreds of big cats all living together.”
The Message of Roar
37:47 to 41:45
Analyze the intended and contradictory messages about wildlife in Roar.
“More about Roar, which, by the way, was about 100 minutes long.”
The Aftermath of Roar
41:45 to 42:09
Discuss the legacy of Roar and its impact on animal welfare.
“They would get divorced about a year after this movie.”
Show all 12 chapters
The Dark Legacy of 'Roar'
42:09 to 45:54
Explore the troubling details surrounding the making of 'Roar' and its impact.
“Definitely there were moments where his, you know, 14, 15-year-old stepdaughter is like really upset and crying and doesn't want to continue.”
Listener Mail and Eco-Friendly Companies
45:54 to 47:18
Hear from a listener about a company that plants mangrove trees with every purchase.
“For a second, I thought you were going to say Tippi of the Hat to you.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Josh Clark:This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends. It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N-A member FDIC. You ever been to the pharmacy counter and your mind goes blank when the pharmacist asks?
0:33Josh Clark:Any questions? Well, that's why you need to listen to Beyond the Script from CBS Pharmacy and iHeart Media. Hosted by Dr. Jake Goodman, each episode features real conversations with CBS pharmacists, the health experts you see most, breaking down the questions you wish you'd asked, from which meds may not mix well to what vaccines you need before a big trip. They're going to bust the myths, decode trends, and share practical advice you can actually use. Listen to Beyond the Script on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode is brought to you by Audi. We all know that feeling, a change of plans, a new opportunity.
1:07Josh Clark:Instead of overthinking, what if you just said yes? With the all-new Audi Q3, the answer is easy. It's made for the yes life, with the power and room to handle whatever pops up. Yes to adventure, yes to right now. Because saying yes without hesitation, that's real luxury. The all-new Audi Q3, made for the yes life. Learn more at AudiUSA.com. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
1:39Chuck Bryant:Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too. And this is a good old Stuff You Should Know movie edition, which usually, I have to say, have generally been pretty good. Yeah?
1:52Josh Clark:Had you ever heard of this movie?
1:53Chuck Bryant:No, I haven't. Had you? Oh, yeah.
1:56Josh Clark:It's legendary.
1:57Chuck Bryant:Okay, you had. You had. I didn't know if that was right or not. I looked up to see if anybody had written in. And I guess somebody named Ian Tindall had recently. Oh, really? Yeah. So in case, that happens sometimes. People write in and be like, oh, thanks for doing the episode I suggested. It's something that had been on our list already. So that happens sometimes.
2:21Josh Clark:That just happened. Somebody wrote in and was like, hey, you didn't thank me for this one. and I was like, oh, sorry, I didn't, you know.
2:29Chuck Bryant:Well, that is what happens. So if we don't thank you, there's a 98 % chance that we didn't. We already had it.
2:36Josh Clark:That's right. But I already had this one. This is a legendary movie known as the most dangerous film ever made. From 1981, this, you know, big budget movie that was terrible and never shown in the United States much. So it's no wonder that you hadn't heard of it.
2:54Chuck Bryant:No, but I guess, yeah, being a movie dude, this is the kind of thing it's like a legendary movie for sure. Especially, have you seen it? Oh, no, no, no. No. Yeah, it's almost impossible to find. You could shell out, I think,$100 on Amazon to buy a DVD of it.
3:13Josh Clark:Don't do that.
3:15Chuck Bryant:Alamo Drafthouse re-released it in 2015, which generated a lot of buzz and interest in it. but they did it in such a way that people used to show the room, kind of. And then it's just not anywhere. It's nowhere. You can see some trailers and clips and stuff like that, but the movie itself is nowhere. That's kind of a shame because from what I can tell from researching it, it would be something to see at least once.
3:41Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. I don't feel like I'm missing out having never seen it all because I've seen tons of clips and read about it and stuff, And it's kind of one of those that to suffer through the entire thing, you know, I think that's the thing you should do with the room. Sure. But not necessarily with Roar.
3:57Chuck Bryant:Okay. Fair enough. Good. Well, then I feel a lot better.
3:59Josh Clark:Yeah. Just my dumb opinion.
4:02Chuck Bryant:So, all right, Charles, let's tell everybody what we're talking about. It's a 1981 movie, Roar. Like you said, a lot of people consider it the most dangerous film ever made. Why is it the most dangerous film ever made? Especially considering there's been plenty of movies where people have died making the movie. Like Noah's Ark from, I think, the 20s. Three people drowned during the real deluge that they filmed. You know, there was the Twilight Zone movie. Like, people have died. No one died on this movie. So why do people call it the most dangerous film ever go? Yeah.
