by Tippi Hedren
Less than two weeks after we got the incredible news about EMI and Banjiro Uemura, Luna, a four-year-old lion, decided to take advantage of a slightly ajar perimeter gate and go strolling off toward the railroad tracks and the northern mountains.
All of us went into emergency, drop-everything search mode. We had to find her, fast. It wasn’t just that she was one of ours and we loved her. We’d also discovered that there was no affordable way for us to carry insurance that would cover wandering big cats. If Luna attacked an animal or a person, we could easily be wiped out in a heartbeat. She wasn’t a “Knobhill graduate,” so none of us really knew what she might do if confronted while she was out on her own.
We were out all night, picking our way through rattlesnake terrain, spreading out behind trackers who were following her distinctive paw prints, hoping our flashlights would catch the glow of her almond-shaped eyes in the darkness. She was nowhere to be found.
By midday the next day there were about twenty of us involved in the search, most of us carrying walkie-talkies. We weren’t about to notify the authorities, which would have led to the arrival of press and TV crews, some of them in helicopters, compounding an already potentially dangerous situation.
We were also very aware of another frightening possibility—some of the residents in the area were proud, chest-beating, he-man hunters. If they got wind of a lion on the loose in their vicinity, they would have grabbed their rifles and fired up their four-wheelers in a race to hunt down poor Luna and mount her stuffed head above their fireplace.
We had to guard against any of them eavesdropping on our walkie-talkie citizen-band radio communications so they wouldn’t catch on to what we were searching for or where she might be located. We worked out a code, “Perfect Location,” as an alert to the rest of the search parties that Luna had been found.
The helicopter we hired scanned the land from overhead while the ground crew swelled to more than forty people. By nightfall of the second day we were frantic, knowing that a lion on the loose for three days with no food is a walking, desperate, five-hundred-pound killing machine.
The second night came and went, and I was on high alert for the crackle of a walkie-talkie or a call from a neighbor saying, “Are you by any chance missing a lion?” The stress was unbearable. My sister Patty was visiting from Oregon, and she was right by my side as the sun rose on another day of no news.
Finally, midmorning of the third day, the receiver I was manning in the CB station suddenly buzzed to life, and a voice came through to announce, “I’ve found the Perfect Location.”
Just as suddenly, the voice faded away before the searcher could identify himself or tell us where he was. I started frantically pushing all the switches on the receiver without a clue what any of them did, during which I collapsed into an uncontrollable fit of giggles—three nightmarish days, two sleepless nights, thousands of dollars for helicopter rental, Luna, by the grace of God, had finally been found, and I had no idea where, thanks to a couple of dead fifty-cent batteries.
Moments later a handler raced in to announce Luna’s location—she was under the road bridge, maybe three football fields away but still on our property. Noel and I had speculated that if one of the tigers were missing, they’d probably wander miles and miles away, but Luna, being a lion, would probably stay close to home. Sure enough, there she was, contentedly curled up in the cool, lush foliage by the river, camouflaged beneath the bridge and perfectly safe.
We were getting a truck ready to go retrieve her when Noel stepped up and said, “Don’t bother, I’ll just walk her down.”
He knelt beside the bridge where he and Luna could see each other and coaxed her with a simple “Come on, Luna, let’s go home.”
Having put us through quite enough drama for two and a half days, Luna anticlimactically strolled with Noel back to her compound, where her roommates ran to surround her with noises I swear sounded a lot like “So, tell us all about it. Where did you go? What did you do? Did you bring us anything?”
It was a disruption, to say the least, but we were relieved to have her back so that we could return to focusing on the film. I loved every minute of preproduction. It was exciting, stimulating, and involving. Between that and the animals and my ongoing work with the Vietnamese refugees, I woke up every single morning with a purpose, and to this day, that’s my idea of a life worth living.
