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00:00Untertitelung des ZDF für funk, 2017
00:30Untertitelung des ZDF für funk, 2017
00:59Dad hatte ein Traum, um zu zeigen, dass Menschen und große Katzen leben können,
01:03aber nach zehn Jahren, Millionen Dollar und eine Strecke von Katastrophen war,
01:09hat er gelernt, wie misgeistig das wirklich war.
01:13Was the most dangerous movie ever made.
01:30No animals were harmed in the making of this film,
01:33but 70 cast and crew members were.
01:35And for 35 years, my brother Jerry and I
01:40have held onto the footage from the film.
01:42First time I've seen a lot of this stuff in many, many years.
01:47A lot of good animal footage.
01:50It's a spectacle of a film to watch.
01:54It's impossible to make that movie that way with real animals again.
01:58Anybody responsible wouldn't let you do it.
02:00It wasn't safe.
02:02Roll it! Smoke your microphone!
02:05The whole thing just is like this
02:11biblical, epic story.
02:16Noel was a circus huckster.
02:18He was a manipulator.
02:20He was dishonest.
02:22But he had that very special skill that I couldn't help but respect.
02:27It was the late 60s when all of this started.
02:40My parents were on an African safari and they saw a house that was overrun by lions.
02:45It was the game warden's house that had been abandoned because of a flood.
02:49And they thought that was really cool.
02:51And so they came back to Southern California.
02:53And I guess on the plane they were talking about, you know,
02:55wow, why don't we make a movie like that and we'll just have the family in it.
02:59We did know a thing or two about Hollywood.
03:01My stepmother is Tippi Hedren, who is a huge star from Hitchcock's movie, The Birds.
03:11Dad was her manager.
03:13And my stepsister is Melanie Griffith, although this was early on in her career, probably 20
03:19years before she took home the Golden Globe.
03:21My brother Jerry and I had done some acting, so we would round out the cast with our brother
03:26Joel working behind the scenes.
03:30Dad wrote the majority of the script, which would be about a family in Africa living in
03:34a house filled with dozens of big cats.
03:38He wanted the animals to behave naturally, so instead of using trained animals, he got
03:42this crazy idea that we would raise our own pride.
03:46And so my folks began to buy, adopt and rescue any big cat they could get their hands on.
03:51Which was ridiculously easy to do in the 70s.
03:55Big cats were being bred all over the U.S.
03:58The 70s were probably the most interesting decade in the history of Hollywood because you
04:04could get almost any kind of movie made.
04:07And that's because all the big studios had sort of bottomed out.
04:11And so at the time that Noah Marshall first said, I'm going to make this wild lion movie,
04:17it would have been thought of as, yeah, let's, you know, let's give it a shot.
04:28So they started inviting cats into their home in order to acclimate the cats to them and acclimate
04:35themselves to the cats and make everybody feel comfortable before they started shooting.
04:42Imagine being a kid and growing up and saying, oh, you got these big lions and stuff.
04:51You love dogs.
04:52You love cats.
04:54They're just big cats.
04:55And they do play like cats a lot.
04:59Well, Zoni, first off, you're not allowed to have lions and tigers in Sherman Oaks, which
05:04is adjacent to Beverly Hills.
05:06No.
05:07It's a given.
05:08It's not allowed.
05:10And as much as we loved hand raising the cubs, they grow fast.
05:14And our living room was no match for 500 pound lions.
05:19So over the next four years, as dad was building up a stable of 150 cats, he was also building
05:25the set, planting 800 trees and transforming 40 acres of California desert into a playground
05:31for lions, tigers, and himself.
05:39In my life, I've met only a few people in the film business that have like some kind
05:45of animal magnetism that is like this electricity that comes off of them.
05:51And Noel was one of those people.
05:55There was something about him from, I guess, from years of living with the cats that gave
06:00him this kind of animalistic energy.
06:03He was the cat himself.
06:05That's what those cats looked at him as.
06:08And he liked to be the big one, the big male pride lion.
06:14It's just like life.
06:15You get the funny with the tragic.
06:17Just with them, you get the gentle and the ferocious too.
06:19The closer you get to them, the more they'd like you, the safer you'd be.
06:25And Noel would go into the compounds and yell, come on, lions, and they'd all come racing
06:30towards him.