4:36Josh Clark:Well, I mean, in other cases, there have been accidents on films that were all, you know, top quality productions. where just something happened that was a big mistake. But in this case, the actors were purposefully put in peril because of just the whole idea of the film to begin with. And there's really no way to talk about it without just sort of telling the story, I guess, from Inception, which was a married couple in Hollywood. Yeah. The great Tippi Hedren from, you probably know her from Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, most famously.
5:10Chuck Bryant:Yeah.
5:10Josh Clark:and her hubby, Noel Marshall, who was her agent and a movie producer. He was best known, probably still best known for The Exorcist and unfortunately Roar.
5:21Chuck Bryant:Yeah.
5:22Josh Clark:He kind of rewrote his legacy after The Exorcist. But there were a married couple who thought of this idea because of a trip they took.
5:31Chuck Bryant:Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so Roar is essentially like, it's meant to generate like goodwill and stuff among humans toward wild animals, right? To show them that wild animals are nothing to be afraid of. And Tippi Hedren and Noel Marshall had a shared love of animals and wildlife that dated all the way back to Marshall's youth. I think his teenage years when he volunteered at the St. Louis Zoo. And I guess as he and Tippi Hedren got together, he kind of influenced her. She was already a champion of certain social causes, but she hadn't taken up animal welfare yet.
6:07Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. You know, she had an activist heart, I guess. Always did. And they were in Africa. They were in Zimbabwe filming. She was filming a movie. This was in 1969. It was a movie called Satan's Harvest.
6:22Chuck Bryant:Yep.
6:22Josh Clark:So, you know, her career wasn't at its zenith after the birds, I guess.
6:28Chuck Bryant:Right. Right.
6:29Josh Clark:But while they were there, they went to Mozambique and went to a game preserve there. And a couple of sort of key things came out of that game reserve, I guess, preserve visit. I guess it's a reserve and a preserve, huh?
6:41Chuck Bryant:Sure. The P is in parentheses before reserve. That's right.
6:45Josh Clark:They saw an abandoned house that had a pride of 30 lions living in this home, sort of in and out. And they were like, huh, like what an interesting concept, you know, to be put on film. This looks really kind of strange seeing these big cats roaming around a home. And then the second thing is that their guide there kind of educated them on what was going on with the poaching conditions back then. And that really inspired them to do something to drive some sort of awareness about these beautiful big cats.
7:16Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and it was kind of in the air at the time, too. Like, there was a big, like, jungle adventure in Africa, like, theme going on in a lot of movies and TV. There's a very popular TV show called Doctari about a father and daughter veterinary team who worked with wildlife in East Africa. And get this, Chuck. Doctari, which is a drama, was based on a movie called Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion. Oh, poor Clarence. I know. But how do you get Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion to the serious animal medical drama Doctari? That's a strange transition.
7:57Josh Clark:Yeah, I think probably a pretty smart one because Doctari was on for a few seasons. Yeah. You know, other stuff like Mutual Omaha's Wild Kingdom was big. And I think you're right. I think there was a general fascination with Africa and the United States at the time. So they were bitten by that bug. They get back to Hollywood and they said, hey, what if we do this movie? What if we do a movie about these big cats? and they pushed the idea to some animal trainers and they said, that's a really bad idea. It's not practical and it's like super dangerous. But caveat, I suppose if you raise them together and they all knew each other and they were raised with humans, then it might not be as dangerous or as dumb of an idea.
8:45Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and so this is the first step that is actually a step backward because I get the impression they came back from Africa and just assumed they were going to get a bunch of, like rent a bunch of lions and tigers and stuff, put them together, you know, knock this movie out in a year or something at the most. That is not the case. So they actually started from scratch. They got their hands on a lion cub named Neil and they started raising him around the family, in the house with their teenage children, one of whom was Melanie Griffith. She is Tippi Hedren. daughter. And she was like 13 or 14 when Neil came into the picture and they raised him from a cub into this, this 400 pound family pet, fully grown male African lion, Maine and all like sleeping in bed with Melanie Griffith at the time.
9:38Yeah.
9:38Josh Clark:And I mean, this wasn't, they didn't have a ranch out in the middle of nowhere.
9:42Chuck Bryant:Right. Good point.