Our “studio” in Soledad Canyon would never have been confused with Universal or Paramount. It was no-frills, but it worked. Noel had done a superb job of transforming the property into acres that looked like East Africa. The African house on the edge of the lake was ready for filming. The plywood support buildings—the camera, machine, and electrical shops; the editing rooms; the wardrobe space; and the kitchen/commissary to feed a hundred people—were finished. The animal support buildings, including the animal hospital and medication refrigerator, were up and running. The parking lot was transformed, just in case, into a paramedic helicopter pad. We lucked out and found an electrician who also happened to be a licensed paramedic, so we were as ready as we could possibly be for every eventuality.
Our cinematographer was Jan de Bont, who’d worked on such foreign hits as Keetje Tippel and Max Havelaar and was nominated for the German film Turkish Delight. He and his beautiful wife Monique van de Van, star of Keetje Tippel and Turkish Delight, lived in the mobile home up the road from ours, which made Jan available on a moment’s notice and gave him a three-minute commute to work on foot.
For still photography we hired a quiet, talented darkroom employee named Bill Dow, who’d printed scores of photos for Food for the Hungry. It didn’t bother us in the least that he’d never worked on a film set in his life or that he’d never taken still shots of big cats. He had exactly the right temperament to learn on the job and do whatever needed to be done without so much as glancing at a clock, and all these years later he’s a dear, cherished friend.
We were a nonunion shoot, which made the experienced professionalism of our camera, lighting, and sound people even more amazing. Our production manager, Charles “Chuck” Sloan, had an impressive television résumé, with the added bonus that he’d helped raise some of our big cats. With only a handful of exceptions, like our pigtailed Frank Tom, the crew had never been within miles of a big cat before.
A local girl named Alexandra Newman had come on board many months earlier to do routine chores with the animals. She arrived with no experience but ended up becoming a qualified vet technician. After demonstrating a natural affinity for the tigers and leopards, Alex became closely involved with the jaguars, the most dangerous animals in the world as far as I’m concerned, exquisitely beautiful and completely unpredictable.
Alex had loved and bottle-fed our two jaguars, Patricia and Henry, since they were infants. The three of them had a warm, comfortable friendship until one day, without warning, while Alex was changing the straw in his den, Henry suddenly decided he didn’t really like her after all. All black-velvet 175 pounds of him crouched and then sprang at her in one raging lunge. She managed to keep from being seriously mauled by holding up a small chain-link screen in front of her while she quickly escaped. From that day on, Henry reacted with sheer viciousness every time he saw her, even at a distance, and like me with Cherries, Alex would never go near him again.
We never did get to the bottom of what prompted Henry to turn like that on someone he’d known and been fond of since he was a cub, but in case his sister Patricia was as much of a ticking time bomb as he was, we gave both of the jaguars to a trusted, well-maintained zoo. Alex and I both sighed with relief as we saw their transport truck disappear down the canyon road.
We obviously needed a strong, reliable, smart, and fearless team of handlers, and we’d recruited a few of them from the maintenance and fencing crews around the property. Darryl Sides, for example, became not just a recruit but graduated to foreman of our handlers when I saw him scale a fourteen-foot-tall chain-link fence in two lightning-fast upward r
eaches, as if there were a monkey in his recent lineage, to rescue a maintenance man who’d accidentally strayed into the lake compound.
Mike Vollman had left a Midwestern carnival, come home to California, and joined our fence crew. Within a couple of weeks he was an apprentice handler and went on to become a skilled handler and trainer.
Noel recruited Rick Glassey and Steve Miller, who’d been working in Marine World’s Tiger Moat as trainers, to be bit players in water and attack scenes. Their experience had taught them that tigers can start out having a great time with sparring matches in the water and then instantly escalate into deadly fights, and casting even the most willing actors and actresses for those minor parts was out of the question.
Our animal cast now numbered 132 big cats, one elephant, three aoudad sheep, and a collection of ostriches, flamingos, marabou, storks, and black swans for background. The birds were Joel’s exclusive responsibility. He wanted no part of the big cats, but he loved those birds, and since he was our set dresser in general, it made perfect sense that he would “dress” the outdoor sets as impeccably as he dressed the indoor ones.