06:31The cats got a little excited.
06:33That's all.
06:34Oh.
06:35These animals weren't really trained.
06:39They were brought up in captivity and they were kind of trained to be comfortable around
06:44people.
06:45And, you know, he had a hierarchy of him as the alpha male.
06:54He thought that you could live with the animals safely and they could be part of your family.
07:00I learned at the St. Louis Zoo, and you're taught that animals can be trained, but they can't be tame.
07:08And Noel thought they could be tame.
07:10And he had all the bite marks to prove that I was right.
07:14So while we were doing all this in the beginning, taking in 150 big cats, some zebras, two elephants,
07:26and building an African set in the riverbed of a California canyon, we'd run out of money.
07:32To pay for it all, Dad and Tippi sold everything and moved into a mobile home on the set.
07:37But their fortunes turned around pretty soon after that because a film Dad had executive
07:42produced was about to become a blockbuster.
07:45It was a supernatural thriller called The Exorcist.
07:49Dad now had enough money to get started with Roar and hire a crew, but there weren't a lot of
07:55people that were willing to come work with those 100 lions because there was no way that you could
08:01train that many animals.
08:03So you kind of took anybody you could get.
08:12I moved to Los Angeles in July of 1977, and I came from Austin, Texas.
08:19The first job that anybody could get in Los Angeles, whether they had just gotten out of
08:26prison or just come to the city and wanted to work in film, was this movie called Roar.
08:31I was in my early 20s.
08:35I remember one of my buddies calls me up and says, so have you ever production coordinated
08:40before?
08:40I said, yeah, I can production coordinate, which, you know, I'd never done the job.
08:44And stares at my very limited resume and says, okay, that was it.
08:49That was my interview.
08:52So I was looking in Variety, and I saw an ad for a script supervisor for Roar.
08:58So I went out there, and they said, are you a camera assistant?
09:02And I lied, and I said, yes, I am.
09:05I told him I'd never done script supervising before, so he told me what to do, and it sounded
09:10pretty simple.
09:11I signed on.
09:13I was contacted by a placement service from the makeup school I had attended about a year
09:17earlier.
09:19First day, Noel came in and says, where's the makeup?
09:22And I said, this is it right here.
09:23And it was a little bottle.
09:24And he grabbed the bottle, he poured it out in his hands, rubbed his face with it, and
09:29said, how's this?
09:32And I just, I just rubbed it out behind the neck and in his ear a little bit, and I said,
09:36oh, it looks great.
09:37Okay, great.
09:38And he just ran out.
09:39Most of the crew didn't have a lot of experience, but we knew we needed somebody that was really
09:47good to lead the camera team, someone brilliant, who was also willing to put his life on the
09:52line.
09:52And we found Jan de Bont, who would later become the cinematographer of Die Hard, and
09:58a huge director in Hollywood, with Speed and Twister.
10:02Jan, at that point, had just come from Holland, and I think this was his first job in the United
10:09States, and he had two sides to his personality.
10:12Personally, he was very sweet and very gentle, but he could also be a screamer and a very demanding
10:19person to work with.
10:21He was, well, not Mr. Warmth.
10:25I was the camera assistant for Jan de Bont.
10:29Nobody else wanted to do that job.
10:32Jan was teaching me how to be a good focus puller, and I got good at it because he would
10:37just yell at me.
10:38So now I know all the Dutch swear words.
10:41Noel and Jan both were very impulsive, and they were always doing something stupid and
10:48crazy.
10:49People were going to get bit.
10:50People were going to get hurt, and they did.
10:52We started filming Roar in 76.
11:07By then, we'd built a compound an hour outside of L.A.
11:11Financing was in place, and my dad, Noel Marshall, had cast our two leads.
11:15Himself, as a scientist studying big cats, and Robbie, who we had adopted at two years
11:21old and was just the most beautiful and gentlest lion you can imagine.
11:26And so the two of them would anchor a family-friendly film about big cats.
11:30Roar is a story of a man who is living in Africa among lions and tigers, studying their behavior.
11:43He has a friend named Mativo, and this guy's family is coming to visit him.
11:49This guy is Noel Marshall, and somehow he goes to the airport, and they get a ride, and they
11:54miss each other.