9:43Josh Clark:This was in the Valley. This was in Sherman Oaks and their Spanish home in Sherman Oaks. So I'm not sure about the laws at the time. We'll see that they were ordered to get rid of them about a year later. In fact, it was about a year after Life magazine in 1971 ran a big photographic feature that it was, you know, a very sensational thing. It showed all these amazing pictures of life with this 400 pound lion living in the home, like you were saying, you know, hanging out by the pool, the kids playing with them. And so about a year after that, I guess the city stepped in and said, you can't do that in Los Angeles even.
10:20Chuck Bryant:No, and in retrospect, I think in her autobiography, Tippi Hedren later wrote that she realized that this was stupid beyond belief to keep a 400-pound male lion in the house around her family. And like there's pictures of her like lounging around with her head on the lion's like chest and everything. They're both laying on the ground together. It's adorable. quite a photo spread. And it's also got that perfect, like, late 60s, early 70s photo look that you just could not possibly recreate. It looks like that. It's really cool. But yeah, so they were ordered to get rid of the animals. By this time, they'd started collecting other lions and started raising them together, again, with the ultimate goal of filming them all together in this movie that they wanted to make, right?
11:08Chuck Bryant:So instead of getting rid of their actors and pets, they bought like a ranch in Acton, which is in Soledad Canyon, I guess a little north of Los Angeles. I'm sure you know where that is, right?
Read the full transcript
11:21Josh Clark:I had never heard of Acton, actually. It said it's 40 miles north, but I think I'd heard of Soledad Canyon, but Acton is new to me. I guess that's where you go when you want to raise lions.
11:32Chuck Bryant:Right. The locals leave you alone when you show up with a bunch of lions, right? And they did. They bought a bunch of acreage and created a compound. And even the compound was bought with an eye toward the ultimate goal of making this movie.
11:45Josh Clark:Yeah. I mean, they wanted to film it like, you know, as lions who lived in a house. And so they created everything was kind of built as a movie set to be. So they landscaped it with, you know, it was supposed to be in Africa, set in Africa. So they landscaped it with plants and architectural styles that might have mimicked Southern Africa. They put in an artificial pond. And then eventually they would move there a few years later in 1976 and live on the property and kind of get to work on that movie.
12:14Chuck Bryant:Yeah, that was about the year that they started was 76. I say we take a break and we'll get into actually making the film because this is about the point where things start to get a little bonkers.
12:25Josh Clark:That's right. We'll be right back.
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15:22Chuck Bryant:Chuck, before we get back into it, I have a Tippi Hedren fact that I found. She is the only actress to be directed by Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin, and Ed Wood Jr. Nice. Yeah, that's quite a career.
15:37Josh Clark:Yeah, I like that Venn diagram.
15:39Chuck Bryant:So, yeah. Okay, so we're at the filming, the beginning of filming. The cameras are rolling, and the cameras just kept rolling.
15:48Josh Clark:Yeah, they kept rolling. You know, by this point, they had more animals. I believe you mentioned they started collecting more, but specifically they had tigers by that point. They had leopards. They had panthers. They had cougars. Notably, they had, I mean, this was self-described by Tippi Hedren, And those were just sort of the big cats. They also had flamingos and ostriches and storks and swans and sheep. And they even had an elephant, which made an appearance in the movie. And these are all pets living there together, again, with the aim that they would all know one another by that point and be docile enough to be animal actors.
16:27Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Yeah.
16:28Josh Clark:But as you would imagine, they had a hard time raising money for the project because mainly they didn't have much of a project except for a loose idea, I guess.
16:38Chuck Bryant:No, they had a bunch of real estate. They ended up self-financing this thing mostly. So they sold a bunch of their real estate to put the cash into this film. I think Noel was one of the producers on The Exorcist, and he made a bunch of money off of that. He was essentially an investor in it. So he got an executive producer credit and I guess some of the back plum. Is that what it's called? Back plum? Yeah. Back end? Sure, the back end. But it's plummy. Okay. Anyway, he had a bunch of money from The Exorcist. They threw that into and they were like, okay, this is going to be such a cool movie that no one's ever done anything like this before.
17:19Chuck Bryant:We're just going to make our money back a million times over. And initially, the whole idea, remember, they had seen that pride of lions living in this, and that was kind of what kicked this off. So the whole thing was very lion-centric. But I think the working titles were Lions or Lions, Lions, and More Lions. Those are definitely working titles, I think.
17:40Josh Clark:Yeah, it makes Roar look pretty great by comparison as a title.
17:44Chuck Bryant:It does. Yeah, you could see Noel, like, dropping his gin and tonic, thinking, like, I got it.
17:50Josh Clark:Yeah.
