Original subtitles

I was 28 years old and going on 18.

Coming from Sweden, so it's like all in a

fog back there, you know.

The way I got involved was that,

you know, Ed Pressman

had this idea of making a film out of a toy line,

you know, the Masters of the Universe.

And he needed somebody to play He-Man,

which was like

the main toy guy.

And

I remember there was a...

There was like a

Macy's Day parade in New York, in

Manhattan, and that's the first time I met

Pressman, I think.

I went on

one of the floats as He-Man, you know.

So it was kind of slightly embarrassing to

sign on playing a toy, right?

All I remember is going to Radio City Music

Hall in New York and it was full of kids

with these little

fluorescent swords going,

I have the power.

And I came out there and it was kind of

almost a shock how

how huge this thing was, you know.

And I think I met Menaka maybe in New York

at that time,

because I have a sort of

a vision of him there, and I have another

vision in Cannes, which I think was 1986,

when he

announced a picture, when he's doing all

the talking,

Oh, Dolph would be

huge, the film will be huge, you know.

And I just made a movie with Stallone, he

said, It will be bigger than Stallone,

you know, it was like all this hype, and I

was just sitting there like kids,

Okay.

I know it was a huge deal.

I mean, it was a pretty big deal.

But Rocky Ford had been a big deal for me,

because it was a huge hit. And

I did a worldwide press tour, and here came

He-Man on the heels of that,

sort of an American hero from the Russian

bad guys.

It was a big switch for me.

You know, when I was a kid, I was 28 years old.

You know, I was dealing with a lot of

personal issues and fame and all of that

stuff at the same time.

So it was just a whirlwind for me.

The Menachem and Yorum were part of it, you

know, sort of.

It's not as dramatic as when you think back,

but when you're in it, you kind of go from

day-to-day and you're just trying to do

your work.

I think I was a little bit reluctant

because it was a toy line and

I was, you know,

in those days, making movies

from toys and

cartoons wasn't quite as hip as it is now.

So, yeah, I was a bit reluctant.

And also, I think...

You know, seeing how the guy was dressed,

which is basically,

you know, a stamp-sized sort of

a loincloth.

I thought it was,

I don't know.

I don't know how this is going to look.

I'm going to have to train a lot.

That's what I thought. I

felt a little stupid doing it, dressing up

in a He-Man costume and

saying I have the power.

I was wearing like the,

you know, the fake, what you call the

extensions.

And

yeah,

I did.

You know, like I just came off Rocky IV

with Stallone

and a lot of other good actors in that

picture.

Yeah, I felt a little, this is my first

starring movie.

I know I was a bit hesitant about it,

whether it should work or not. I'd

done one picture, you know, like a

supporting role, like your fifth lead or

something. And

now I gotta

carry a movie playing an American

character, which was just basically

straight out of

college.

chemical engineering major and

karate champion.

It wasn't like I came out of

New York Film Academy.

So it was tough for me.

That was part of frustration.

I wasn't a big sci-fi fan, so

all the stuff, the little dwarf with a

little key and all of that.

I mean, Gary Goddard was very, he's one of

those childlike kind of directors,

believes everything.

But for me, it was a bit weird, all this

stuff, because I just played in Rocky,

Rocky 4, which is quite, kind of

hands-on, no pun intended, sort of,

realistic picture.

So it was kind of, it felt strange to me,

all the armor and all plastic stuff.

Anytime, you do those type of movies,

especially in those days, because it

wasn't,

The CGI wasn't as good.

You were more nervous about that. Now,

if you do something, you know it can be

fixed in post,

FIP, fixed it in post. Or

anytime you see a green screen now, you're

kind of, oh, it's going to look really cool.

Whereas in those days, once you--

once they said, some mobile, fix that

later, or we'll

just fire this ray gun, and we're going to

put the flash in there, you're like, oh, no.

You see

the old Flash Gordon series in front of you

with the cheesy

effects and all of that.

because I wasn't wearing any clothes.

It was hard to find a guy my size

who was built like me who could do stunts.

I think there was somebody, but

anytime,

the big screen, anytime you were any closer than,

extremely wide, you could see it wasn't me. So

yeah, I remember there was one scene where

in the picture, I think I go, I'm chasing

somebody, I'm being chased, and I

used my sword to knock out this window and I jump.

in the movie onto this disc, this kind of

hovering disc. But

of course, the way we shot it was,

I go

knock the

window out, which has got candy glass.

And those days, it was all in one take.

And I was like,

you got to do this yourself.

And then there was a platform underneath, right?

And it was late at night, and I did it

first take.

And I knocked out the glass, and I jump, and I'm

halfway in the air.

It's like three stories up,

concrete.

And there's no, there are no boxes, there's

no mats, like nobody's put those.

Now usually there should be something in

case you miss. And

I'm like, oh shit, you know, there's

nothing there.

And I made it to the platform, but I got

pretty upset that day 'cause

had I missed, you know, I would have been

sitting here.

Regarding production, the average budget

for film in 1986 was $6 million.

Independent picture and this is 22

so

obviously it was quite a big movie for

those days Yeah,

I think rocky was like 30 rocky foot was

like 30 or 28 million dollars.

I just give you size of scale

So I think it was shot mostly it was based

in Culver Studios in Culver City

where they shot

Gone with the wind was done at the facade

of the mansion is there and all that so it

was it was um

I did a lot of sword training I did a lot of

costume fittings, and I worked on the

script a bit with Gary.

I think we had a lot of script problems, if

I remember, a lot of story problems.

We shot about 50 nights in a row

in

Whittier,

hometown of Richard M.

Nixon, by the way, if you guys want to go

check it out.

Anyway,

we shot there for 50 nights in a row,

and I believe it was a record before

Scorsese did After Hours,

the most, you know,

consecutive night shoots, so it was quite

tough for us,

for us actors, especially the guys wearing,

especially guys like Beast Man and these

guys in full-on makeup.

You know, I did my best and I thought

up to a certain point in production, it

looked really good, but I think even

at my young age, I started feeling like,

you know, they were cutting some corners in

production, especially I could tell on set,

you know, shooting

towards the end of the picture, you know,

as usual, but

Not as usual, but it's classic.

Towards the end, you're running out of

money, you're trying to

cut the corners.

And I think we shot

pretty much in sequence, so

the end was shot last, unfortunately.

Right towards the end of the final

showdown with the He-Man and Skeletor,

yeah, and that big set.

I think that's where

I recall

the ending was supposed to be,

I think he was supposed to be

I was supposed to

cut him and he goes flying off into space

through some portal of some sort.

But we came in the beginning, but

that took too long.

So he just kind of fell down in the pit,

the bottomless pit.

That's what he ended up.

I know Gary was quite frustrated.

I mean, he was

probably about 40.

I was 28,

like I said, going in 18 and coming from

Sweden and all that.

So

I wasn't involved much in that, but I did

feel the frustration from the director, I

remember that.

Obviously, I knew towards the end that

they had a lot of problems shooting it, and

Gary was arguing,

and Gary Goddard, anytime I was in the

office, and

he complained a bit to me, but he knew I

wasn't gonna do anything, I couldn't do

anything, so

he was arguing with the producers, and I think

the premiere,

I can't quite recall if it was in LA or if

it was in New York, but

I think it was disappointing, and I was

disappointed,

Because

Rocky IV was a huge hit, and this is my

second picture, and it didn't do that well.

But I did do a tour for it, I think.

I went to Europe, I went to England, I went

to Japan.

So I just kind of kept going at the time.

It wasn't that bad.

I think that

it

did hurt my career a little bit, I think,

in some respects, because I came off such a

big hit.

But

as always, you just got to keep going, so I

didn't really reflect on it too much.

I can't remember the premiere.

I think I blocked it out.

But

I don't think I was--

I wasn't that happy about it, because I'd

been to the Rocky IV premiere, which was a

huge hit

just before. But

when you're young, you think everything is

going to go up, up, up.

But life isn't like that.

It takes

10 years before some movies stand out above

others.

And I think

Masters for some reason stands out a little

bit, even though some people hate it and

people make fun of it,

but other people love it. So,

you know, there's,

yeah,

I think it's okay.

It's not a bad movie.

I mean, people seem to enjoy it.

It's kind of,

it's sort of

childish and entertaining and,

you know, some of the effects aren't that

great, but I mean, for a younger audience it's

quite good.

Maybe it was marketed wrong or maybe they

didn't,

maybe they didn't really,

release it the way it should have been

released.

I'm not quite sure, because I wasn't

involved. But

like I said,

some movies,

just looking at my own pictures,

some movies have stood the test of time.

Some

nobody gives a shit about, basically,

and they're never mentioned again.

And Masters is one that people do mention,

you know, so they did have something. Like

people who saw it as kids kind of remember

it and it had some kind of place in their

childhood or whatever.

Maybe it played too young.

I mean, Superman had a certain

sophistication.

You had Brando and you had,

you know,

Gene Hackman, and you know, there was

another level

of sophistication to the story, whereas the

He-Man fans were kids, like,

I guess five to 10, five to

13,

preteens, right? So

maybe in those days,

like for instance, now Cars or one of those movies

play a lot to those young kids, and

they're marketed to the kids,

but maybe in those days they didn't do that.

They thought that that picture would play

to an adult audience, to grownups, but it

didn't.

So maybe

had it been released now,

it's slightly better

post-production and so forth, it can

probably do pretty well.

Up until recently, I got two daughters, now

they're teenagers, but up until recently,

the only film that I'd

let them see was Masters of the Universe, 'cause

there is no blood. In

some of my other movies, there's a lot of blood,

severed heads and all of that good stuff.

I think these guys, you know, the Cannon

Boys were just very,

they were very charismatic and very

ambitious,

you know, guys who just came to Hollywood

to take it over in a quick kind of quick

sort of way, not,

perhaps not

playing by all the rules, but

sometimes that works,

you know, and it worked for a while for

these guys too, you know.