11:55When the family shows up in this house, where lions, tigers, cougars, and leopards have been
12:00living freely as they want.
12:03And so it was just one little catastrophe after another, protecting themselves from the cats.
12:10Then there's a subplot of Togar, the evil lion, who is kind of attacking the good lions.
12:22It's sort of like the old thing, if you have a million monkeys typing on a typewriter, you'll
12:27end up with Hamlet.
12:28Well, their idea was, if you have enough wild animals, if you just let them do whatever they
12:34want to do, you'll end up with a movie.
12:36We started filming October 1st of 76.
12:48The first day of filming, Dad wanted something amazing to show investors.
12:53He started by filming the big lion fight, so we thought that would be magnificent, and
12:58that's the one Dad really wanted to do.
13:00In the film, Dad's living with the cats, and they're all getting along great, and Robby
13:06leads the pride.
13:07Then, a rogue lion, Togar, comes in, and there's a big fight, and all of a sudden, Robby's brothers
13:13start to challenge his dominance.
13:16I gotta go help your uncles, they're killing each other.
13:19Now, these are completely untamed, untrained, full-grown male lions.
13:25They had all their claws and teeth, and testosterone.
13:28Stop it!
13:30Stop it!
13:31Noel's character would rush in, and break up the lion fight, as like he was the king of
13:36the beasts, or the alpha male, that was gonna take care of this matter.
13:40This worked fine for the first two takes.
13:50On take three, he ran in, broke up the fight, but one of the lions bit him through the hand.
13:59You can see him, and he shakes his hand a couple times, and then the lion comes back after him
14:06again, and he gets to where there's a small tree branch that he can pull down, and he pulls
14:12the tree branch, and the lion came with his mouth open, and he had stuck that tree branch
14:18into the lion, and that was the only thing that saved him.
14:22The bite caused arterial bleeding that was shooting out about 15 feet.
14:28We loaded Noel into the ambulance, and they drove off.
14:32When a lion bites you, they have so much bacteria in their mouth, it's almost instant infection.
14:38And I mean, immediately after someone get bit, they just keep pouring hydrogen peroxide on
14:43it the whole time they take you to the hospital.
14:45By the time you got there, you're infected.
14:48Five minutes later, we see another ambulance coming.
14:51Drives up to the main compound, and the back door opens up, and it's Noel.
14:56He jumps out, and he goes, let's get the cameras.
14:59We're going to shoot close-ups on my hand.
15:01We're going to put this in the movie.
15:04And he said, Ken, squirt some blood in there.
15:06The bleeding had stopped.
15:07He wanted me to squirt fake blood into the hole.
15:09I realized after that day that this isn't the normal person I'm working for.
15:14This guy's a little out there.
15:16By the end of day one, Dad's whole arm was infected.
15:20He knew that it wasn't the lion's fault.
15:22By any means, they're being a lion.
15:24These are wild animals.
15:25They're wild.
15:26You're going to get bitten.
15:27It's not if, it's when.
15:29So he had to spend the whole next week in the hospital.
15:32And then he was back.
15:35Back on set and back in charge, along with his own special brand of chaos.
15:42Cross out.
15:43Rolling.
15:44Roll camera.
15:45Roll camera.
15:46Action.
15:46Pass it.
15:51Come on, lions.
15:53Come over here.
15:53Come on.
15:56Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut.
15:59Right.
16:02Roar, I'm getting it over here.
16:12At the time we shot Roar, one of the primary suppliers of camera equipment in Hollywood was
16:17Panavision.
16:17And they provided all the high-end cameras to all the big motion pictures that were shot
16:22in Hollywood and all over the world.
16:24I always coined the phrase, this shot will be shot in panic vision, because that's the
16:31way Noel always liked it.
16:32He liked to panic on the set.
16:34You know, the more chaos there was in the set, the more he enjoyed it.
16:38This is my very first day.
16:39Noel takes me, literally, says, stand right here.
16:43Face that guy over there.
16:44And all of a sudden, all these people, they line up.
16:47And there's two lines.
16:48And we're facing each other.
16:50And just then, I hear this loud rumble and Noel screaming.