17:50Chuck Bryant:But you said they collected a bunch of other animals, some of which do not live in Africa. Like Siberian tigers do not live in Africa, but that didn't stop them. So they expanded the scope even more because they wanted their whole family of big cats and animals to be able to star in this movie. So they ended up kind of expanding the focus of the whole thing.
18:09Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. They didn't even have a script. And, you know, Marshall was not a writer. Like, you know, like you said, he invested in The Exorcist. I don't think anyone ever confused him with a creative in Hollywood. But he did write the script. He got some ideas from Tippy. He wrote the script, said he was going to direct the film. And it was a family adventure. So he was going to have all of his family in it, which was, you know, young Melanie. And then he had two sons from a previous marriage, Jerry and John. And they were all going to be in it. But they were like, we need a real deal, like regular lead actor for the male role to play like the patriarch of this family.
18:50Josh Clark:But they could not get any actor to sign on because, again, I don't think even people thought it would be that dangerous yet. They just knew it was not a good idea and it was bad. The script was terrible. So Marshall's like, you know what? I'll just do that, too.
19:03Chuck Bryant:Right. I'm sure they were like, what is wrong with everybody between not raising financing or getting a star?
19:10Josh Clark:Yeah.
19:10Chuck Bryant:So Noel wrote, directed, and starred in this movie, like you were saying. And that, from all of my experience, any movie that is written, directed, and starred in is essentially going to be not as good as it would be if any one of those were taken out of that equation. Oh, you think? Yeah, because there's no one there to tell the director or the writer or the lead actor, don't do this. Like, those things are supposed to be checks and balances, like the three branches of government in the United States. So if you have all of them together as one, you got a big problem. All right.
19:51Josh Clark:I disagree. But we'll just walk right past it.
19:53Chuck Bryant:All right. That's fine.
19:54Josh Clark:I mean, I think if you're terrible, then it's a bad idea. But there have been plenty of examples of great writer, director, actors and great films.
20:03Chuck Bryant:Okay. Name one besides Herbie the Love Bug.
20:06Josh Clark:Like most anything Clint Eastwood's ever been in. okay
20:13Chuck Bryant:I don't fully agree with that but okay yeah
20:17Josh Clark:alright I mean that's fine you can nitpick Clint Eastwood anyway like I said we don't need to debate this point
20:22Chuck Bryant:man it's just like the pot is just just simmering almost over but we're gonna walk past it like you said
20:28Josh Clark:yeah I think the point why this is bad is because he was not a talented human being right early on though Melanie Griffith is like I don't want to be in this movie I think the direct quote to her mom was, I don't want to come out of here with half a face. So she backed out. They got her friend to star instead, her friend who was an actor. But eventually she was like, you know what? I guess I will be in the movie. So she came back on board, and they completely reshot all the scenes. They're just burning through money at this point. But reshot the scene so Melanie could be back in the film.
21:01Chuck Bryant:Yeah, that friend was Patsy Nett, who went on to become an award-winning Foley artist. That's right. It's like you said, they're burning through money because there's something to remember here that I didn't think about until pretty far down the research. Like they were not shooting video. They were not using SD cards. They were using actual film stock over and over, like all sorts of film stock. And that stuff was expensive, wasn't it?
21:28Josh Clark:Oh, yeah. I mean, they, you know, at one point, because they had to essentially just keep cameras rolling and wait for the animals to do something interesting.
21:37Chuck Bryant:Yeah.
21:37Josh Clark:They were shooting, you know, six, seven, eight cameras at a time sometimes. And this was, I mean, this is something you routinely see now. But back then you didn't, you know, you maybe had three or four cameras max on like a huge, huge stunt. But rolling that many cameras just wasn't what you did typically back then on films, especially films of this size. So they were just burning money on film stock.
22:02Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And like you said, the reason why they were just running all the time is because the cats had zero training. Like you could not tell them like, OK, we need you to jump at this person because in this scene it calls for that. The cats would just look at you like I hear like, and that's it. Like, I don't know what you're saying. So occasionally they would do something interesting enough to use in the film. And then they reverse engineered it and wrote the plot around the stuff that they had filmed the cats doing.
22:34Josh Clark:Yeah. And all the animals. There was a scene where the elephant destroys a boat. And that scene is in there because the elephant destroyed a boat. It was not planned, but they were like, hey, we got a little bit of production value out of the elephant wrecking that boat. Right. So we got to put it in the movie. The other thing was these animals were, you know, they were raised in captivity and were used to laying around by the pool and laying in bed in a fairly sedate scene. So while they were pretty calm and chill as far as big cats go, in the movie when the real human actors are instructed to like yell and scream or to run away or something, that would incite or excite rather these animals in ways, you know, that they weren't prepared for either.