Masters was their big shot, and even though

it didn't reach

perhaps the heights they'd wished for when

the Star Wars and

You know, so forth.

I think it's still

a decent picture compared to some of the

others they made.

Masters certainly, I

think, beat Superman 4 and watchability and

over the top, I don't know. I

don't want to say anything about

my boss, Mr.

Sly Stallone, but

that wasn't a bad picture.

But then he probably stayed on top of

everything and he was in there,

you know, tweaking it so that it didn't

really go off the charts, you know.

I have kind of a fondness for the picture

now with time.

Because I was a kid and, you

know,

it was my first starring movie, I think

there's some kind of

sweet qualities to it and Courtney Cox was

in it and some of the actors were kind of

fun to work with and even though I

was frustrated doing it, I think it's still

a picture that, you know,

a lot of people enjoy.

Gary, do you recall your first impressions of

either Golan or Globus? Yes.

First time I met them, they were both very

welcoming and very gregarious and

I think

pretty much

fit the image that they had

at the time of the

Go-Go Boys of Hollywood.

They were very busy making a lot of movies.

If you ask me, the image before I met them

was that they were very

aggressive and very

strong-willed and

very busy making a lot of movies.

And

their reputation was that they were very

gruff and very,

they were very,

I guess their reputation was that they were very

aggressive and busy and didn't have a lot

of time for details, just wanted to get

things going.

And they didn't mince words.

That was what I thought before I met them.

When I met them the first time, which was

actually with Ed Pressman,

They were great. Very,

very warm, very gentlemanly, and I think

our meeting lasted all of 30 minutes.

But we went with both of them,

and

I think they wanted to meet me and be sure

that I could handle the job.

And we had a good, pleasant meeting, and

everything went off from there.

So my first encounter was actually very,

very good.

I think that they were perceived as

two

guys that sincerely liked making movies

that

maybe were a little too much into,

you know,

volume instead of quality.

But

in the process, they

started a lot of people, a lot of

first-time directors, first-time writers.

A lot of people were elevated to producers.

A lot of people have gone on to have good

careers in the industry.

And so,

I

mean, at that time, I think studios were

making about, I don't

know, 12 to 15 movies a year each, maybe,

if that.

They were making 40 films, 40.

These guys were just going.

Some of them were a million and 2 million,

and some of them were 3 million, some were

8 million, but they were just making a ton

of movies.

So I think they had their own area of

respect. I think

the thing that really hurt them with the

industry was when he made,

Menahem so desperately wanted to make

over the top with Sylvester Stallone.

And Sylvester Stallone didn't want to do

the movie, but his agent said the classic

agent line, well, don't say no, just give

him a price.

What would you do it for?

And

I think if I remember correctly, it was $15

million.

And no actor

had been paid $15 million at the time.

And I think the one thing the industry

resented was when he made that

deal,

every other star said,

yeah,

I want that deal.

I want the $15 million deal.

And that began the

escalation of

huge salaries for stars.

And I'm not saying that's good or bad.

I'm just saying I think at that point, the

industry was probably not

happy at that particular

decision.

But

I think they had their own place in the

Hollywood firmament that

everyone knew, and I think they respected

them for that. But it

was definitely in a different niche.

If you're saying,

were they ever on a level

of Warner Brothers?

No, of course not.

Canon was in a different kind of thing.

It was a different kind of movie.

It was a different kind of

operation.

I definitely believe that they had got to

the point where

probably Menahem as a filmmaker,

wanted to be respected.

And I think,

I mean, they knew what their reputation was.

They knew that everyone saw them as kind of,

yeah, you guys do a lot of stuff, but

where's the quality? And I think that

they wanted to do some

projects that not only would

bankroll their company,

but would bring them a little more respect.

I mean, I think that was their intention.

You can argue with how they went about

executing it, but I think that was their

intention.

And by the way,

I don't

believe in my gut that

the two of them ever

set out to make a bad movie.

I think they were sincere, that they were

trying to make good movies within the

framework of the

genres and the budgets and the schedules

that they had to deal with.

And I think they were trying to get

a little bit out of the

assembly line factory process and make

better pictures.

But I think timing and financing just

caught up with them.

None of us knew when we started Masters of

the Universe

that they were

beginning

some severe financial problems.

And when we made our movie, we found out

midway through.

So

I would say this, that when

we met them,

yes, they love movies.

They were probably in pre-production

production or post-production on probably

40 pictures at the time.

I'm not kidding.

They were

slammed.

And you saw schedules all over the walls

and posters.

There certainly was

a hustle and bustle to the Canon Studios

when I arrived.

But I think there was an underlying tension

with

with both of them, actually. And

later, what

that was, is they were obviously,

they had a lot of things going, a lot of

money was

moving, and

I think the beginnings

of what was going to become a major problem

later were probably happening about the

time that we started Masters of the

Universe.

Ed Pressman had the property, he believed

in the property.

He had written, he had had

a treatment developed by David Odell.

And

he was shopping to the-- actually, he

finished the screenplay, take that back.

He had the screenplay done, and he had

Dolph Lungren attached.

So that was the package.

Here's the script, here's this.

And I came in as the director.

Now, I don't know if he shopped around

before that, but

I had directed

a very successful live stage special

effects production at Universal Studios

called Conan,

the

Spectacular Adventures of Conan.

No, Conan, a Sword and Sorcery Spectacular,

that was it.

And he had seen it.

He was impressed with it and got in touch

with me. And

I had been looking to direct a film.

I'd written a few screenplays by then.

I'd written

the infamous Tarzan the Eight Man

for John and Bo Derek.

And

I was doing a project at MGM, I think. And

so I met with Ed and I said, I'm really a

director and

this is right up my alley.

I understand this stuff.

And

Ed said, I think you are too.

And so he attached me and he got Howard

Kazanjian in to be the line producer.

And that was a package that he took to

Warner Brothers.

Now, I don't know who else he shopped it to, but

Warner Brothers wanted to do it.

They were ready to do it.

But they said,

we're only going to do this for $15

million.

And I think the budget that Howard had come

up with at the time was

$19 million, I think. And

so

they really wouldn't budge and Ed wouldn't budge.

And so we left Warner Brothers.

And I think the next landing was

Cannon after that.

We went to Cannon.

Ed says, how do you feel? I said, well,

I don't want it to look like

a typical Canon movie.

And by that, I mean there was a certain

look to most Canon films.

And what I found out was,

this is going to sound very strange, but

they had a deal with a film processing firm

in New Jersey.

And all of their film got processed there.

So it didn't really matter who your DP was,

even though one picture might have a little

different lighting look and stuff on the other.

They all had this kind of,

I would say, low budget texture to them.

And I didn't want that for Masters of the

Universe. And

so I convinced them that we needed to go,

he did say, Mohammed said, this has to be,

it's got to be a big film.

It's got to look like all the other big films.

So I said, well, we need to get Richard

Edlund.

He's recently left Boss and he's started

his own company.

Let's go to Richard Edlund.

He'll do the effects.

The effects have to be great.

But I knew, because I know a lot about

effects,

that in those days, pre-digital,

they shot in 65.

to get the quality effects they shot in 65. And

I knew eventually

someone would find out that the 65

millimeter shots wouldn't really cut

with

the normal lab stuff they do. And 65

could only be done at two labs at that

time, MGM lab and one other one.

So

down the road,

after all the contracts were done and we

were in production,

they found out that they couldn't really

develop our film

at their normal labs because it wouldn't

cut with the 65.

So I think we're the only Canon film

where the entire film was processed through

MGM labs.

And so we have a very, very

great

quality

in terms of the look of the film itself.

And

we have a different feeling to the film.

So part of that was that, because we didn't

fall under their bulk.

They had a huge, as you can imagine, with

this New Jersey developing place, the bulk

film rate they must have had.

But

we went with MGM, and

they had to pay MGM that.

And then the other thing was Richard Edlin.

Richard Edlin

was

not a cheap date

on the effects side.

When Ed Pressman was going to start this

picture with Warner Brothers,

very critical difference, one year

difference, but what difference a year can make.

Masters of the Universe toy sales at Mattel

were at their absolute peak.

A year later,

when Canon started,

they'd already started to decline.

And a year later, when the film actually

came out,

the Masters of the Universe toy line was

way down.

So

that two year difference

made a big difference in terms of where

Masters of the Universe was from the time

it started to the time it

got made to the time it got released.

Oh, at its peak, it was

a billion dollar line for Mattel. It was

phenomenal.

But that's because

Mattel fell into inadvertently a pretty

cool thing.

There were no

shows, no animated shows on syndication

other than retreads

of old shows.

And

Filmation and

Mattel came up with this idea of taking

this He-Man show, making this He-Man show,

this toy line they were going to do,

and doing an animated show, and they just

funded 65 episodes, and they just went for it.

And so suddenly there was this new

programming.

It had no competition.

There were no other shows on like that.

And to say that it caught fire would be an

understatement.

The TV show was a hit, the

toy line was a hit,

and it just grew and grew and grew and grew.

Because you have to understand, the other

toy companies,

even when they saw the model, it takes

about two to three years to catch up.

You've got

to say, oh, let's do a whole show and let's

do a whole new line.

They got to

do tools, they got to make it, they got to

manufacture it.

So they really kind of held

the market until Ninja Turtles came along.

And that was the next big

big toy line.

And

so again,

I think had Ed made the film with Warner

Brothers a year earlier

and the movie had come out, even if it was

the exact same movie, if it was the exact

same movie, we'd have done probably double

or triple the business

just because of the phenomenon.

But

we came out

when it had pretty much

run its course.

Contractually, Mattel had approvals on,

I think they say they didn't have

approvals, they had vetoes.

Either way, they had control over how he

looked.

Like for instance, I actually wanted to put

more costume on him.