16:55And I look to my right, and here's Noel running like a crazy man with a sheet of plywood, shaking
17:00it behind 30 to 40 lions, tigers, cougars, leopards that are running down this human chute
17:07that we have made.
17:08And this is the way they would move 30 or 40 cats from point A to point B.
17:14Yon operated the camera on a lot of stuff, a lot of very dangerous stuff, handheld the
17:18camera.
17:19And a lot of those scenes where you're in the room with Noel and 30 or 40 lions.
17:24Nowadays, no one could ever do the same kinds of things that we did, because they don't,
17:28there's too many safety considerations now to even attempt those kinds of things.
17:33They were really looking out after the animals, you know, and they didn't want to injure the
17:37animals in any way.
17:38So they were pretty well protected.
17:40In fact, a lot of the crew members complained that the animals got better treatment than the
17:43crew members did.
17:44In the third week of filming, we were shooting a scene where the family was trying to escape
17:49from the lion house in a rowboat.
17:51There's one shot that Yon wanted to do, which is he is on shore and we dug a hole for him
17:59and he was going to handhold a camera when he was in this little pit.
18:04Well, we had to throw a green parachute over him so that it blended in with the grass to disguise
18:08the cameras.
18:09They had the cats inside the caged off area and on cue, they would open the gate.
18:16The cats would run right over the top of the camera.
18:19I told him, you can't do that.
18:21If you move down there, one of these cats is going to eat you.
18:24You don't know what the f*** you're talking about.
18:27You're just a f***ing elephant trainer.
18:29I said, okay, have a good shoot.
18:38We're doing this scene where the family has been chased around the house on the lake by
18:50these cats.
18:52They had dug a trench along the shoreline.
18:54In the trench was Yon de Bont and his camera assistants and they were covered by a camouflage
19:00net.
19:00We all go in, we start acting, and we're in the rowboat.
19:07Yon's filming, handheld, underneath the parachute, and all the lionesses are all jumping over
19:12him.
19:13It worked fine for the first few takes, but after about three or four takes, the lions
19:17know the routine now.
19:19They're not coming out as quickly as they did initially.
19:22The lioness saw this thing move underneath this green parachute.
19:27She didn't know what it was.
19:28And like any cat, that cat was intrigued by it and went in order to pull the tarp off.
19:39He just scalped him.
19:42So Yon got 200 stitches in the head and just, but it was a quick, you know, one swipe.
19:49And everybody yelled and we got him out of there and sent him to the hospital.
19:53Yon came back.
19:54He was back filming two weeks later.
19:58The whole thing about the movie is that it's not a great movie in terms of story.
20:06It's not a great movie in terms of acting.
20:07It's a unique movie that showcases what can be done with wild animals.
20:14These cats weren't really trained to do really anything.
20:27There were no special effects and there were no split screens.
20:30You know, none of that in this movie.
20:31So all the stuff that you see of people interacting with the cats, they were actually there.
20:35It had some of the most incredible animal and actor interface footage ever shot.
20:43Noel wasn't training the cats to do anything in particular.
20:50He wanted the action to be real.
20:52It was an incredible experience.
20:54The interesting thing about all of it was the entire time that we were filming,
20:59the lions just did what they would do in a given situation.
21:02It's an example of a little lion, Gary, who carries on a conversation.
21:06Well, hello, Gary.
21:09Oh, why did you go with your friend?
21:13Oh, come on.
21:16We all knew this was something that we're going to do once in our lifetime with working with all these cats.
21:21They're pretty amazing.
21:22They were so inquisitive.
21:24Their unique beauty, you just get to appreciate all of that on a much deeper level
21:29than you would ever in any other experience in life.
21:33Even if you went on a safari in Africa, you would never get that kind of an experience.
21:42Everything that we all had in life was invested into this thing.
21:45All the money from all the houses, all the money that anybody we could borrow from anybody went into this.
21:52Between the injuries, the delays, and the animal bills, the pressure was enormous.
21:58You know, food bills, $10,000 a month, back in, you know, the 70s.
22:03Noel was balancing so much because not only directing, he's really the head animal wrangler,
22:10and he's also acting at the same time.
22:13So I think anybody would have gone nuts.
22:15He knew what he wanted to do and how he was going to do it,
22:18and he didn't really want to hear anything that got in his way.
