Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
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. Had you ever heard of this movie? No?
I haven't, had you.
Oh yeah, it's legendary.
Okay, 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, right, So in case that happened. Sometimes people write in and be like, oh, thanks for doing the episode I suggested, and it's something that had been on our list already, So that happened.
Sometimes 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, Well, that is what happens. So if we don't thank you, there's a ninety eight percent chance that we didn't.
We already had it, that's right. But I already had this one.
This is a legendary movie known as the most dangerous film ever made from nineteen eighty one. 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.
No, but I guess yeah, being a movie dude, this is the kind of thing. It's like a legendary movie for sure. Yeah, especially have you have you seen it? That's a guest. Oh no, no, no, no, Yeah, it's almost impossible to find. You could shell out I think one hundred bucks on Amazon to buy a DVD of it.
Don't do that.
Alamo draft House re released it in twenty fifteen, 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 yeah, 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.
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.
Okay, fair enough, good, Well then I feel a lot better.
Yeah, just my dumb opinion.
So all right, Charles, let's tell everybody what we're talking about. It's a nineteen eighty one 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 twenties. Three people drowned during the real deluge that they filmed. You know, there was the Twilight movie, Like people have died. No one died on this movie, So why do people call it the most dangerous film ever go?
Yeah, 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, the great Tippy Hedron from You probably know her from Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds most famously, Yeah, and her hubby, Noel Marshall, who was her agent and a movie producer. He was best known, probably still best known for the Exorcists and unfortunately roar. Yeah, he kind of rewrote his legacy after
the Exorcists. But they were married couple who thought of this idea because of a trip they took.
Yeah. Yeah, So roar is essentially like it's meant to generate like good will and stuff among humans toward wild animals, right to show them that wild animals are nothing to be afraid of. And Tippy Hedron 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 yeers when he volunteered at the Saint Louis Zoo. And I guess as he and Tippy Hedron 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.
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 nineteen sixty nine. It was a movie called Satan's harvest YEP. So you know, her career wasn't at his zenith after the Birds. 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 the reserve and a preserve.
Huh.
Sure, the PA is in parentheses before this, right.
They saw an abandoned house that had a pride of thirty 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.
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 Duct about a father and daughter veterinary team who worked with wildlife in East Africa. And get this, Chuck Daktari, which is if 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 like animal medical drama Doctari. That's a strange transition.
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 in 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 eye. It's not practical and it's like super dangerous and 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 dumb of an idea.
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 putting together, you know, knock this movie out in a year or something at the most. Yeah, that's not the case. This 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 Tippy Hedron's daughter, and she was like thirteen or fourteen when Neil came into the picture and they raised him from a cub into this four hundred pound family pet, fully grown male African lion Maine and all like sleeping in bed with Melanie Griffith at the time.
Yeah, And I mean this wasn't they didn't have a ranch out in the middle of nowhere, right, This was in the valley. This is in Sherman Oaks, in 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 nineteen seventy one ran a big photographic feature that
it was, you know, the very sensational thing. It showed all these amazing pictures of life with this four hundred 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.
No, and in retrospect, I think in her autobiography, Tippy Hedrin later wrote that she realized that this was stupid on belief to keep a four hundred pound male lion in the house around her family. And like there's pictures of her like lounging around with her head on the lions like chests and everything. They're both laying on the ground together. It is. It's quite a photo spread. And
it's also got that perfect like late sixties early seventies photo. Lookye, you just could not possibly recreate it looks like that. It's really cool. Yeah, 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, So, instead of getting rid of their actors and pets, they bought like a ranch in Actin, which is in Solidad Canyon. I guess a little north of Los Angeles. I'm sure you know where that is, right.
I had never heard of Actin. Actually it said it is forty miles north, but I think I'd heard of solid Ad Canyon.
But and it's new to me. I guess that's where you go when you want to raise lions, 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.
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 an 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 nineteen seventy six and live on the property and kind of get to work on that movie.
Yeah, that was about the year that they started with seventy six. 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.
That's right, we'll be right back, Chuck.
Before we get back into it, I have a tippy hedron fact that I found. She is the only actress to be directed by Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin, and Edward Jr.
Nice.
Yeah, that's quite a career.
Yeah, I like that Ben diagram.
So yeah, okay, so we're at the filming, the beginning of filming. The cameras are rolling, and the cameras just kept rolling.
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 Tippy Hedron.
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 you know, animal actors.
Yeah.