I thought he was a little too bare for,

but they showed me the toys and the toys

were, I did add, I added the shoulder pads

and I added the cross belt. And

at first they were really, no, this is how

he looks. And

I said, this is a live action movie.

You're gonna have a guy running around in

his underwear.

I mean, basically, if that's really what

you're saying,

can I not take some liberties here?

And so finally I got them to buy off on the

shoulder pads, the cape,

the shoulder straps with the sword thing,

the high boots.

So

at least he didn't look like

he was a guy in

red underwear running around.

Because that's,

if you look at the early toys, that's

basically, it's got a belt and a leotard, I mean,

a trunks and that's it, some boots.

So

they had

pretty much approvals on everything.

And

when I, we had done a rewrite or two with

David, and

I think we did a rewrite with Steve

Tolkien at one point, I think.

There were some big battles, of course,

and

it came back,

he man, he can't kill anybody, he can't

hurt anybody, he can't this, he can't that,

like,

okay,

this is an action movie, and this is a live

action movie,

and what are you saying? He can fight

people, but he can't like

hurt anyone,

And

so a lot of people go, why do they have

these blasters? Because that's like Star Wars.

Well, first of all, the whole concept of

Masters is actually high technology with

sword and sorcery.

So actually, you don't have those kind of

limits.

But the main reason is because

with a sword, he would have to run someone

through or

dismember

something like that.

But with a blaster, you can go,

pass, and someone

falls.

So

Mattel was easier with that concept than

the other.

The second thing is,

Why do you have all these guys? It was

weird.

We got this--

a lot of people said that we made

the

warriors look like

Star Wars. But

the warriors in Star Wars,

the sentries, were all white.

Ours were all black.

And ours actually had more of a

German kind of Nazi helmet design to it.

But anyway, all that aside,

we portrayed them more as robots.

That's why they spark out when they get hit

and stuff.

because

I got Mattel to buy off, well, if these

guys are robots, can he smash the robots?

Yes, he can smash robots as long as he's

not killing any people.

I said, okay.

So

a lot of these things that are in the movie

came out as we tried to solve these

problems so that he could have battles and

he could have his sword and he could have

his blaster

and he could do away with some of these

armies of villains.

So

they had approval and everything.

Like at the very end,

although I think ultimately I just ignored it,

For instance, when he goes,

when Skeletor becomes

like a god, right?

The line,

that whole monologue I wrote in that

monologue finished with,

I

am

a god,

right? And he transforms.

And we got back notes from the tell.

He can't say that.

He can say, I am as a god, but he can't say

he is a god because that might offend

some of our customers.

I'm like,

really? I mean,

he's not saying he's the god.

He's not God with a capital G.

He's just saying he is

a god.

Is that really?

You can't believe.

And I had to film it both ways.

But luckily I got in my way because it's

not the same.

I am

a god or

I am as a god.

It's not the same.

So I think ultimately

they agreed with that.

But it got down to that kind of thing. So

I could sit here and go endlessly over all

the approvals and things were necessary.

But here's the funny story.

Now remember

on the context of when we started this,

He-Man was like this.

And when they got the deal, it was starting

to go down.

So the studio really wanted this thing to work.

Now, by the time we're making the movie,

their

third or fourth quarter toy sales, probably

fourth quarter, because Christmas is the

big quarter.

So those sales had come in and they

realized it had tanked.

So I get this panic call from John

Williams.

I think this must have been in

March or April.

We shot that thing, I think, if we started

in March or April, shot through the summer

or something like that.

So it was around that time.

I think we were just starting shooting, or

about to start, or we had just started

shooting.

And John Williams was the Mattel executive.

He said,

we have to talk.

We have to have a meeting right away.

I said, well, can't you just tell me? No, I

got to see him person.

I said, OK, so we had a meeting.

And

so

We have this meeting.

Now, this is the same executive who had

before said, you can't do this, you can't

do that.

And John's a good guy, so I'm not putting

him down, okay? And I had a good

relationship with

him.

But I love

the change.

So

a year before,

now we're heading into production, or we're

in production,

and they get their sales figures.

Now, I don't

know this, but now we have the meeting, and

John goes, we just got

the sales figures,

and

the sales figures are down.

And this film has to be a hit, this house film.

And I said,

Okay, John, but you've seen the movies.

I mean, you guys say he can't do this, and

he can't fight, and he can't battle. You can

do whatever you want.

You can kill, you can maim, there can be

blood, nudity, I don't care.

It has to be a hit.

So I

thought that was funny.

I said, well, you know, it's a little late,

but okay, that's good to know

that we can have more

freedom to make the movie.

I'm known for doing family entertainment in

whatever I do, but I

really do

prescribe to what Walt Disney once said, is

I don't really make movies for kids.

I make them for the parents

and I put things in that I know the kids

will like.

So

I tried to push it up a little bit because

I really felt if you're really going to

make a movie

for the kids that you perceive is the

market for this,

then

you

may find that no one comes.

And so if anything, I guess I've been

accused of being kind of halfway in the middle

because

I did have Mattel on me.

There were a lot of

very severe kind of things with Mattel that

you can't do this and you can't do that and

you can't do that.

And

yet we wanted to make a movie that would

reach out to, I would say to the, I wanted

to make a film, A, that I was proud of, B,

that I would go see,

and C, one that would

find an audience not only with the kids who

had He-Man, but hopefully Widen, and also

one for that the parents showed up

They might actually say,

wow,

this is a lot better than I thought it would.

I didn't want to have a Super Mario

Brothers, or I didn't want to have a film where

you're just making this kind of

sugar-coated version of

a toy film.

So we strived hard to

elevate it.

The original

version

with everything in was scaled back in

any number of ways.

In particular, I think the biggest, a lot

of it I think we could live.

I'm very flexible.

I can move to some degree.

However,

we actually scouted locations in Iceland

for the opening scene

and we were going to shoot it in Iceland.

And of course, what we don't know is that

while we're in Iceland, canon financially

is beginning to fall apart, but we have no

idea this.

So we get back from Iceland and they say no

Iceland.

And we had scouted some unbelievable

locations.

I mean, right out of Lord of the Rings stuff.

I mean, big,

beautiful landscapes and stuff like that.

So we went to a place after that called

Craters of the Moon in Sun Valley, Idaho,

which was different,

not as epic

in the Lord of the Rings kind of way,

but still very interesting landscape that

would have been a lot of caves and caverns

and a lot of interesting formations,

very

otherworldly and kind of cool that we could

have built some

really great mat shots around.

And

the funny thing was that I

said the typical thing when we started,

when they said we couldn't do Iceland, I

said, I'm not going to shoot this

at Vasquez Rocks.

We're just not going to do that, right?

And

so

we get back from, and we figure, okay,

Craters and Moon's fine.

I said, this is great.

I have pictures of us on the scout and just

beautiful places, light shafts of light

coming into these caves and things.

And

we get back and now they say, you can't go

there anywhere.

You're not going to location, you have to

shoot in LA because

And again, we don't really understand, but

we're beginning to get the idea that there

are financial problems,

And I said again, I said, we can't shoot in LA.

I'm not going to shoot in Vasquez Rocks.

And you just can make the jump cut to us on

Vasquez Rocks.

By the way,

Vasquez Rocks were three days because

since this got pushed to the end

was the last thing we're doing.

It's like, okay,

you have no time.

This is it.

You have three days.

Get all your shots in three days and that's it.

So I think we made the best of it.

But I would say the one place where

you really felt that was in the

opening sequences, which is too bad,

because it opens the film, It would

have been great to open with these sweeping

vistas in Iceland.

It would have been pretty amazing.

Ed came to me with the script, and when he

gave me the script, he said,

we have to do He-Man on a budget, and what

we have here, the conceit is

that he comes to Earth.

So he told me that as he gave me the

script.

I read the script with that in mind.

And

I was okay with the concept.

I like the fish out of water idea,

but

I added the prologue and I added the finale

back in the throne.

I argued to them, I said, look, just give

me one throne room.

That's all I want.

You give me the throne room for the finale

and we'll open in the throne room, we'll

close in the throne room, and at least then

we wrap the picture in Eternia

instead of, you know, because basically in

the original script, I mean, they

show up on Earth and then they

disappear back to their place and you never really

see much.

You do see there was one

I think in David's original script was the

thing where they find the American flag

on a little clip back on the planet, but it

was a very simple thing.

So I

came up with this idea of a prologue and

a finale

that introduced the throne room in the

beginning and brings you back to the throne

room before the big, you know, the

cosmic eye is going to open, right?

Well, I like Dolph personally.

He's a great guy.

Dolph, but it was his first movie

after Rocky.

And he had as an idol,

Sylvester Stallone, who on his movie was

starring in it, wrote it, directed it.

And so Dolph was thinking that he might

follow that

path ultimately.

And he also had an acting coach for every scene.

And

I allowed the acting coach, that was fine. But

on a couple scenes, when I would give him

direction, he would do a line.

I'd see him look

off that way to get

a nod of approval or something.

And at one point, I had the guy

removed from the set.

I said, he's not your director.

I'm your director. So

you can work with him all you want out

there, but

you listen to me.

By the way, towards the end, we finally got there.

One of his best scenes.

At the very end,

when he and Skeletor are in that lock,

and he says,

I think Skeletor says,

He says, it's not about them, it's about me.

It's always been about me.

He says that and Sculpture says yes.

And he says,

let this be our final battle.

He finally brought his voice down,

got some emotion behind it.

Maybe it's because

they were, you know, I had them really

pushing, pushing hard against each other

and he was actually using physical energy. And

it's

actually pretty good.

You know,

that was the last thing we shot though.

But I think Dolph would agree

that

he's a better actor today than he was then,

I would say.

And

what I did was kind of a psychological

thing as we went through the picture,

because in the original script,

he had a lot more dialogue.