22:22The one thing he didn't want to have was Noel get upset.
22:25What are you doing?
22:26Oh, you got that goddamn gate open.
22:28How can you beat up?
22:30It's not open over there.
22:31Well, you stopped here three feet back.
22:33I stopped here because the cat was in my way.
22:35When did the camera stop?
22:36One second, two seconds to go.
22:38You run, son of a bitch!
22:42Roll sound.
22:43Roll it.
22:43He constantly kind of pushed his luck in the number of takes that he would shoot.
22:49Hard guys.
22:54And so it became like a game of daring the cats to lose control.
23:03He endangered his whole family to make this crazy movie.
23:07It's really like, you know, Ahab or Crazy Obsession, really.
23:14Noel took chances that no sane person would.
23:18You know, he was just a crazy man.
23:20But that's what obsession does.
23:22Timbo was an African bull elephant he had had acquired from a Canadian animal park,
23:43who was soon joined by Cora, a female who came from the circus.
23:46Dad wanted the elephants to act naturally and just have minimal training,
23:51enough to walk them to and from the set without hurting anybody.
23:56There's a scene where the family is in the boat,
23:58and they're going around the lake,
24:00and they're pulling the boat out.
24:03And unbeknownst to them, the elephant is there.
24:06And the elephant sees them and goes after the boat.
24:10And the elephant hated the boat.
24:12And it just stomped the bloody hell out of it.
24:16My job was to train the elephants.
24:20I trained the elephants to take the boat away from them in the movie.
24:25That was fun.
24:26And I think we went through about three or four boats.
24:30Noel decided he wanted the elephant to pick Tippy up.
24:34And we practiced it.
24:35And we practiced it.
24:39So she's trying to hold on to his ears and get a footing on his trunk.
24:43And he's supposed to be rearing up or, you know, with her on his head,
24:47shaking his head back around.
24:49And she slips.
24:53And her leg gets caught between the tusk and the trunk.
24:56So it breaks her ankle.
24:59Fairly, a very severe break on her ankle.
25:01And in the movie, they run the film backwards.
25:04So instead of falling off, it looks like the elephant has its trunk down and does like this.
25:10And she flies up onto his head.
25:13The injury shut filming down for weeks and landed Tippy an extended stay in the hospital.
25:19On a daily basis, you were cheating death.
25:21It was just insanity, you know.
25:26Roll sound.
25:27Rolling.
25:28Smoke and marker.
25:29The culture of what this production was was different than any other production.
25:34It was non-union, so they didn't follow any rules.
25:37They could expect anyone to do anything, including work within inches of dangerous lions and dangerous animals, you know.
25:45Marker action.
25:46Action.
25:49I'll go.
25:50Come in.
25:51Safety protocols.
26:00No, I don't know any safety protocols.
26:04It was crazy.
26:06The emergencies that would pop up every day.
26:09This guy just got his arm scratched.
26:11This guy got his face scratched.
26:12This guy has to go to the hospital.
26:14This guy needs stitches.
26:15It was pretty much non-stop.
26:17There were zero safety protocols.
26:19You have animal people with canes.
26:22And if one of the lions looked like they were going to bite you, they might get a little tap or something.
26:27You don't want to ever lay down.
26:28You don't want to ever pretend to limp or be sick or show any kind of weakness.
26:36One of the hardest scenes we had to shoot was the family come to the realization that the lions aren't trying to kill them, but they're really friendly.
26:44So they're playing with all the lions.
26:45And Tippi comes out of the house and sees them in the midst of all the lions and supposed to faint.
26:55And we had a hard time shooting that scene because the minute she fainted, pretended to faint and hit the ground, the instinct of the cats was triggered.
27:05Even though these cats were all raised in captivity, that instinct is still pretty strong in them.
27:12And we use that instinct a lot of times to get to motivate them.
27:17Roll sounds.
27:18Rolling.
27:18We would carry little pouches of small bits of meat.
27:23And when we needed to have a cat look in a particular direction, you'd have the meat off camera.
27:29And what most people don't know is lions, particularly lions, they get possessive over anything.
27:36It can be a piece of paper.
27:38It could be something that someone left on the set.
27:41When they get possessive, a lion will take hold of that object.