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 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 Exorcists, and he made a bunch of money off of that. He was essentially an investor in it, so we got an executive producer credit. And I guess some of the back plum is that what it's called back plumb, Yeah, the back end. Sure, the back end, but it's plummy.
Okay.
Anyway, he had a bunch of money from the Exorcists. They threw that into and they're like, Okay, this is gonna be such a cool movie that no one's ever done anything like this before. We're just gonna 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.
Yeah, it makes ror look pretty great by comparison it a title it does.
Yeah, you could see Noel like dropping his gin and Tonic thinking like I got it.
Yeah, 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 face 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.
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, huh. 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. 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 was like, you know what, I'll just do that too, right.
I'm sure they were like what is wrong with everybody? Between not raising financing or getting a star yeah, 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, I disagree, but we'll just walk right past it.
All right, that's fine.
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.
Okay, name one besides Herbie the Lovebug.
I like most anything clinice Wood's ever been in.
Okay, I don't fully agree with that, but okay.
Yeah, all right, I mean that's fine. You can nitpick clinice Wood anyway. Like I said, we don't need to debate this point, man.
It's just similar. Like the pot is just simmering almost over, but we're gonna walk past it, like you said.
Yeah, I think the point why this is bad is because he was not a talented human being. Early on, though, Melanie Griffith is like, I don't want to be in this movie. I think the direct quote was 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, or 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, ye, but reshot the scene so Melanie could be back in the film.
Yeah, that friend ned who went on to become an award winning Folly artist. And 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.
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. Yeah, 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 the size, so that they were just burning money on film stock.
Yeah, and like you said, the reason why they were just running all the times because the cats had zero training, Like you could not tell them like, okay, 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 man b bae bit 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.
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, right. 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 is 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.
I know, I felt bad about that confused them, and that's said. They were like, why are friends you know yelling?
Yeah, and you know we're we're going to get to some of the darker stuff later. This isn't all just like funny.
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 there's 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, 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.
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 one hundred and forty 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, 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. They're shooting it all at this compound for Africa there sort of deep outside Los Angeles, and people started getting hurt. I think seventy cast and
crew members ended up getting injuries. And in the 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 like give their name and then say kind of what their most major injury was on set.
Right, Probably the biggest one was Yon Debance. 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.
Yeah, two hundred and twenty stitches. But he would complete the film and before you start emailing us, I gotta stem the tide, Josh. Unfortunately, Yon Debant is very much known for being a big time action movie director. Oh yeah, yeah, 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 idea to quit his first movie here.
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, 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 this you know, 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, right, and you know they had some help, but they weren't staff like they needed to be.
No, And I think those are also the same crew that kind of came and went over time. They were like this, this is nutstude. I don't want to have anything to do with this.
Oh yeah, they didn't want their name on this thing because they saw where it was going.
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 fifty stitches. She also had to undergo cosmetic surgery to kind of reconstruct that part of her face. Yeah, that made it into the movie.
Yeah, that scene, I mean that was a very believable tax scene.
Yeah. 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.
Yeah, for sure, there were two cases of Gangreen from you know, getting bitten by infected cat mouths. Tippy Hedron was one. She got a lion bite, got Gangreen. I'm not sure where she got it, but she ended up getting skin grass. There was also a scene where she was riding on Timbo the elephant, and this animal wasn't used to being ridden and like have somebody like shouting and stuff like she was, 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 Gangreen.
Yeah, Tippy Hedron getting thrown from the elephant and breaking your 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. To 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 like a few years in your teens, and they had to kind of like deal with that as well. This is like reverse boyhood essentially.
Yeah, for sure. There was also a flash flood which damaged some fencing. This is nineteen seventy eight, 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 no animals were hurt in the filming of this, like only humans. But they recovered most of those animals, but allegedly the deputies there ended up having to shoot and kill three lions. Yeah, and there was also a situation where 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.
Right, And technically none of this happened during filming. But yeah, yeah, I think that's just part of a problem. When you have hundreds of like big cats all living together, that's not how they live. That flood you mentioned they had like twenty 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 and 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 Heeddron and Noel Marshall were so deep into this financially that they couldn't walk away. They had to finish this because it was 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, right, But I bet I know that. You know, they certainly had no chance of recovering any money if they stopped, and they knew that too, and they were close to being done. Like you said, they did finally finish in the fall of seventy nine. 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 you know, late seventies money, about seventeen million dollars, which
is almost what Raiders of the Lost Art cost. So they're definitely not getting their production value. And I'm sure a lot of that seventeen 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.