And I would slowly cut dialogue and change

scenes, and we'd get together, and

he got wise towards the end.

He was in the middle of the thing.

He was like,

I think you're cutting my line.

He said, no, I'm just, you know, why would

he man say that? He wouldn't say that.

His lieutenant would say that.

He wouldn't do that.

He would do, I had always justify

everything.

So that Dolph didn't feel I was cutting

lines, but I was.

throwing the lines to...

I decided to surround Dolph

with a good company of actors.

A, I think

I felt it would help bring him up, and B,

it would allow me to

ensure that

the drama of the movie was carried on the

shoulders of the other more seasoned

actors.

And at the core of that was Franklin Gella.

The one thing I knew was

I had to have

a villain

at the core of this picture

that would

absolutely be believable and would make

this come off the page.

And

I

zeroed on Frank right away, really.

I considered two or three actors at his level,

but I had seen Frank in Amadeus on

Broadway,

and he was astonishing.

So besides his film career, I remembered

that performance.

And I said, I really want, I think Frank

Langella can really center this picture.

And once I knew I had Frank, I started

quietly,

I'm not going to say rewriting because,

but I would say that we,

Frank and I began to scrape together bits

of Shakespeare and bits of

different

great writers and stuff. And

we would compose these scenes before

shooting.

And it was a promise I made.

I said, I promise you, Frank, you will have

more to say than just kill him, get him,

destroy them, I will destroy you, which is

pretty much what the original script had.

And we wanted to evolve, again, I'm going

to return to Jack Kirby.

Jack Kirby,

who did the great Marvel comics and created

Doctor Doom and Magneto and all these great

villains.

He always said that

a great villain had to have his own kind of

view of the world. And

a great villain doesn't view himself as a

villain.

A great villain views himself as

a noble person on a noble mission.

And

so I wanted Skeletor not to be a cardboard

villain, but to be a villain that actually

had dimension.

And part of that was also then, of course,

Eva Lynn, making Eva Lynn

an accomplice

which you felt they were connected in some way.

So

that was a very deliberate choice, to

bring

a kind of,

to bring some

gravitas to the script, to the movie,

through

actors and actresses like Frank and Megan

and all that, and then to surround him with

strong actors as well.

So

that's how I kind of constructed it

and dealt with having Dolph at the center.

But there is some truth to it. I mean,

if Dolph's seen this, I mean, if you look

at, I gave him examples of Clint Eastwood

and other guys in movies that

the leader is usually not the one that's

saying, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

It's other people doing that and the Clint

Eastwood character or whoever, insert

whichever one going, that sounds like a

good plan, or

no, we're not doing that, we're doing this.

And

I think it worked.

I mean, it worked for the movie. I

don't think it would have worked.

And I think even Dolph would say today,

it's good I didn't have pages and pages of

dialogue in this thing.

I think Dolph always had a

sense of self.

So he was never totally into the scene

because part of him was always making sure

he looked good.

And I was trying to fight that.

Like, don't worry how you look.

Don't worry.

We'll make you look good.

Don't worry. Just,

you know,

concentrate on this.

You know, make this work.

And

the funny thing was, you know, we would do a take

And he'd do the rehearsal great.

He'd go, I'd say, okay, let's do this.

And I'd take this down here, take the, and

he'd go, okay,

and we'd just run it, but he wasn't yet on.

Something happened in those early, you

know, again, it was his next movie.

Once you say we're rolling,

instead of doing what he did in rehearsal,

where he wasn't energizing or powering up,

he'd suddenly power up,

and

moments before he would say,

in the rehearsal, he would do it

correctly.

He'd say, I'm trying to think,

I will never kneel to you, right? He'd do

it as a line.

Then we'd roll and

he'd go, I'll never kneel to you.

It'd be this big thing that came out of

nowhere, right? And he'd like,

okay, wait, let's do that again now, you know,

like we rehearsed it. And

he'd go, yes,

And then we'd roll.

And the problem is when you're on the set,

I mean, I could do, if it was the old days,

I could do what

William Wyler would do.

I could do 130 takes and just wear them out.

But you can't do that today.

That's not the way it works today.

So

you have to get the best take you can and

say, OK, we're going to move on.

I'll fix it in post.

That's what you have to do.

So the strange thing was that when he

was not on in his head, he was much better.

But then

cameras roll, and he had some image in his

head that he suddenly had to be this other thing.

And

maybe it was.

That last scene we shot, the one that I

like, it was like 2.30 in the morning.

It was our last day, and they were shutting

us down.

And maybe it was just

sheer, I'm going to get this done and get

the hell out of here, you know?

But anyway,

it was

the best.

Everything was a problem.

Everything was a challenge.

And every day brought new

challenges that we had to overcome in order

to get the shoot done that day.

I'm in the middle of making the movie in

Whittier and the

call time is 10 A.m.

and I get a call.

I get waking up at 6 A.m.

Mom wants to meet you.

have to meet him at his office and we have

to be there at 9 A.m.

and I said, well, we're shooting a movie.

You have to be there.

I said, can we do it with the phone? No, we

got to go.

Okay, so I get up and the drivers come and

I drive down there.

You get there at 8.30 for the 9 A.m.

meeting.

He doesn't show up till 9.30. I'm

supposed to be on the set at 10, you know.

I'm making phone calls going, okay, we'll

get ready for the,

you know, this

is before cell phones.

So

set this up and set that up and do this and

do that.

And

he rolls in at 10, whatever it is,

a half an hour late for his own meeting. And

I'm a director on a movie we're shooting

that's out there setting up in Whittier

and

45 minutes to an hour away by car on a good

day without traffic.

And

how is the shoot going?

It's going good. Okay,

do

you have any problems?

No, just the usual problems.

All right, well,

what about this? What about that?

Yes, this, that, blah, blah.

Okay, go.

Okay.

Believe me, it could have been done over

the phone. Of

course, I went thinking, oh my God, this is

going to be like, he's going to tell me I'm

fired, or he's going to tell me there's no money.

Why would I have to drive all the way down

there on a shooting day to meet with him in

person?

And that was it.

It was like, I want to know how it's going,

what's going on, any problems? No, okay, good.

So

there were

those kind of days, which you just look

back and go, that's kind of strange, but

OK.

And

one day he came over--

this is kind of the

Pennywise and Pound Foolish thing.

He wanted to see this big set, because for

our set, to get that epic throne room that

I wanted, we

opened two doors between two sound stages,

and we built the throne room through the

two stages, which

was a gigantic set.

And he wasn't going to do it, but we

finally got him to approve and he proved it.

But he wouldn't approve the lighting

budget.

Because I wanted to bring in a theatrical

lighting designer, like a Jules Fisher, Dan

Flannery,

to light this incredible set so we'd get all the

value, the production value. No way.

You don't need it.

And so he says, I said, why don't you come

to the set and I'll show you.

So we met at 8 in the morning on a

Saturday, and the set had just been done.

And

he comes on, and he's still got

like

remnants of breakfast on

him.

You know, it's funny.

And

I meet him there, and I go, Well, this is

the set.

He goes, This is big, very big.

And

I said, Yes, very big.

So we want to have a light inside of this.

He comes back and

he goes, No, no, you just need

a string of lights across the top and just

light it.

That's all you need.

I said, Well, actually, to get the look we

want, we need to have some lights from the

bottom or from the top.

We want to light these columns or give it depth.

He goes, No, no,

When I did, he goes to my DP, he goes,

Hananya, when I did, it was the

movie about the plane that was hijacked.

Delta Force. Yeah.

And he goes, Well, I did that.

I shot the entire thing

inside a plane, and we had one strip of

lights, and we did everything.

I was like,

yeah, that's a

plane.

You're inside a plane that's

this big.

It's not like this.

But in his mind, somehow,

he connected

that

what he did on

Delta Force by lighting with one strip of

lights the inside of the plane.

But it was the same thing on this

massive set.

It's just like...

But anyway, we went ahead and kind of found

a way to light it and do it anyway, even

though, you know, because Hananya was with

me in the sense that he

knew

Manam for many, many years, and

he also was a DP that wanted to be proud of

his work.

So we kind of jerry-rigged and we found a

way to light the set anyway. But

that was the one time that Manam came to

the set on the entire shoot.

That was it.

Midway through, we were aware.

there was this sense in the, not the crew,

but some of us were aware

that they

may not be able to finish this movie.

We may not

get done with this, which is evidenced by

the fact that I had to go back and,

I can say this now, but you're

not supposed to contribute your own money

when you're in the DGA, but I contributed

$50,000 of my money

for that last day that we picked up months

later to get, there was no end of the film.

I mean, literally,

We finished the movie.

I mean, and also, what I didn't know was

Elliot Schick had agreed that at midnight

we would shut down.

And I thought we'd shoot all night if we

had to get all this stuff done.

And literally

at midnight,

Elliot puts

a clipboard in front of the lens of the

camera and says, we're done.

This is done.

We are done with this shoot.

What are you doing?

You know, the whole thing was lit.

We were doing the battle and the whole thing.

And I'd already come up with, oh, this is

important.

Bill had designed that.

If you look at the set of the throne room,

there's all these levels and stairs and stuff.

We designed that.

I wanted to do the ultimate

sword fight that would take them all

through up and down, all through those

levels and all.

That's how the stage was designed for that

very thing.

And when they came back and said,

we're done at the end of this week, and

there was another week, we're going to

shoot that whole thing.

It was 3 days or four days, I can't

remember.

And they said, no, we're not done.

You have to finish it all.

You've got to this date.

I decided instead of this fancy sword fight

that I would get, it was inspired actually by

Big Trouble in

Little China.

There was that scene in Big Trouble in

Little China that I'd seen years before,

which was those kind of colored lights and

this kind of fantasy thing. And

I said,

I said to the DP, I said,

get a color wheel, get a smoke machine.