27:46And any other lion that comes around it or any other person that comes around it gets attacked.
27:52And if you're the cameraman and he decided to get, you know, possessive over those sticks that camera's on, you better just walk away.
28:00I have a picture of the lion that bit me.
28:02There's a circle around him.
28:04One tooth into my neck here, another one here.
28:07Pulled my ear off, a tooth on the skull, one tooth up inside my cheek, up just below my eye.
28:14It was pretty serious.
28:16Noel was a great believer in hydrogen peroxide for everything.
28:21And so it was like somebody got bit.
28:23It was like, well, I put hydrogen peroxide on it, you know.
28:27Once a week we sent somebody to the hospital.
28:30And the Palmdale Hospital was expanding.
28:33And the new wing we all nicknamed the Noel Marshall wing.
28:37There must have been a hundred people, at least, if not more, that had been injured and admitted to the hospital for medical care.
28:47Every time somebody got bitten, you know, there'd be fewer people, you know.
28:50And we were always, the turnover was a lot.
28:52I think one time we had probably 20 crew guys quit.
28:57So at the start of 1978, we were nine years past Dad and Tippy's inspiration in Africa, and a year and a half into filming.
29:08By now, everybody in the family had been injured by the cats.
29:12And that included Melanie, who was clawed across the face by a young lion and needed plastic surgery.
29:17But despite the injuries, there was no way Dad was giving up.
29:23He and Tippy had bet everything on the film.
29:25They'd sold the family homes and properties, and walking away would have been financial suicide.
29:30All your loved ones are all going to the hospital, but you still have to keep going, and you have to keep going.
29:37We couldn't make any money back until we finished the film.
29:40So each day, we just pushed our luck a little bit further, and you could just feel it.
29:45Something really bad was going to go down.
29:49Roll sounds.
29:50Rolling.
29:50We're doing a scene where Noel has just gotten out of the bathtub, and he's walking around the house in his underwear, talking to Mativo.
30:00What do you think you're running?
30:01A country club for lions?
30:02Come on, sit down.
30:06And Kyle Mativo was a brave, brave African actor.
30:10He lived in Santa Monica.
30:11He was a Kenyan.
30:13He says, in Africa, we don't go with the lions.
30:16The lions are over there, and the people are over here.
30:18We don't go together.
30:20Now, there's lions and tigers walking around by Noel, some cougars and leopards up on the balcony, and the rafters above him.
30:31Sit down. You're okay.
30:33You're surrounded 360 degrees and nothing but cats.
30:39Oh.
30:41Oh.
30:43Oh, I can leave him alone.
30:45Sit down.
30:47You're okay. Sit down.
30:50Noel, for whatever reason, was kind of tempting the lions.
30:55And take after take after take, you could feel the energy of the cats getting more and more aggressive.
31:09Hey, no more fighting.
31:13Come here.
31:14We were on take 21, so he was really pushing his luck.
31:22This lion comes from down on the floor, comes up a couple steps.
31:28And this is when one of the lions decided it was time to kill Noel.
31:34And grabs dad in the back of the leg and just, I mean, clamps into him and drags him off the stairs.
31:45And just pulled him down like you would pull a mouse into a hole.
31:49And then Noel just cursing and screaming and shrieking as he got kind of dragged off out of the camera.
31:58He was bitten fairly seriously.
32:02Like a couple of deep puncture wounds on his thigh.
32:05Blood coming down his leg.
32:07He is a mess.
32:10And they get him out of the house.
32:12They start pouring hydrogen peroxide on him.
32:14But they bring up the truck and they take him to the hospital.
32:18While Noel was in the hospital recuperating from that injury, if the lions and tigers weren't biblical enough, late one afternoon in the cutting room, Jan Devont came running in and said, help us.
32:31You've got to come out and help us.
32:32We have to build a dam.
32:33We built the set house in the Santa Clarita River bed.
32:43And it was in the floodplain.
32:45You're not allowed to build in the floodplain, but this is a temporary movie set.
32:49So we did.
32:50Soledad Canyon has flooded a few times through the years.
32:53But never really badly.
32:55Not like it was in 78.
32:59It rained and rained and rained.
33:01And the water started rising.
33:03Like 19 inches of rain in a 24-hour period of time.