23:20Chuck Bryant:I know. I felt bad about that. It confused them. That's sad. They were like, why are our friends, you know, yelling?
23:26Josh Clark:Yeah, and, you know, we're going to get to some of the darker stuff later. This isn't all just, like, funny.
23:32Chuck Bryant:No, good point. So this whole thing, the entire film takes about five years to film. And not just because the animals weren't doing what you'd want them to almost all the time. There were some real catastrophes that they ran into that were just totally unavoidable. But this is a very dangerous set. Like, that is the through line here. If you haven't picked up on that, people are interacting with, you know, domesticated to an extent, but they're still very much wild, fully grown lions, tigers, leopards. And that's what's going on. They're filming that. They're filming like the lions jumping on people and attacking people.
24:15Chuck Bryant:And so this is like a really dangerous set. At the same time, because they were using all this stuff. there's a strange realism to the whole thing, especially the violence that the animals inflict on the humans because it actually was what was going on.
24:31Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. I mean, they had a hard time sustaining funding because of this. They had a hard time sustaining a crew because of this. I think in total over the five years, they had about 140 different crew members because people, you know, they would get on set, they would work for a little while. Either there would be, you know, know, something terrible and horrifying would happen, or they would just realize, like, you know, you know when you get on one of those shows where you're just like, this is not a professional outfit. Right. So get out of there as quickly as I can get something else going.
25:01Josh Clark:They're shooting it all at this compound for Africa there, sort of deep outside Los Angeles. And people started getting hurt. I think 70 cast and crew members ended up getting injuries. and if you look at the Alamo Drafthouse trailer that they put out online, at the end it'll show, as they're announcing the cast, it would freeze frame on that cast member and in parentheses give their name and then say what their most major injury was on set.
25:31Chuck Bryant:Right. Probably the biggest one was Jan de Bontz. You probably recognize him from such films as Heart of a Champion, the Ray Mancini story. or Roar, but he was the cinematographer for this movie, and he took it like three weeks after this whole thing started. He got it bad, where a lion essentially scalped him from the back half of his head backward.
26:02Josh Clark:Yeah, 220 stitches, but he would complete the film. And before you start emailing us, I got to stem the tide, Josh, unfortunately. Jan de Bont is very much known for being a big-time action movie director.
26:15Chuck Bryant:Oh, yeah? Yeah.
26:17Josh Clark:I mean, you were kidding, right? Yeah. Okay. Just making sure. He directed Speed and Twister and some other, you know, very big movies later on. But this was his first film in the United States. And I think that's probably why he kept coming back, because it was his first film in the States. And maybe he didn't think it would be such an idea to quit his first movie here.
26:36Chuck Bryant:Sure. Yeah, because that's a really good point. he was a very talented cinematographer by this time. Like, that's one of the other things he's very well known for, not just directing. So, like, this movie, this, like you said, completely, like, unprofessional outfit where the writer, director, and star has no experience in any of those fields has a world-class cinematographer working for it, which makes the whole thing even that much more bizarre when you watch it, apparently.
27:04Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. So, you know, speaking of, John Marshall, I believe he was one of the sons, he got bit on the head. He tripped and fell during a scene. And of course, again, I don't think we mentioned that not only were the animals not prepared for some of this stuff, but they didn't have a full staff of animal wranglers on hand. Like anytime you have a, I mean, it really depends. But if it's like a big cat or something like this, you've got a team of people there for each one. And, you know, they had some help, but they weren't staffed like they needed to be.
27:39Chuck Bryant:No, and I think those are also the same crew that kind of came and went over time. They're like, this is nuts, dude. I don't want to have anything to do with this.
27:46Josh Clark:Oh, yeah. They didn't want their name on this thing because they saw where it was going.
27:50Chuck Bryant:So Melanie Griffith, who said that she didn't want to come out of this with half a face, came very close to that, actually. She got clawed by her eye. She needed 50 stitches. she also had to undergo cosmetic surgery to kind of reconstruct that part of her face that made it into the movie yeah that scene that was a very believable
28:13Josh Clark:attack scene
28:14Chuck Bryant:so you got a clumsy plot and actors you have a great cinematographer and now also you have genuine terror and blood that shows up in this essentially what's supposed to be like a kind of wacky comedy family adventure
28:31Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. There were two cases of gangrene from, you know, getting bitten by infected cat mouths. Tippi Hedren was one. She got a lion bite, got gangrene. I'm not sure where she got it, but she ended up getting skin grafts. There was also a scene where she was riding on Timbo the elephant, and this animal wasn't used to being ridden and, like, had somebody, like, shouting and stuff like she was. Right. So it threw her off, fractured her ankle. And then Noel, the star and the director and madman behind all this, he got the other case of gangrene.