And at the end of the night, we're going to

just shoot these guys

at random with, and you're going to hand,

you're going to take your camera, you're

always going to keep the color wheel where

it can't be seen behind them,

and you're going to be doing, they're like,

what are you talking about? I said, just do

this, and we're going to cut this battle

together at the end.

And

I said, I said to the guy,

I need one thing to get me into this.

When the swords clash,

can you, and this wasn't a schedule, oh,

this is the big deal.

They would only shoot

there were only, there were 82, 65

millimeter shots in the picture and that's

what was budgeted and they would not shoot

one extra one.

And I went to the guy there, who was

Richard Ellen's guy on the set, I said, I

need you to shoot one shot for me that's

not on your storyboard.

This is what it is.

You put your camera down here, you look up

at that big circle, I'm going to have their

swords clash and when their swords clash,

I'm going to have them kill the light so it

goes to black.

And I need this as a transition shot to

take me from

their clash into this surreal world that

I'm thinking about.

And it's how I'm going to save the ending

and get this done in a night.

That's what I had, one night.

And he said,

okay, I'll do that for you.

So we got that shot because I knew I'd need it.

And that is the transition shot.

You know, when you see it in the picture now,

the camera's down low looking up

and

the sword's hit and there's,

we added the stuff at the end.

And then you'll just see the lights go down.

That is literally

the electricians

just killing the lights and everything

going down, right?

And then we go into that surreal world with

the smoke and stuff, which basically I had

a stuntman,

I had Blade

in Skeletor's costume,

working out a few quick routines.

And

this is the one that

we only had till midnight.

We're down now to that day, right?

But I was going to come back at the

end,

after that, at like midnight and go to like

6:00 in the morning and get all those last

things to make the movie work.

So, because no one told me they were

actually going to literally shut me down.

I thought I could push at least till

sunrise and then, okay, now we're done, right?

So this was the improvised thing I did just

to get what was going to be another week

into like 2 days, two nights, basically,

two days and two nights to wrap the whole

thing up.

And

so we're in the middle of that and we're

shooting all these shots of them in the

smoke and all this kind of stuff.

And we're going, we're going, okay, you do

this, you do that.

And that's when Elliot just says,

bang, you're done.

It's midnight, we're done.

This shoot's

over.

like, what do you mean it's over? It's

over.

It's done.

You know, that's it.

And they literally shut me down.

And I said,

there's no ending to this movie.

And so a week later, two weeks later,

three weeks later, we get to with Manaham.

And I told them, I said, you know, we don't

have an end to this movie.

Basically, they start fighting, but there's

no end to the fight.

And Manaham actually said,

we'll fade out.

We'll just fade out.

you're going to fade out all of

them fighting.

I'm a hero fighting the villain, and you

never see the hero win.

You can fade out.

It's like,

you can't do that, you know? So I went back and I

wrote up

what I thought could be done in a day,

and

sent that to my, I asked for a meeting with

my, I said, look, we can do this in a day.

And I've talked to Richard Edlin.

We can shoot it at his studio,

and we can do the whole thing there,

and it'll cost whatever it is.

We had it costed out from Richard Edlin.

It was like 100 grand or something like that.

And he says, You put up 50.

I said,

What?

You put up 50.

If you put up 50, I'll put up 50.

I'm like,

You want

me to pay to do this thing? He goes, Yes.

And I was like,

Well,

okay,

let's

do

it.

It's my movie.

So

we did it, and we did it in a day.

And everything you see there after

all

the stuff in the smoke, when they finally,

when he hits the sword, the sword slides to

the end,

starts to fall.

Dolph makes a lunge for it, grabs it,

blocks Skeletor,

pushes himself back up.

They fight again.

He whacks him.

Skeletor goes over the edge

and falls.

And the green screen for that

was all done in one day.

And at the very end, I made Franklin Jella

get in that vat.

I don't get any credit for this. Now,

every Marvel

movie now has that little tag at the end of

the credits, right? But I was the guy that

did that.

Everyone would say, stay until the end,

stay until after the credits.

And I made

Frank Langella, this great actor,

in this skeleton mask, get in this bubbling

vat of liquid so he could pop up and say,

I'll be back, right?

But all that was done in one day

at the Boss Studio

and basically made the whole end work.

I asked them not to put the

logo at the beginning of Masters Universe.

I said, don't put the logo.

And I said, what do you mean? I said, I

just, why don't you put the logo at the

end? Let's just open with just, let's open

with the, I was

trying everything I could to try and make

this not look, feel, sound like a canon movie.

And that one I lost, obviously.

There's no way they were not gonna have

that logo. I said,

can't we just open this without the logo?

And they wanted to know why.

I said, you know,

because it's a fantasy, it's a this.

I never said,

I don't want people

thinking,

oh, this is a canon film.

Because at that time, when we were making that,

the Canon logo had a bit of a negative, you

know, I get it. I get

looking back now and, you know, retro

and thinking nostalgically of the 80s, okay.

But I actually tried to say, let's start

without the logo.

They showed me the first posters for

Masters and they were the typical

Photoshop,

you know, which was kind of their style.

And I said, no, you have to get Drew

Struzan.

We have to have Drew Struzan do our poster. And

the girl in charge of the graphics

department, the average, she said,

they're never going to pay for Drew

Struzan.

I said, they have to.

I mean, they want to sell this as a big

epic action movie,

And

she said, they're just not going to do it.

And she said, I talked to them, they're not

going to do it.

I said, okay,

I want to meet with them.

And we set a meeting up

and I went out to whatever it was, Larry

Edmonds bookstore, you know, and bought a

bunch of Hollywood posters, all Drew

Struzans of E.T. and

Raiders of the Lost Ark and you know, all

the Drew Struzans.

And

I go into the meeting and I go, all right,

you guys said you want to market this and

you want to be like Indiana Jones, you want

to be like all these pictures.

Yes,

Okay, let me just show you a few.

on the floor, rolled out

all the posters. I said,

these are all by an artist named Drew

Struzin.

We need Drew Struzin to do our poster,

because if you want

the public to perceive it as this kind of a

movie, this level of a movie,

we have to have a poster by this guy. And

it's the difference, you guys, between at

that time, I think

at that time, an original

poster by Drew was $18,000.

That was

his price.

And I said,

you're going to spend, I guess,

$8,000 10,000

on your Photoshop.

Why don't you spend 18,000 and get this?

And my mom, they went,

you're right.

Okay, let's do it.

And

the head of,

she was totally shocked.

But you know, they got it.

I mean, I'll say one thing for them.

Yes, they were tight with a dime, but

when

you showed them that and you made sense,

the good news is there were no committees.

You know, we're just like, oh, okay, you're right.

Let's do it.

So that's how

I think

I think Drew Struzan, that's how Cannon has

one poster

by Drew Struzan and it's Masters of the

Universe.

And by the way,

a fantastic poster,

and also one that Drew himself has always

told me is one of his favorites. And I

never totally believed him because I

thought maybe he says that to every

director.

But when he did his book, I don't

know if you've seen his book, the Drew

Struzan book, but on the cover with him there,

it's

Indiana Jones and it's

ET

and it's Masters of the Universe. So

I actually think he was

serious.

The reviews were not too good overall.

There were some good ones,

there were some bad ones, and there were

some mixed ones,

I have found out in later years that it has

a very strong fan base.

I mean, the people that like it love it.

It's part of their childhood, it's part of

their growing up, they really like it.

And surprisingly, I have some fans that

were older when it came out too.

I think that people

that went to see it on their own merits,

on the movie's own merits,

liked it.

And people that went in with certain

expectations

didn't.

And

it's luck of the draw.

I know we tried to make a great movie, and

a lot of people recognize that.

And

I'm still proud of it, actually.

I'm not really apologizing for it,

not for anything.

We've talked about a lot of it. But

I just saw it again about a

year ago.

It was playing on

Showtime or HBO or somewhere, and I was

flipping channels.

It just started.

So I was only going to watch like 10

minutes of it, but I wound up watching the

whole thing.

And

actually, it's pretty good, especially when

you consider,

all the, no one gets to consider that, but

when you consider

what it took to get that movie on the

screen and all the things we had to fight,

it

turned out remarkably well.

And within that, I think there's some

pretty cool performances of which Frank's

is at the top.

So

to say I was a little disappointed at the

critical reaction, of course,

and

I thought it would do better at the box

office, to be honest. I

never thought it was gonna be Star Wars,

never thought it was gonna be Star Wars.

But I actually thought we'd do 20 or $30

million at least.

And

I think actually in retrospect it might

have, but

I did find out many years later, you can go

and really, you can follow the charts.

You can see it was really only in the

theaters 2 weeks.

And in the

first week it opened, it was the number one

box office picture.

It was only like 5.7 million or something,

but it was the number one movie that week.

In the second week, it was the number two movie.

In the third week, it's gone.

And

what I found out was that

Canon just had no

power to keep

movies in theaters.

So whatever the next movie was that was

coming out that week, obviously that third

week there was a new wave of movies,

I think our movie just got swept out.

If it had been Warner Brothers or Paramount

or Universal, they would have told those

people, you keep playing Matches of the

Universe.

You're going to play that for the next two

or three weeks.

We're going to get every dime out of it

before you're not going to get

this next movie.

And then they would do it.

To get the next movie, they'd keep that in

their theaters.

So I think that hurt us.

And I also found out

the

second week that it opened, I went to Santa

Barbara, my hometown,

to go see it with my mom and some friends.

And I found out you could only see it at a

matinee.

It was only being played

at kids' matinees.

So in terms of their,

I think Canon really had a problem with

not having marketing clout and not even

knowing. I don't

think they even knew.

Because if it was Santa Barbara, it was

probably other cities. So

in many cities, we were only being shown as

a kids' matinee movie.

And I think that obviously hurt the box

office.