33:09And what happened is, about five miles upriver, it broke through the dam.
33:18We heard hissing.
33:21At first, couldn't figure it out.
33:22But then realized, looked up the wash and saw this wall of water coming.
33:26It was literally a huge wall of water.
33:29It's like a tsunami.
33:33Water was four or five feet high and going like 60 miles an hour.
33:53And there was a perimeter fence that kept the cats in.
33:56But pretty soon, one of the trailers broke up and took out the fence.
34:02So a lot of the cats escaped into the canyon.
34:06In the course of the night, things got worse.
34:08And the waters expanded.
34:10And slowly started to take out the entire canyon.
34:14Cats started breaking out of cages.
34:15We had to start letting cats out.
34:17We lost a lot of cats that night.
34:34Robbie, who was the main lion and that's the hero of the whole movie, he was one of the 13 that got loose.
34:44They're as afraid as we are.
34:46There's a flood.
34:47They're not in their normal areas.
34:49Everything's changing.
34:50And so it's really the dynamics of it all is set up that it's not going to end well.
34:57A couple of our guys were going to get a chain on Robbie and going to put him away.
35:02He was the hero lion.
35:03He was the one that would roar and make that vicious face.
35:08And that's what he was doing when the guys came up on him.
35:14To the sheriffs, it looked like he was going to kill our people.
35:18And they said, don't shoot.
35:20To the sheriff, that looks like the cats were attacking him.
35:22And Robbie, who was one of the best cats in the world, just got shot.
35:33Two of our lioness who swept downstream, and they were in a trailer park.
35:40And apparently the animal control people hadn't remembered to bring their tranquilizer guns, so the police shot them.
35:50Noel was in the hospital when the flood hit.
35:55He was bitten fairly seriously, and he had blood poisoning.
35:59And they were thinking about having to amputate his leg.
36:01And so he left the hospital without the doctor's permission.
36:11I hear this helicopter.
36:13It lands, and out gets Noel Marshall.
36:16He was scheduled for surgery that morning.
36:18And he sees me, walks up to me, he says, how many of the cats are still out?
36:23I said, Noel, I don't have a clue, man.
36:25They're everywhere.
36:26And he grabs a chain.
36:28He says, come with me.
36:32We came back the next morning, and we saw cars up in the trees.
36:37Trailers were knocked over.
36:40Everything was pushed against the set.
36:42Mud.
36:42It was a major disaster.
36:44Robby and the two females, who we had raised from birth, died from their wounds that night.
36:51It was very, very sad.
36:53I mean, Robby was an amazing animal.
36:55He was very, very close.
36:56It's a member of the family to us.
36:59Our set was destroyed.
37:01The lake was destroyed.
37:03We didn't have a place for the animals to live.
37:07Where are you going to put him?
37:08You can't leave him in cattle trucks for, you know, three months.
37:15A lot of the sound rails and the film rails were more underneath the roof that had collapsed on it.
37:22We formed a line up the hill, and we start handing it off to each other and putting it up in a van.
37:29To sit there and pull your film that you've literally, blood, sweat, and tears, have gone into making this film and seeing it all just gone.
37:38That was the one time where we all said, maybe this is not meant to be.
37:48When the flood was happening, we were already kind of 95% of the way done with the movie to not finish that last couple percent,
37:57which then the hope is that you would make so much money that you would be able to pay for everything,
38:02and then it would all make it worthwhile.
38:03So we pushed through eight months of salvage work, first rebuilding a home for the cats,
38:09then recovering all the film and equipment we possibly could.
38:14And by July of 1979, Dad had raised money from investors and got a $3 million disaster loan,
38:21and we were rebuilt and ready to roll.
38:23We spent the rest of that year preparing for some of the hairiest action sequences ever made with big cats.
38:29And then we rolled the cameras.
38:44And roar was a wrap.
38:53Once they wrapped production, we got a letter from MGM Labs that said,
39:00congratulations, we've processed more film for your production than any other production in the history of MGM.
39:05Well, in 1980, when you didn't have digital editing and you didn't have computers to work with,
39:11you just had to look at every single frame of film over and over and over again.
39:17I mean, we're talking about an impossible task.
39:22Over a million feet.
39:24I don't know how many films have ever shot that much footage.