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I can't imagine that seventeen million dollars worth of production value made it into Roar from everything I've seen, you.
Know, I don't think seven hundred thousand dollars worth of production value except I guess Yandubont shooting some nice looking stuff probably for sure.
So they finally finished filming, they get it edited, it's all ready to go. They've like 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. They never got it in the US.
No, no release in the US.
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 if 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.
No, And there was a lot of buzz too. I read some of the press tour that Tippy Heedron was doing in nineteen seventy nine to help, you know, pump up the release of the movie, and like it was widely discussed. Apparently it was. It was shown widely in the UK and Ireland. But even all that, it was I think it grossed two million dollars worldwide. Yeah, so they lost fifteen million dollars 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.
That's right, let's stick our second break.
Yeah, yeah, all right, we'll be right back with a little bit more believe it or not about Roar right after this.
All right, we're back.
More about Roar, which by the way, was about one hundred 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.
Sure, but just loosely.
It was a plot about an eccentric American scientist who spent a few years living in Tanzania's where it was set and then having his family come out there, and you know, it was really about that simple, 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.
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. 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 an admirable one.
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 Tippy Hendrid 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. He said, Marshall doesn't quite seem aware of the forms he's using.
So it was just a big mess.
Yeah, big mess. I think that should be like the tagline, right, So yeah, I guess if you're like I got to see this, there are stuff, there are things you can see online, but you're just unless you're gonna show out a hundred bucks, you're not gonna see the whole movie. One of the cool things about this though, is from the outset, Tippy Heedron and Noel Marshall were not just about like, let's just make a bunch of money exploiting animals.
They one of their stated purposes of making war was to take some 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 Shambala, which is like they presented as a place of peace between animals and
humans where they can come together in harmony. 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.
Yeah, for sure, I mean that is when positive. They would get divorced about a year after this movie, and he continued to support the Shambala project even after that, which was a good thing. But I don't want to paint Marshall is 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, fourteen fifteen 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.
So I don't want to portray this as just like sort of a fun family project gone wrong.
Yeah. There was an interview with his son John around the time that this was re released by draft House Films in twenty fifteen 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 ror and he will always be known for Roor from what I can tell.
Yeah, for sure, that's his legacy.
In nineteen eighty five, it got a little bit more attention because the Today Show had Tippy Hedron on because she had written a book, her autobiography or at least about this, The Cats of Shambala, So she was on there promoting that, they showed clips from Roor 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. Yeah, came along, like you said, in twenty fifteen, 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.
Yeah. They 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 seventy members of the cast and crew were, and Tippy Hedron apparently was not at all happy about the I'm sure this portrayal, and the Roor Foundation asked 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 twenty seventeen, and then there's been reviews, especially after Alamo or the Draft House released it in twenty fifteen. 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.
Yeah, I think my favorite one is from Under the Radar, it said, based on his reputation alone, nineteen eighty one's Roar is the citizen Kane of films where actors were mauled by lions. That's pretty good.
Drew mcweeney also had a pretty memorable quote. They said that it feels like Walt Disney decided to make a snuff version of Swiss Family Robinson.
That's kind of on point.
Yeah, 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 Shambala Preserve is still around, The RAR Foundation is around, and they're accepting donations. I think they're down to like nine big cats now. 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 Tippy Hedron's still alive.
She's coming up on her one hundredth birthday in twenty thirty.
Well, I hope she doesn't listen to this.
I feel like we did it justice.
Yeah, which is exactly probably what she doesn't want to hear.
Okay, it's true. Well, if you're listening, Tippy, hats off to you. And since I did our annual hats off to Tippy Hedron, I just unlocked blistener mail.
For a second, I thought you're gonna say Tippy of the hat to you.
After all the times we've done that too, I can't believe we've never come up with that before.
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, So listen 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, right.
I wanted to share information on.
A company called man mang Gear m A n G Gear. They make SPF shirts and for every shirt they sell, they plan a mangrove tree.
Nice.
It's a nonprofit started by two brothers. And when you do this they send you a certificate the GPS coordinates of the location cool where your mangrove was planted. After listening to the episode, it couldn't help it share in case you wanted to do 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 maw to lick and
just go to mang gear dot com. That would be m A n G g e r dot com and check out those SPF shirts if you want to have a mangrove tree planet in your honor.
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.
I'm sure there's a website called mang gear that sells puba care shavers and stuff like that.
All right, 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 this like Robin did, you can send us an email to send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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