I thought we'd do,

which for the time, if we had done 25, 30,

$35 million, that would have been pretty

good for the time.

But I think the reason it stopped at 17.6

or 70 money, whatever it was,

is because it literally

was gone.

It made that money in two weeks, and if not

two, three,

and then that was it.

So we didn't really get to play.

It's funny with Masters.

We didn't know that the He-Man line was

doing this,

and we didn't know that

Cannon was going out of business,

basically.

And we were making a movie

with these two

entities

who were all betting everything on this movie.

And yet,

you can't squeak blood

from a turnip.

There was only so much

that you could do, and that's it. But

We made our schedule.

We opened on time. And

the one thing I think that the picture

lacked was a really strong opening.

I wish that Mattel would have stepped up

and said, we're

just going to spend the money.

Let's do a campaign.

Let's really make everyone aware that this

movie is happening.

I think that at

the end of the day, besides the film, and

you can argue

whether Superman or that movie was a good

movie or not,

but I can tell you that good movie or bad,

They just didn't have the money or the

staff or the knowledge of how to open these

kind of films.

They were trying to open these films the

way they would open a Delta Force movie or

anything else. A

big,

one week before the movie, just put in some

TV ads and throw the posters out and go

like this and hope it's gonna make it. It

doesn't really work for these kind of films.

But anyway, I was

a little disappointed,

but I really,

I liked the movie and I liked Frank's

performance and Meg's performance and

Pretty much everybody.

It's Courtney Cox's first movie and she did

a great job.

It was really,

really,

for me, I think it holds up pretty well,

all things considered, as one of those

movies of the 80s.

Can you tell me what the reputation of Canon

Films was when you approached them with

Masters of the Universe?

Well, I remember

when I was

starting

working with them on Masters,

their office was

like a train station.

There were

dozens of people all over the place,

lots of action.

And

Menachem's

decision on making

Masters when we had Dolph Lundgren was

very quick and

much more

or less

legalistic and bureaucratic than

one was

normally even then getting

involved with.

So

by the time the film

was finished, things were starting to get,

I think, a little

more difficult and there wasn't as much

activity.

I remember the offices seemed

much, much quieter

and

things were changing.

As I recall, we had

definite interest from the majors

when the film was at its peak

and we were talking with Warner Brothers

and

they was interested at the studios,

but by the time we actually got the rights,

It was

a little past its

peak, so

the

studios were not as interested as they had

been, and

Cannon jumped in.

The problem was,

in getting the rights,

we were negotiating with Mattel,

and

management

changed while we were negotiating.

So it

took

a couple of years to get the rights secure,

and in that time,

Masters as a toy line had peaked.

So the film came out

actually a year too late.

It would have been much more successful had it

come out at

the peak of its popularity.

So it was a

double-edged sword. We were

able to

get the rights to this

valuable property, which

was sort of an

early

form of what's going on now is

films like Lego

taking

toy or a

game and turn it into

a movie.

So

it was a good idea,

ahead of its time,

but then delayed because of some

bureaucratic problems

at Mattel.

And

so the timing wasn't ideal.

And while I think if we had been able to

achieve

the potential of the film,

a year earlier

with

the resources of a big studio

and could have gone more into outer space.

It had the makings of something that could

be very, very popular, far beyond what it

turned out to be.

Frank Langella was a pretty big star then,

and we had to

figure out his schedule,

and Dolph was,

you know,

becoming a big name.

It was right after Rocky,

so he was

a and

who starts at times always in this

making films is always a matter of juggling

people's schedules and

I assume that

the race had something to do with

a lot of these factors that

were sort of

superficial to making the best movie.

Doff was the first

person I thought of to go to.

discovered Arnold Schwarzenegger for Conan and

the

idea that we

had

found

a physical presence that was so

unique that would match

the He-Man idea

seemed really

to fit the bill.

So we went after Adolphe and

I don't think he said yes

immediately, but

I don't remember

protracted

delay.

Gary had done the Conan Barbarian

experience at Universal when we had

produced Conan,

so I was aware of

him through that

achievement and then got to meet him and saw

he was a very smart and

talented

fellow.

He had made one film

before that,

as I recall,

which

hadn't

done so well,

but he had

a grasp

of this kind of

adolescent

kind of subject.

I remember the pressure on Gary and on the

production

that

was a function of

budgetary constraints, and

a lot of it was done

in one stage.

location.

So it was

controlled

and that made it

cost efficient.

I don't remember

getting into any

big disputes that I can on other pictures.

I think they gave it their all, but I don't

remember exactly.

I'm not sure how much they spent.

The film

was a modest success

and whether it could have done much more

had they spent

the kind of money the studios spend,

we'll never know.

If we hadn't

been in the very midst of their

collapse,

I think

the film obviously would have had

a lot more

backing and

support

that

the company couldn't afford to do it at

that stage we were in.

People remember

Cannon and Minakum and Yoram as

a kind of

comet

that came and went,

and

people who met them remember

their...

They were the life of the party.

I mean, the legacy of

other

producers,

the Weinsteins, whatever,

may be much more

important, but I think there's a place

in

the general Hollywood

memory of

that period of

the Go-Go Boys.

It used to be in the old days, in order to

break in the film business, one of

the few sure ways you could do that was to

approach Roger Corman.

And Roger was really good at giving young

people a break.

And then Cannon rolled into town, and that

became a second place where

people who were young who wanted to work in

films could

get their chance.

You could actually approach Menachem, who's

the head of the company,

pitch him an idea and get a yes or no on

the spot, which is impossible today.

And

if you got your yes,

you got a shot to make your film, you

wouldn't get much money to make it, but you

got your chance.

They were perceived as sort of a wildcat

company.

You know, like, who are these two Israeli

guys who just came into town and opened up

this thing? And

I mean, it was an extraordinary time to be

working for Canon because

at the time I was doing Masters of the

Universe and Invaders from Mars,

the

The studio that had the most number of

films in production was Warner Brothers

with six.

Canon had 84

in production.

I mean, that tells you right there, wow,

what are these guys doing here? This is

amazing.

I think they were hoping to

get out of that sort of Chuck Norris,

Charles Bronson ghetto and move on to

basically different higher level

productions.

Runaway Train was an example of that.

I think Masters, they were hoping to do

that with Masters as well.

Mattel

approached Conan Properties

about issuing a toy line based on Conan the

Barbarian and those characters. And

I was a designer on all the Conan films.

And until they found out that it was going

to be an R-rated film,

we can't have toys based on an R-rated film.

So put them in a quandary, and they decided

to create their own

similar line,

sort of a sword and sorcery line, and that

became Masters of the Universe with He-Man

and She-Ra.

I think Don Glute wrote the

original

story and named the characters and things.

And so it was a hugely successful toy line,

and then it became a hugely successful

animated series.

And so

Mattel started to go into a decline and

they desperately needed to pump up the

Masters of the Universe toy sales, so they

thought a movie would be a perfect way to

do that.

And so they approached Canon Films

and

what I was told, I'm sure you got

a

more detailed background from Gary Goddard

on this,

but

Canon said, okay, we'll budget the film at

$37 million.

We'll

put up half, you put up half, you put up

the first half.

So they put in half the budget,

and we quickly ran through that half, and

Mattel said, okay, now it's your turn to

put up the other half.

And Canon said,

nope.

And they were, what?

And

Mattel needed the film so bad, they had to

put up all the rest.

So it was Canon's way of tricking them into

financing the entire film.

Gary Goddard is one of the greatest

pitchmen in the business.

He is phenomenal.

He could

sell

saltine crackers to Arabs in the middle of

the desert.

He's just amazing.

And I was there working in the art

department when he was

shepherding the

Mattel executives around giving his dog and

pony show and getting them pumped up about

what this film was going to be like.

And I could see in their eyes, they were so

excited.

They could almost taste the money.

They could almost taste the success.

And the very last room he visited was our

art department

with all the pictures of the designs and

of all the characters and sets and

everything on the wall.

And after he finished his pitch and had

these guys at their highest point, he

turned to the production designer at that

time, who his

name was Jeff.

He was an English fellow.

And

Gary's nodding to him like, right, Jeff,

it's going to be incredible, isn't

it? And Jeff

looks up from the drawing board, he goes,

it's not going to be too fucking awful.

Jeff didn't last too long after that, and I

was made a production designer in his place.

Actually, Jeff recommended that I take his place.

I didn't get

much interference from Cannon at all, a

little bit here and there, but it was

Mattel who was insisting, you know, He-Man

has to look like the toy.

He has to have those stupid

bangs and stuff.

And

the costumes I looked at, I thought, boy,

if we put that on the screen, this

picture's dead in the water.

And fortunately my friend from

Paris, Jean Giraud, who

goes by the pen name of Moebius,

was living in Santa Monica. And so

I hired

Jean to come in on the film and together we

redesigned costumes and things for He-Man

and all the characters. And

it was a real fight with Mattel

to

get them to see the wisdom of the

ways.

And I told him, I said,

This can't be shallow.

This has to be layered and leveled, and

that's the way I like to make pictures.

I want people to be able to see it

and then go back and see it again and see

new things each time.

So for instance, we came up with the idea of

He-Man's armor

is

shards of machinery and things he's

collected from the battlefield and then

strapped onto himself

to show that, yeah, this war has been going

on for a long time, and this is what

our hero is down to. He's

building his own armor from scraps of metal

from the battlefield.

And I thought that adds a little color, a

little interest, a little background and

makes it more real

rather than

the silly toy

costume.

It was a big fight.

They argued over the color of the cape,

but eventually

I pretty much convinced them.

I couldn't go full blown with

the shards of machinery and stuff, but I do

get to redesign the costume.

When they hired

the art department, we'd all signed little

one-page

deal memos.

And we were in the middle of making the film.

By that time, I was

production designer on the film.

And the Mattel people were

coming through one day, and they go,

oh, that's going to be a great toy.