29:08Chuck Bryant:Yeah, Tippi Hedren getting thrown from the elephant and breaking her ankle, that made it into the movie as well. I know Noel got a bite on the hand trying to break up a fight between lions and started bleeding. That made it into the movie as well. So all of this stuff is just showing up. Two crew members lost digits. like over a six year period people kept coming back like the core people kept coming back and coming back and coming back there's one other thing to keep in mind too charles this was supposed to take place the action in the movie takes place over what maybe like a few days weeks months tops the actors involved are all aging like over the course of several years some of them teenagers under like you really undergo some serious like outward changes over the over like a few years in your teens.
30:00Chuck Bryant:And they had to kind of like deal with that as well. This is like reverse boyhood, essentially.
30:06Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. There was also a flash flood which damaged some fencing. This is in 1978. So this is like two and a half years into this thing. And it damaged some of the fencing such that some of these big cats escaped. This is some of the darker stuff as far as the animals are concerned because they really played up the idea that like no animals were hurt in the filming of this like only humans but uh they recovered most of those animals but um allegedly the deputies uh there ended up having to shoot and kill three lions yeah and uh there was also a situation where the um i think there was a disease that spread through the cat community and some of them died it's hard to get like good verification on that, but I see plenty of places that claim that happened.
30:54Right.
30:55Chuck Bryant:And technically, none of this happened during filming. But yeah, I think that's just part of a problem when you have hundreds of big cats all living together. That's not how they live. That flood you mentioned, they had like 20 minutes of filming left. I think when there was a wildfire, they were down to like seven minutes, something like that. And it just kept getting set back and set back, that flood was so destructive that it destroyed a lot of the vegetation that made up the set. So they had to replant and then wait for it to grow back again. It just kept getting set back and set back. I have the impression, and I don't know if you got the same impression, that Tippy Hedron and Noel Marshall were so deep into this financially that they couldn't walk away.
31:43Chuck Bryant:They had to finish this because it had to be a hit or else they were in serious financial trouble. Did you get that same impression? Yeah, I mean, who knows what's going on. It's either that or just like the madman thing takes over.
31:59Josh Clark:But I know that they certainly had no chance of recovering any money if they stopped, and they knew that too. Right. And they were close to being done. Like you said, they did finally finish in the fall of 79. They had to shoot a little bit in Africa, but most everything was taking place there at their ranch. And they spent, and this was late 70s money, about$17 million, which is almost what Raiders of the Lost Ark cost. So they're definitely not getting their production value. And I'm sure a lot of that$17 million was just, you know, wasted money, like film stock and rebuilding things and just waiting around and waiting around and paying crew while you're waiting around.
32:44Chuck Bryant:Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I can't imagine that$17 million worth of production value made it into Roar from everything I've seen, you know?
32:52Josh Clark:I don't think$700 ,000 worth of production value, except I guess Yann de Bont shooting some nice looking stuff, probably. For sure.
33:00Chuck Bryant:So they finally finished filming. They get it edited. It's all ready to go. They've got their hands together. They're rubbing their hands. They're ready to start making some money back. And they cannot find anyone in the United States to sign on as a distributor, which is a huge problem, especially back then. You had no streaming services whatsoever. Like the way you saw a movie was to go to a movie theater. and the way you got your movie in movie theaters was by having a contract with the distributor to get that movie out to movie theaters so that you could have money coming back in. They did not have that in the United States.
33:33Chuck Bryant:They never got it in the U.S.
33:35Josh Clark:No, no release in the U.S. It was a non-union production, so that had something to do with it, but really the deal was it was just a really bad movie. Sure. And nobody wanted to release it. I think even at the time, they didn't think, Like, a distributor doesn't even think they can get it back based on how notorious you can trump up the advertising of, like, the most dangerous film ever made. Like, it was really that bad that they couldn't even get, like, cult B-movie status going for it, you know?