And then, of course, there was our human cast. Noel, our leading man, writer, director, producer, etc., etc., etc., made up for his lack of acting experience with his experience with our animals.
I did triple-duty as actress/coproducer/costumer. It took four days of shopping to assemble the cast wardrobe, and usually shopping for clothes pre-filming is a fun, exciting adventure. Unfortunately, there would be no gowns and tuxedoes and fabulous shoes and handbags for Roar. We were strictly going for a drab, practical, wash-and-wear look, or as I came to think of it while I shopped, the “polar opposite of Edith Head” wardrobe.
Jerry Marshall, son Jerry in the film, had done a few TV commercials.
John Marshall, son John in the film, had some acting experience on TV episodes and commercials.
My cherished Melanie Griffith, daughter Melanie in Roar, was in the process of building an extraordinary acting career. She was awesomely talented, awesomely beautiful, and sometimes awesomely impossible for me to figure out.
Our only other principal actor, playing the role of Hank’s/Noel’s assistant zoologist, was Kyalo (pronounced “Chaalo”) Mativo, an authentic African from the Kamba tribe in Kitui Province, Kenya. His mother gave birth to him on a dirt road while walking home with a bundle of thatching grass on her head. He was on a four-year film scholarship at UCLA, had written and directed for the Voice of Kenya TV station, and had acted in a couple of short German films. Mativo was deathly afraid of the big cats, so he bravely embraced the role but instantly vanished from the set the moment his scenes were over.
Finally the night before filming arrived.
If I’d been acting the next day I would have been studying my lines, worrying about getting enough sleep and how my face and hair and wardrobe would look.
But Noel was starting with some staged lion fights. I wouldn’t be needed on camera.
I took a long, peaceful walk that evening. I stopped at each compound and at the elephant barn to say hello, preoccupied with what was about to happen and what it had taken to get here.
We had months of dealing with live lions and tigers ahead of us, with no idea how they’d behave with the excitement of so much equipment and so many unfamiliar people around them. A lot of the big cats would be interacting with each other for the first time. So many things could go wrong, with no way of preparing for them beyond what we’d already done, no way of predicting . . . and so many scenes involved my precious daughter being no more than an arm’s length away from harm. John and Jerry, too, of course, but Melanie . . .
We’d been told for years by big-cat experts that we were out of our minds, that there were perfectly good reasons no one had ever taken on a film like this before. Were we arrogant or delusional to believe that we could and should be the first, that we had some special kind of expertise or luck or magic? Who exactly did we think we were to risk all these lives—our crew’s, our animals’, ours, and most of all, our children’s—for what really amounted to nothing more than a very, very expensive home movie?
What were we thinking?
What if those experts were right?
What if this film really was too dangerous to make?
Twelve
Roll film.”
With those two simple words, words we’d worked toward for six long years, Roar was officially under way. It seemed as if there should be band music and balloons and confetti, but instead there was just an awareness of all the money that was on the line: EMI’s, Banjiro Uemura’s, almost a million dollars of our own, a San Diego investor’s—the list of people who were counting on us went on and on. We had to make this work, in spite of the fact that the only thing we could predict about making this movie was the absolute unpredictability of our real, four-legged stars.
Less than a week into filming Casey, of all lions, bit Noel in the hand. It was a serious puncture, piercing Noel’s palm, and we were off to Palmdale Hospital. It wasn’t a rage bite on Casey’s part, it was pure frustration and confusion from all the unfamiliar activity going on around him. Our fault, not his.
Noel’s wound was treated and he hurried back to Soledad Canyon, intending to get back to the set to pick up where filming left off, but the pain from the spreading infection made it impossible. With our director and male lead unable to work, we had to shut down for a week.
Almost since the beginning of filmmaking, crews have used small sandbags to anchor the bases of lights, reflectors, cameras, and other equipment that have to remain perfectly stationary while an outdoor scene is shot. No problem. We were prepared with a generous supply of small canvas bags filled with sand. What was a problem, which we couldn’t have anticipated in a million years, was that some of the lions decided to become wildly possessive of the sandbags, dragging them on camera in the middle of scenes and fiercely defending them from anyone who dared to come within fifty feet of their treasured bag of sand. If reshoots weren’t so expensive, we might have found it hilarious.