Oh, that's going to be a fantastic toy.

Oh, that'll sell.

Oh, this is fantastic.

And I said, gentlemen,

gentlemen, I was hired to be the production

designer for the film.

I was not hired to design your next year's

toy line.

That's a separate negotiation.

And they flipped.

They threatened to shut down the film eight times.

I just kept working.

I organized the other designers and stuff,

and we just stayed together as a block. And

it was actually

Ed Pressman who came through and

gave us

some of his points

in the

profit participation in the toys, but by

then the toy line was pretty dead.

When I signed on,

the film was about at least one-third

bigger.

We cut a third out of the script.

There was

a whole lot of stuff taking place on

Eternia where He-Man and

the rest of the characters lived.

And that got cut.

But by that time,

I had done so many films, I was used to that.

Almost every film I worked on, they would

cut a third of the film,

usually

the best parts.

So

they had cut Eternia.

I mean, we had,

in the beginning it was like, we're going

to shoot this in Iceland.

So they went off on a big location, scout

to Iceland, came back,

this is the best place to shoot at me this.

And I'm thinking,

they're not going to shoot in Iceland.

Next thing we know, we're doing scouts out

in Pinnacles.

And I'm thinking,

this is a great location.

We're not going to shoot here.

You know what's going to happen? We're

going to end up at Vasquez Rocks,

which is

one of the most

used locations in Hollywood history going

back, I think, the 20s.

Vasquez, where you see it in commercials

all the time, you see it everywhere.

And sure enough, that's where we ended up

shooting.

It was a really exciting production to be

on because they let me do a lot of

great things. Like

we shot at Laird Studios, which is the old RKO

studios.

And they let me take two sound stages and

knock out the wall between them.

And I built the biggest set

that Hollywood had seen in about 30 or 40 years.

And it became the place in the business to visit.

I mean, we had

celebrity directors, producers, movie stars.

Everybody wanted to see this gigantic

throne set.

And everybody wanted their picture taken,

sitting on the throne to all the power of

the universe.

That was

a big thing.

And I remember

Yeah, Sylvester Stallone showed up

and he was watching. And

at one point he turned to Gary and said,

he pointed up to Dolph, he goes,

he gave that guy lines?

I was told it was as punishment

that we would not have a cast and crew

screening.

I don't know if that's true or not.

It may have just

been because Cannon was broken.

They couldn't afford a cast and crew

screening.

So I got together. I

pulled all the art department together.

We went to go see it and paid to go see it.

And

I remember just being really happy that we

had a beginning, middle, and end.

Because at one point it looked like we

weren't going to have

the end.

When Masters came out was really odd.

I didn't understand it until Gary explained

to me what happened. But

it had a

fairly respectable opening weekend.

And then the next weekend it was even

bigger.

And the next weekend it was even bigger.

I'm thinking, holy cow, we got ourselves a

massive hit there.

And about the 4th or 5th weekend, they

pulled the film from the theaters.

I'm going, wait, we're on A roll.

This thing is not declining in popularity.

It's building.

Word of mouth is really

feeding this film.

But

Guri told me later it was

Canon was just in the middle of going under

right then.

I had been in many studios

and network offices before.

I'd been working in Hollywood for a long

time and there was always a kind of a

cathedral hush about the offices of

studios.

You walked into Canon

and it was like a production office.

It was like people running up and down

hallways carrying cable and shouting things

at each other and there

were lights and activity and madness and

chaos like a movie set and that was just

their production office.

And I loved that about it right away.

I felt like this is not a place where

you're in development for the next 10 years

on something and then at the end of which

maybe they say yes or no.

They just kind of said yes in a hurry.

Unfortunately, that was the problem.

Yarm and Menachem absolutely loved movies,

and they loved the making of movies, and

they loved the buzz and madness of making

movies, and they weren't in the polo

lounge, and they weren't making deals in

quiet restaurants somewhere.

They were

rolling their sleeves up and making movies.

The problem is they loved cinema in the

abstract.

I don't think in my experience

that they really knew what it was like to

love something so much that you were

patient and took the time and went through

the pain

of seeing it through draft after draft

after draft, admitting to yourself that it

might not be right yet.

and committing yourself to the hard work to

make it right.

They didn't love that part of cinema, and I think

that hurt them in the end.

Once something was greenlit, I think they

stayed out of your way.

They obviously minded the money, as was

their job that it was right for them to do.

But oddly enough, they didn't seem to

really, really have their handle on

how to work best with a director, either

creatively or financially.

When I was working on Masters of the

Universe, Gary was

Gary Goddard was running way over budget, I

think because it was under budgeted to

start with.

I don't think through any fault of his,

movies are expensive to make.

And I would

go to meetings with Chris Pierce and with

Menachem,

and they would wring their hands and moan

over how it was running millions of dollars

over budget, and they would

talk to Gary about how he was going to

control it this week.

But I don't think they really, really,

really knew how to

how to

solve the money problem,

solve the money creative nexus.

They wanted to, and

they dealt, I felt very humanely and warmly

with all the people.

I saw nothing but

good treatment of the people around them in

terms of how they talk to someone in a room.

But they

They weren't able to be effective

in getting people to do their absolute best

for the money they had.

And they also

didn't seem to really, really, really know

good dailies from bad dailies.

My kids were...

at the point at which Masters of the

Universe was

working on it.

My son wasn't born yet.

I had a three-year-old daughter.

She was not playing with He-Man and

Skeletor. So

I was not

hugely aware of the toys.

I knew about them,

but I had to educate myself about them

when

I came onto the project.

And I was doing a rewrite anyway.

I was working with

an absolutely wonderful script by David

Odell that to me needed very little work.

I thought it was great.

Gary

Goddard had rewritten it heavily, and my

job was more to un-rewrite Gary and bring

it back closer to

David.

So I didn't have to learn the mythology so much.

I mostly had to get inside what was working

in the story and what wasn't.

When I read the script,

I read Gary's rewrite of the script.

Gary is a brilliant designer and conceiver

of entertainment

centers and zones and is a wonderful

entertainer and a wonderful thinker,

but I wouldn't say he was a screenwriter

necessarily.

And so the script was heavy on concept

and lower on emotional

through lines.

So

my thinking was unless we find an emotional

through line in this movie, unless we

really care about the human beings in this

character and follow something through, it

will not reach an audience.

My task was to help

get it

to that point.

Unfortunately, Gary, as happens with

directors and is always going to happen

with directors, they're only going to shoot

what they're going to shoot.

And he basically day by day by day simply

restored his own rewrite and that's what

was shot.

But I remember thinking that the one thing

the movie didn't have was it did not have a

fantastic

final

mano a mano between good and evil.

That ultimately it came down to He-Man just

hit Skeletor harder than Skeletor was

hitting He-Man.

And I remember thinking

at that point, that's not enough.

You need a third force.

You need,

Luke Skywalker did not just win because he

had better aim.

He won because he stopped aiming.

because he went the other way from aiming

and he gave himself over to the force.

He drew on a lesson you'd heard earlier in

the movie and everything came together.

And that incredibly satisfying conclusion

was not to be found in the script for

Masters of the Universe.

It simply came down to he clobbers him

harder.

And that.

will never, ever, ever satisfy an audience

and was never going to.

And I knew that.

And we struggled and struggled and

struggled and fought to find something in

He-Man 's character or Skeletor, some

essential weakness in Skeletor or some

essential strength in He-Man that could

come through in that moment.

And we never found it or were never given

the mandate to find it.

Gary had designed the new Candyland game

and he designed all these

entertainment centers and theme park things

and I think they thought that he had a

great connection to

their core audience, which I think he did

in a way.

Bigger gambles have been made in the land

of directors that have paid off.

If that one didn't pay off, the fact that

they made a gamble isn't in itself the

problem.

He's a good guy, worked incredibly hard.

I just don't think he had the specific

skill sets for that particular task.

Dolph worked very hard at acting.

He had a coach

who who took the job very seriously, and

Dolph took the job of being coached very

seriously.

He worked hard at finding a character and

finding the emotion.

I would ultimately say that I don't think

there was enough character there for him to find.

If there had been more written for him to

find, I think he would have found it.

If the other studio said that it was too

expensive, they correctly knew

what it would cost

to do it right.

The special effect of Skeletor, of creating

a skeleton head and having it move and talk

and express emotions in 1986 was

astronomical and would have taken an

enormous amount of time, and they knew that.

But the solution that Cannon came up with

was to paint a skeleton on Frank Langella's

face that looked like

a Halloween costume that a mother made,

a reasonably talented mother made for her child

to go trick or treating with.

It was

I'm going to use the word, it was

embarrassing.

It was embarrassing to see on the set and

it was certainly embarrassing on screen.

So the way that they were able to say yes

to Ed Pressman

was

either not really knowing what it would

cost to do it right or I think more

significantly not caring.

No, I think they cared.

That's not fair.

I think they really cared.

I think they were just impatient and in a

hurry and

didn't have the sitzfleisch

for

just sitting down and really, really

figuring it out.

And they did the same thing with

the Red Skull in Captain America.

They just

painted makeup on Scott Pollan's face and

it's just for today's fans and even for

those days' fans, not good enough.

They did have to shoot it very quickly.

They had a set.

It was an enormous set.

It took up two sound stages at Culver

Studios.

I wouldn't say it was a great set.

Incredibly talented people worked on it.

I don't think it really was fantastic.

It didn't really have the scale.

It didn't seem as big as it was.

And they had some sort of

hole in the set in which they projected, I

don't know.

I frankly don't even remember how it ended

in the end.

I do know that they were absolutely raced

through the ending because they had run so far

over budget and

out of time that they just had to do what

they did.

The story took place on Earth and they land

in a neighborhood and they have

spaceships land and things explode and

everything goes crazy.