34:04Chuck Bryant:No, and there was a lot of buzz, too. I read some of the press tour that Tippy Hedren was doing in 1979 to help, you know, pump up the release of the movie. And, like, it was widely discussed. Apparently, it was shown widely in the U.K. and Ireland. But even all of that, it was, I think it grossed$2 million worldwide. Yeah. So they lost$15 million just out of the gate. And because it was never shown almost anywhere else, especially after its first run, they had like there's that was it. That's all they ever made off of it. Like they haven't slowly been making their money back. It just ended its life right then and there after it limped out of the last theater in the UK.
34:47Josh Clark:That's right. Let's take our second break, yeah?
34:50Chuck Bryant:Yeah.
34:51Josh Clark:All right, we'll be right back with a little bit more, believe it or not, about Roark right after this.
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37:45Josh Clark:Step in the sun All right, we're back. More about Roar, which, by the way, was about 100 minutes long. Livia did the great service of trying to break down, even without seeing it, the plot of this whole movie. I don't think we should kind of go over that because maybe spoilers if people want to try and find this thing, but almost certainly more because it's not a very good movie at all. But just loosely, it was a plot about an eccentric American scientist who spent a few years living in Tanzania is where it was set and then having his family come out there. And, you know, it was really about that simple.
38:31Josh Clark:Like these people, you know, there's a mistaken communication where the family comes right as the dad has gone to go to the airport So they walk into the scene where all these lions and it's really that bad. Like that's kind of the plot of the movie.
38:46Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And the overall theme of the movie is that this doctor in the time that he's been living in Tanzania started living among the wild animals he's studying and become like a family with them. Now his family, who hasn't been living with these animals, is showing up. And this is, I think, what I understand is that you start to see the process of them kind of coming around through all the attacks and hijinks and all that stuff. Until the overall message is, if you treat wild animals in a friendly manner, they're going to be friendly. If you are scared of them and you treat them hostily, they're going to respond as such.
39:24Chuck Bryant:The thing about this is, I think it was Richard Brody from The New Yorker, he points out that just consistently throughout the movie, this message is contradicted time after time after time where people are being friendly to these animals and the animals are like drawing blood and attacking them on screen in the movie. So the message itself was flawed out of the gate, even though it was, you know, an admirable one.
39:53Josh Clark:Yeah, another big flaw was that it was sort of a genre-less film. Yeah. Parts of it seem like home movies. Parts of it seem like comedy. Like a couple of the attacks are played as straight-up comedic. Parts of it are played up for the true terror. And the score even is all over the place. So the score sometimes feels like a horror movie. And the score sometimes feels like a comedy. I think Tippi Hedren says they based some of the stuff on old slapstick silent comedies. So it was completely rudderless. And that critic that you talked about, Richard Brody, one of his quotes was kind of back this up.
40:32Josh Clark:He said Marshall doesn't quite seem aware of the forms he's using. So it was just a big mess.
40:39Chuck Bryant:Yeah, big mess. I think that should be like the tagline. Right. Right. So, yeah, I guess if you if you're like, I got to see this, there are stuff. There are things you can see on online, but you just unless you're going to shell out 100 bucks, you're not going to see the whole movie. One of the cool things about this, though, is from the outset, Tibby Hedren and Noel Marshall were not just about like, let's just make a bunch of money exploiting animals. One of their stated purposes of making Roar was to take a significant amount of the proceeds and put it toward wild animal welfare. And they put their money where their mouth is, even though they lost a bunch of money, and they basically turned their compound into a place called the Cats of Shambhala, which is like they presented as a place of peace between animals and humans where they can come together in harmony.
41:31Chuck Bryant:It's still around today, and it's the home of the Roar Foundation, which is also still around today, which is still promoting money and lobbying for legislation on behalf of animal welfare.
41:44Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. I mean, that is one positive. They would get divorced about a year after this movie. And he continued to support the Shambhala Project even after that, which was a good thing. But I don't want to paint Marshall as like some great dude because, you know, reading some of the accounts, it seems like he had a definite anger problem, was possibly violent with his own family. Definitely there were moments where his, you know, 14, 15-year-old stepdaughter is like really upset and crying and doesn't want to continue. And he's forcing her back into these scenes. So he was not a good dude.
42:23Josh Clark:So I don't want to portray this as just like sort of a fun family project gone wrong.
42:28Chuck Bryant:Yeah, there's an interview with his son, John, around the time that this was re-released by Drafthouse Films in 2015 where John was like, you know, we all had safe words that we could use when we were filming, if we were uncomfortable, that we could get, you know, removed from that situation and filming would stop. And he said there was at least one time when Melanie used her safe word and Noel just ignored it and made everybody keep filming. So, yeah, I think that was that's definitely worth pointing out for sure. But like you said, I mean, he's known for being an executive producer, investor on The Exorcist, and he's known for Roar, and he will always be known for Roar, from what I can tell.