39:28I mean, that's absurd.
39:29A million feet of film back in those days was like four pictures.
39:33Every day there would be something that you'd go,
39:36how, why are they doing this?
39:38Who's letting this happen?
39:40And what kind of movie can we possibly make out of this?
39:43At that time, I certainly wasn't qualified to say if the film was going to be good or bad.
39:50Later on, having done it after 35 years, I look back on it and say,
39:55what the hell were they thinking?
39:57And it was mostly lions and tigers.
40:00You just can't do a two-hour movie with them but lions and tigers in a real thin plot line.
40:07They started out marketing it as a fierce wild animal film.
40:14And that didn't go over so well.
40:16Then they changed it to a family-friendly film.
40:22And that didn't go over so well.
40:24And then they changed it to ferocious comedy.
40:28And, of course, that genre doesn't exist.
40:31And so the only distribution deals they got were a handful of countries,
40:36Germany and a few others.
40:39But it was never released in the United States.
40:42Universal wanted to give, I think, $5 million up front,
40:46and Dad never thought a deal was good enough.
40:48So he put the film on a shelf in a storage vault,
40:50and it stayed there for 35 years.
40:53We like to call it the most expensive home movie ever made.
40:57But, uh, because it almost ended up being that.
41:00It got a lot of the crew members into the union.
41:03In that respect, it was a valuable asset to a lot of the members.
41:07A lot of the crew members went on to big careers in the film industry.
41:11Jan de Bont went on to direct Twister, that tornado movie,
41:15and was a DP on several big films.
41:17I went on to have a career mixing sound on a lot of big movies.
41:21And, of course, Melanie Griffith, who went on to be nominated for an Oscar.
41:26Several people, that was the way we got our start.
41:29Uh, trial by fire.
41:31Or trial by tiger.
41:38When we got done with the movie, uh, like, everybody wanted to split
41:42because their life had been put on hold.
41:44We thought it was nine months.
41:45We, after five years, it's almost like you're getting out of jail.
41:48Dad and Tippie were still living at the ranch.
41:50They sold all the other homes.
41:51It was very hard on their marriage.
41:53It was, uh, the whole thing was hard.
41:56It was very intense, and they got separated, like, within a month after filming.
42:01Well, fortunately for Dad, because he didn't have the money to support the ranch,
42:06Tippie then stayed out there and made it a non-profit organization.
42:10She turned the set into a permanent preserve for exotic animals and named it Shambhala,
42:16which means a meeting place of peace and harmony for all beings.
42:19She took the responsibility upon herself, even after Noel was gone, you know?
42:24Got to give her credit, huh?
42:26She really went from movie star to animal lover.
42:30I mean, Tippie Hedron was a movie star at that time.
42:32And then her career just kind of fell off the map, you know?
42:37But if she was happy doing what she was doing, that's all that really mattered anyway, you know?
42:42And we kept all the lines and kept them healthy, and they died off.
42:45We didn't breed anymore.
42:47We took it and abandoned abused animals.
42:49And Tippie has kept that running effectively all these years.
42:52What we did learn from this experience is people shouldn't be interacting with wild animals.
42:59People shouldn't be buying wild animals.
43:02People shouldn't be allowed to breed animals to sell to private individuals.
43:05She had that passion that stayed with her all her life.
43:10So Shambhala is her legacy.
43:14As the daughter of actress and animal advocate, Tippie Hedron,
43:19tonight's Lifetime Achievement Award recipient,
43:22I can really vouch for my mother's passion and commitment to the protection of big cats
43:27because I was there from the very beginning.
43:30Tippie, through charitable donations, is taking care of all the animals through the years.
43:33And her lifetime of achievement was honored at the Humane Society's 2010 Genesis Awards.
43:40As for dad, Roar's Alpha Lion, well, he died that same year at the age of 79.
43:47His legacy is a film that's misguided, a financial disaster, and the most dangerous movie ever made.
43:54But I can tell you, making it and working alongside the big cats was the most extraordinary experience of my life.
44:03There's not too many of us Roar people left anymore.
44:06We're all fallen by the wayside, but we survived it.
44:10If you can say you survived Roar, buddy, you can do anything in life.
44:13We're all fallen by the wayside.
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