And absolutely not one citizen of planet

Earth notices or raises a fuss of any kind.

I remember in the rewrite trying to write

in sort of an average citizen who witnesses

all this stuff

on the street, which they shot in witty ear. And

I think it got cut for budget,

the

actual reaction.

So there was no

no

foundation of reality under anything that

was happening.

And in a fantasy, the most important thing

you can have

is, Alice in Wonderland doesn't work with

that Alice.

Was bad timing and the toy line having run

its course to blame for the failure of

Masters of the Universe? No.

Masters of the Universe was to blame for

Masters of the Universe.

If it was a great story, if it was funny

and moving and exciting,

People would have flocked to it.

People will always, always go see a good story.

The film was perceived as an absolute joke

in every possible way.

It was not taken seriously in any way.

Nor I think did it deserve to be, to be

honest.

And I say that with

every affection for Gary and Menachem and

everybody involved.

It just didn't work.

These are the things I think are wrong with

Masters of the Universe.

We talked about my feelings about the

ending.

It did not have a satisfying,

soul-satisfying conclusion.

It was just a

bang, bang, bang.

There was no humor in it.

David Odell had written a wonderfully

lighthearted

script with real humor and character and

human moments.

My job rewriting it was to restore David

Odell's

humor and grace and charm.

So it had none of that in the end.

It had no

It had no human storyline.

We never met someone who had a problem, who

had an emotional problem, who somehow or

other, because of this experience, it got

worked out or came to a crisis or anything.

It was really just bang, land, zoom,

smash.

And there was every opportunity for humor

in these characters.

There's something larger than life about

Evil Lin and He-Man and Skeletor.

And there was a kind of

a way to mine that humor affectionately, not

satirically, that was not

exploited.

And

I would say also the

poor effects and the poor production

values.

And they had one of the great costume

designers in Hollywood, Julie White's doing

the costumes, and they had

great production designers.

Everyone, it was not lack of talent, it was

lack of

focus and leadership.

Maybe

lack of leadership, I don't know.

I wasn't on the set a lot.

The prop master for that show, Ellen

Freund, went on to do the props for Mad Men.

So we know she's talented, fantastically

talented, and worked

unbelievably hard on that show.

And somehow or other, all of that hard work

added up to very little

because of

lack of the combination, the nexus of

vision and funds.

My experience with Canon being near the

edge of bankruptcy, which of course they

never would have admitted at the time, they

were great, which is the way you have to

present yourself,

was that they refused to pay anybody. My

agent could not get me paid for scripts

that I'd submitted.

It was really hard for me because I

had little kids and it was

my sole source of income and I really,

really needed the money. And

I certainly handed in my scripts on time,

but they wouldn't pay on time. So

my wife went to Chris Pierce's office at

Canon and asked the receptionist if she

could speak to him.

And she had a nurse

she was nursing

a child in her arms,

literally nursing a child, and the

reception is not here and you can't see

him, you need to make an appointment.

And she said, I'll just wait.

And she sat, I think, in his office, on his

desk, waiting for him for, I think,

maybe most of a day, almost six hours.

At the end of the six hours, somebody came

in with a check for every time they owed me.

And from that point on, my agent simply said,

They would call and say Stevens Draft is at

the agency, and then they showed up with a

check, they'd have the draft, and that's

how everybody learned to be paid by them.

It was aggravating.

To tell you the truth, it's really

unforgivable to

expect people to work for you for free

because you have money problems.

But that was their expectation.

And now I

find out many years later, they were simply broke.

I have no pity for them, but I

get it.

The whole Golan Globus goal was to make a movie.

make another movie, make another movie,

make another movie. And

they didn't seem to really, really have in

their heads that an audience was going to

watch it someday.

It seemed to me, and this is just

assumption, more about how they could sell it to.

a buyer than how they could sell it to

an audience.

And I think for a while you can make money

selling to buyers, selling to markets, but

ultimately if you're not selling to an

audience, to individual men, women, and

children sitting in the seats of theaters

and making them laugh or cry or

get excited or sit on the edge of their

seats, ultimately you're going to have to

pay the piper and he's going to demand a

very heavy price.

So I think they went bankrupt because

ultimately they were good at making deals,

they were good at energizing people, they

were good at getting people excited, but

they weren't good at entertaining

audiences.

I wouldn't have missed my Golden Globes

experience for anything.

It was film school for me.

It was a fantastic education in human

relations and human nature.

I loved the energy of it.

If the movies didn't work,

a lot of movies don't work.

I wouldn't

have

missed any of it for anything.

Can you tell us what the reputation of

Canon film was by the time you got to work

with the Masters of the Universe? I mean,

they were kind of known, among other

things, as the Bad News Jews.

I mean,

they

were notorious in

certain ways, which we didn't

actually experience that.

I mean, I actually had a very good

relationship with Menachem

and Ronnie Yakov, who was their production

manager.

These guys were very cool.

I mean, they were like the silk shirts

buttoned down to here with the medallions.

You know, I mean, I had a few

confrontations with Menachem, and

I learned

how to argue Israeli style,

which is

you shout your point at him while he's

answering the last point,

and then he shouts

that point to you while you're answering

his point.

And

so basically, you get

the argument done in about half the time,

and then you sit back and have a cigar and

some cognac.

So

in that way, I mean, I think

I kind of enjoyed

my

meetings with Menakem.

Masters of the Universe is a missed

opportunity. I mean,

again,

they had a budget that was too low for the

scope of the movie that they wanted to make.

And during production, they were like

hammering down

on

saving nickels and dimes here and there and

wasting dollars over there, you know.

One of the things that really disappointed me

that Goddard did

was, you know, because he had Frank

Langella as Skeletor and he had all this

makeup around his face so

his

mouth was a little bit hampered

and so his

delivery

was fiery and had the Frank Langella

thing

But

it was

peculiar because of the makeup,

but it still worked.

So I saw the whole movie with Langella's

performance,

and I thought he worked very well.

But Goddard took him in and did ADR and the

whole performance.

And

I think that

Langella saw the movie and just got bored

and just

foamed it in.

So I mean, it

was not,

he should have stayed with the original

performance.

Dolph was...

I mean, he was like the big

hulking guy,

so he plays well in the posters,

but when he starts talking,

you know,

it doesn't...

You know, he's not...

He's not an intelligent He-Man.

I've often thought that John Crawford was

not very bright.

And...

And yet she got an

Academy Award because she was directed by

someone that really knew how

to

extract

the milk.

It called for some interesting visual

effects and the model shop

built most

of

the props for

the movie.

So we had a separate deal for the props

and a separate deal for visual effects.

And

the guys did a really good job in building

all those props, I think.

Also, I mean, it was

a fantasy, so

whenever you have a fantasy film, it gives you

license to

do weird things and take weird approaches,

which I enjoyed.

You know,

you see dailies and you see the stuff that

you're working on, then there's other stuff

that they shoot that you're not there for,

so...

We were able to,

with matte shots, make the sets work

and make the sets very deep

and

added a lot of production value.

I mean, I think the effects in

Masters Universe are really pretty good,

you know?

And

I think we did

a good job for him.

So there were some

good shots of going into the

the Netherland or the Netherworld or

whatever that we did, I think that worked

pretty well.

I kept all those models.

And recently, I mean, I had

a warehouse that was like,

it became a spider motel.

And it was like 1,000 bucks a month for years,

right? And I finally got tired of paying the

shipping charges or

the rental charges and put it up all for

sale.

And actually, the props on Master sold for

pretty good money.

Skeletor's barge

and

Evil

Lynn's

barge,

and she was a strange girl.

I mean, she had these

electric blue eyes, and that was her thing.

You know, it's funny about the movie.

I think it

was like budgeted at 17 million.

It came in at 25 million.

It should have been budgeted at 25 million.

because they

wasted a lot of money

on

the production

that

could have

gone honestly towards

doing a good job.

The budget got

chopped down so severely.

I mean, it's like going from the

Devil's Playground to Vasquez Rocks to

wind up shooting in

Glendale

because they made a deal with the city.

I mean, it was

Weird.

And it could have been a lot better.

Like I said, if they'd have budgeted for

another eight million more,

you know,

it could have been a much better movie.

And had they

picked

a...

You know, they could have got Richard

Fleischer or somebody like that to direct

it, you know, who would have done a hell of

a good job on it.

You know, I don't know why they didn't,

because he was available.

And he's done a lot of those kind of

movies, I mean, you know.

I think they were probably always on the

verge of bankruptcy.

I mean, they were always stretched out,

you know?

I mean, they'd

make it up on the next one.

I mean, they tried

to do a deal.

They had some guy, I

forgot his name, Miller or something like

that, that

was trying to do a deal

for us to

do extra shots,

and then

we'll pay for you on Superman 4, which is

their next project, which really caved them in.

You know,

that was a real

tanker.

I think that they figured that if they were

gonna be, if they had a successful movie,

they were gonna make a buck.

And

I think they tried,

but they were very,

they were too

niggling

with the money,

I think.

They didn't understand the American pulse.

You know, I mean, they could make,

dynamic movies, and they had done, and they

could sell themselves

to

people to invest in

their

misguided

enterprises

in some cases.

They all spoke English, but they didn't really

understand

the American idiom.

And I think

that was

a big problem.

I mean, the thing is that American movies are so

American

that when they're not American, everybody

picks that up.

This was their crowning achievement, you

know, and

I guess in their fantasies, they thought

that Superman was going to be

a great movie, you know,

which was terrible.

It was so cheap and so chintzy looking and

it just didn't look good.

I mean, it looked terrible.

And,

you know, all the

ragged edges of the production were

visible.

And I think a lot of people were incensed by that

because they basically killed Superman

as

a superhero,

you know,

and

that kind of

signaled their demise in anybody's

attitude.

You know, I mean,

you know, you don't

You don't ruin

a hero, you know what I mean?