43:09Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. That's his legacy. In 1985, it got a little bit more attention because the Today Show had Tippi Hedren on because she had written a book, her autobiography, or at least about this, The Cats of Shambhala. So she was on there promoting that. They showed clips from Roar, and so it got a little bit of attention in the United States at the time, and then was kind of not heard from again until Draft House Films came along, like you said, in 2015. And, you know, played it up for what it was, which is a pretty bad, I mean, B-movie at best. I think most B-movies usually even have more of a plot than this thing did.
43:50Chuck Bryant:Yeah, that's where the tagline, the most dangerous film ever made, came from, which is very popular these days. And they also were the ones that came up with no animals were harmed during the making of Roar, but 70 members of the cast and crew were. And Tippi Hedren apparently was not at all happy about this portrayal. And the Roar Foundation asked her not to speak publicly about it. Apparently she was that mad about it. There is an Animal Planet documentary. I couldn't find that either, but it was called Roar, the most dangerous movie ever made. It came out in 2017. And then there's been reviews, especially after Alamo or the Drafthouse released it in 2015.
44:33Chuck Bryant:A lot of like those kind of online reviewers who just love like terrible movies really sank their teeth into this, if you'll excuse that.
44:44Josh Clark:Yeah, I think my favorite one is from Under the Radar. It said, based on its reputation alone, 1981's Roar is the citizen cane of films where actors were mauled by lions. That's pretty good.
44:58Chuck Bryant:Drew McWheeney also had a pretty memorable quote. They said that it feels like Walt Disney decided to make a snuff version of Swiss Family Robinson.
45:08Josh Clark:That's kind of on point. Yeah.
45:10Chuck Bryant:And, I mean, if you are like, I don't care about any of this. I just want to help the big cats. Like I said, the Shambhala Preserve is still around. The Roar Foundation is around, and they're accepting donations. I think they're down to like nine big cats now. Yeah. They've definitely whittled it down. I'm guessing that the other big cats kind of died of natural causes over time, hopefully. But yeah, there you go. And Tippi Hedren's still alive. She's coming up on her 100th birthday in 2030.
45:41Josh Clark:Well, I hope she doesn't listen to this.
45:43Chuck Bryant:I feel like we did it justice.
45:45Josh Clark:Yeah, which is exactly probably what she doesn't want to hear.
45:48Chuck Bryant:Okay, it's true. Well, if you're listening, Tippi, hats off to you. And since I did our annual hats off to Tippi Hedren, I just unlocked Listener Mail.
46:01Josh Clark:For a second, I thought you were going to say Tippi of the Hat to you.
46:05Chuck Bryant:After all the times we've done that, too, I can't believe we've never come up with that before.
46:09Josh Clark:I'm going to call this shouting out a good little thing that this company's doing. Because we heard from Robin about a company. Oh, let me just read it. Hey, guys, I listened to you from the mountains of western North Carolina near Asheville. And I just listened to the mangroves episode, notably one of my favorite trees. And I wanted to share information. That's me talking about it. Right, right. I wanted to share information on a company called Mang Gear, M-A-N-G, Gear. They make SPF shirts, and for every shirt they sell, they plant a mangrove tree. Nice. It's a nonprofit started by two brothers.
46:43Josh Clark:And when you do this, they send you a certificate, the GPS coordinates of the location. Oh, cool. Where your mangrove was planted. After listening to the episode, I couldn't help but share in case you wanted to show some support to their work. I listen all the time. Every episode is chock full of information, facts, and history. And let's not forget, you both are great hosts and make the show so interesting. Nice. And that is from Robin Motelik. And just go to mangear.com. That would be M-A-N-G-G-E-A-R.com. And check out those SPF shirts if you want to have a mangrove tree planted in your honor.
47:18Chuck Bryant:That was smart to add the extra G, or else they might not have gotten what they were doing across very well. If it was just Mangear.
47:25Josh Clark:I'm sure there's a website called Mangear that sells pubic hair shavers and stuff like that. Right.
47:32Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Who was that, Robin? Yeah. Okay. Thanks a lot, Robin. That was a great shout out. And thanks to the people at Mangear who are doing God's work and using GPS, which we did an episode on. And I guess if you want to get in touch with us like Robin did, you can send us an email to send it off to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.
47:55Josh Clark:Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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50:29Chuck Bryant:This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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