A week after Noel’s latest hospital trip, Casey got into a fight with Tongaru, one of our most notorious bullies, apparently a battle for dominance over the film crew, Soledad Canyon, and the universe in general. Everyone instantly stopped what they were doing, terrified. Even the handlers froze in place. A fight between two grown lions is one of the loudest, scariest, ugliest phenomena in the animal world. They typically start by circling each other, heads slightly cocked to the side, making piercing eye contact. Then one or both of them rise on their hind legs, “arms” outstretched, to make themselves appear as huge and intimidating as possible, manes seeming to stand on end and framing wide-open bloodred mouths, canines bared. Their growls and roars come from deep in their bellies, rumbling and metallic-sounding, sending ice up the spine of the witnesses. They lower themselves to stalk and circle each other again, almost in slow motion, before one of them lunges, sharp claws ready to impale the other, and a fierce skirmish begins, with each of them trying to pin their opponent to the ground and sink their teeth into their opponent’s throat. This frantic scuffle to stay on top and keep from being pinned is accompanied by a lot of vicious biting, clawing, screaming, and rumbling—sights and sounds that haunt anyone unfortunate enough to be nearby when they happen. There’s nothing you can do but watch, hold your breath, and pray that neither of them will be seriously injured, which they seldom are. Only someone with a death wish would try to separate them.
It probably lasted a few minutes at most, but it seemed like hours. Tongaru won, and poor Casey retreated, his feelings more damaged than his body, thank God.
I still don’t know if it was that sudden violent outburst, or if it had just been building for a long time, but shortly after the Tongaru vs. Casey heavyweight championship match, Melanie sat me down and said, “Mom, I don’t want to come out of this with half a face.” She was pulling out of Roar.
I didn’t blame her. Not one bit. I was probab
ly even a little relieved. Whether she was afraid for her face, which could have been disfigured in the blink of an eye and destroyed her acting career, or for her life, I didn’t want my girl afraid, especially not for a film she was involved in only because of me. I didn’t try for one second to try to change her mind, as if that would have been possible anyway. Neither did Noel, John, and Jerry. We hadn’t shot any of Melanie’s scenes yet, so we could replace her—not easily, since her replacement would need to have the guts to work with big cats and the agent and parents who’d even allow it. But this is a town full of young actresses who would do almost anything to be in a film, probably even the “almost anything” this role would require.
We ended up hiring a young, courageous actress named Patsy Nedd, who’d been a friend of Melanie’s since childhood. We knew her, we liked her, and she and Melanie had played with the lion cubs together on Knobhill. That hardly made her an expert on big-cat behavior, but she was unafraid and willing to learn, and we were lucky to have her.
Two weeks later we were shooting a sequence in which the terrified family flees to a rowboat to escape from the wild cats.
Our intrepid Jan de Bont decided he wanted a pit dug so that he could stand in the pit with his main camera lens on the same level as the surface of the lake. Then he’d pull the camera back and have the cats jump over him as they rushed to attack us. Noel insisted that Jan and his assistant wear football helmets, for obvious reasons, which they agreed to, so one of our prop guys drove into town to buy helmets while a few of the guys dug a pit to Jan’s specifications.
A green tarp was retrieved to put over the pit, with some shrubbery around it to help camouflage it. Jan, in his helmet, climbed into the pit with his camera, under the tarp, but just before Noel announced, “Roll film,” Jan discovered that the helmet prevented him from getting to the eyepiece of the camera, so he removed it.
Cameras were rolling when along came Cherries, my old nemesis, who looked down to see this mysterious round object moving around under the tarp. What fun for any cat, and especially for her! No one had loved pouncing on moving toes under blankets more than Cherries when she lived on Knobhill, or had a greater time playing with bowling balls in her compound. She froze in place for less than a second to watch what was now Jan’s unprotected head protruding from beneath the tarp, and then she pounced.