Stars re-align for the iconic space opera’s 40th. Have a nice (birth)day!
Flash Gordon approaching! As the sci-fi classic turns 40, Total Film dispatches War Rocket Ajax to get the behindthe-scenes story from the director and stars.
It’s one of the biggest ‘what ifs?’ in cinema history. How different would modern Hollywood look had George Lucas succeeded in his mission to nab the film rights to Flash Gordon in the ’70s?
Of course, what happened next has become the stuff of legend. After his advances were snubbed by producer and Flash rights holder Dino De Laurentiis, Lucas went on to create his own galaxy far, far away – and his take on the 1930s sci-fi serials he’d fallen in love with as a kid subsequently did rather well at the box office.
Star Wars was so successful, in fact, that – in a bizarre role reversal – the new kid on the block was able to influence its spacefaring forebear. So with sci-fi suddenly hot property in cinemas around the world, De Laurentiis decided to cash in on his own piece of stardust.
Yet despite arriving the same year as The Empire Strikes Back, Flash Gordon was cut from rather different cloth.
While Lucas and his hero Luke Skywalker were being drawn towards the emotional complexity of the dark side, this larger-than-life adaptation of Alex Raymond’s comic strips featured ornate, brightly coloured sets, a villain who had an actual moustache to twirl, and a clean-cut, all-American hero who never had any doubts whether he was doing the right thing. The film was also kinda funny.
“I don’t see the connection between wanting to get the rights to Flash Gordon and eventually doing Star Wars!” Flash Gordon director Mike Hodges tells Total Film. “Star Wars was very entertaining but I found it visually kind of grey. What I loved about Flash and the strip cartoon is it’s so vivid – the colours are so primary and wonderful. Flash Gordon was a completely different thing to Star Wars, the antithesis of it in many ways. So Star Wars didn’t influence me at all and I was quite happy to be moving in a totally different direction. I wouldn’t have wanted to have competed with Star Wars, that’s for sure!”
Flash Gordon was a product of Depression-era America. Media baron William Randolph Hearst wanted a comic-strip space hero to rival Buck Rogers (of 25th Century fame), and after he lost out on the comic-strip rights to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter Of Mars, the man who’d later inspire Citizen Kane decided to bankroll his own. Enter 22-year-old artist Alex Raymond, whose polo-playing Yale graduate-turned-space adventurer became an icon as soon as he blasted into space in 1934. Within a couple of years, Gordon was alive on the big screen, with former Olympic swimmer Buster Crabbe saving the Earth in the popular adventure serials that would subsequently inspire Lucas.
Fast-forward four decades and De Laurentiis initially hired Don’t Look Now director Nicolas Roeg to helm his mission to the distant planet of Mongo. The two men had very different ideas about what the movie should be, however, so after Roeg left, De Laurentiis turned to Mike Hodges – an unlikely choice, perhaps, seeing as he was most famous for unleashing a vengeful Michael Caine on Newcastle in Get Carter.
Ithought I was completely the wrong director and I said so to Dino,” laughs Hodges, who first met De Laurentiis to discuss helming a potential sequel to Roeg’s movie. “He eventually talked me into it, and I’m very glad he did. It was all new to me – I hadn’t really done anything with special effects, so
I was on a learning curve. I was pretty nervous about it all to begin with.”
Hodges wasn’t the only one venturing into new territory. The two leads, Sam J. Jones and Melody Anderson (playing Flash and love interest Dale Arden, respectively), had just a handful of screen credits between them – and ex-US marine Jones had battled his way through a rigorous casting process that lasted nearly a year.
‘I THINK THAT CAMPINESS HAS MADE IT LAST SO LONG’ MELODY ANDERSON
“I do think that of all the parts, Flash was the most difficult to cast,” explains Brian Blessed, who’s since become synonymous with his performance as Prince Vultan, leader of the Hawkmen. “If you take Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt or any of those actors, they’re very handsome, but if you can put the camera in a certain position they can look quite sinister. But you can get the camera on Sam Jones from any position and he has a bubble of purity about him. I just think he’s absolutely perfect in the part.”
The supporting cast was filled with experience, meanwhile. Ingmar Bergman regular Max von Sydow was cosmic big bad Ming; Fiddler On The Roof legend Topol turned up as disgraced Nasa scientist Dr. Hans Zarkov; Italian star Ornella Muti played Ming’s manipulative daughter, Princess Aura; and a legion of British actors got to come to Shepperton to have the time of their lives, with the likes of Timothy Dalton, Peter Wyngarde and Richard O’Brien all relishing the fact that residents of Mongo don’t do understated. And then, of course, there was Blessed, who fully embraced the chance to play one of his childhood heroes – even if he wasn’t allowed the grizzly bear Vultan kept as a pet in the ’30s serial. “‘It’ll cause fucking havoc, Brian!’ they told me.”
Roeg’s version would have been very different to the Flash that made it to the screen. According to then-screenwriter
Michael Allin, it was designed as a more adult-focused take on the comic strip, with Flash and Dale as an interstellar Adam and Eve. They were being chased across the universe by Ming, a god-like being with a penchant for destroying entire worlds, using a few carefully selected females to re-populate the universe in his image. There was a radical course correction when new writer Lorenzo Semple Jr. – a veteran of the Adam West-starring Batman
TV show – introduced a broader, more comedic take on the story. However, this wasn’t quite how De Laurentiis had envisioned his space epic.
“Dino had a vision, and he was very unhappy,” recalls Melody Anderson. “When they showed the rushes, some
of the crew were laughing because it was just so dopey and Dino was infuriated. He wanted to make a sort of Star Wars-like serious space movie. But I think that campiness is part of what has made it last so long.”
“The whole concept of the film had changed since Nic left, and Lorenzo’s script was pretty daft!” adds Hodges. “Dino was an extraordinary man. He was quite ruthless, of course, and his reputation was for being pretty cutthroat, but there was a sort of childlike quality to him. He really believed in Flash Gordon as a story for children, basically, whereas I as of course was coming at it from a completely different angle, with much more tongue-in-cheek.”
Hodges was also happy to let his cast improvise. Indeed, for the memorable action scene where American footballer Flash uses his Gridiron skills to take out Ming’s forces was the result of Jones – who played the game to a high level – pointing out that the Fabergé egg-like props looked a lot like footballs.
“We had to be on our toes,” says Jones. “We had to create whatever made sense at the time and Flash was an American footballer, so that was inherent to his character. It was a no-brainer, and it was natural for me. My body was young so I could take all the tumbling on the hardwood floors!”
“I thought, ‘Well, I’m supposed to be the all-American girl, so I should be the cheerleader,” adds Anderson. “That’s when I came up with all the, ‘Go Flash, go!’ stuff. That never was written into the script, but you’ll notice I tried to carry it throughout the film, like when Flash breaks up the wedding at the end. That was me!”
Not every change the cast suggested made it into the movie, however – when Peter Wyngarde suggested that Klytus, Ming’s sadistic number two, should return for the sequel, Hodges wasn’t up for making revisions.
“Peter Wyngarde didn’t want to die in his scene!” laughs Blessed. “He said to the director, ‘I do think I should be kept on and not killed, I’m going to be very popular.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m not gonna bloody die!’ And [Hodges] said, ‘No no, this is where you get killed. Flash will pick you up, throw you on the disc, the spikes go into your body, and you’re dead and that’s it. And he shut up. But it was all taken in good part.”
To create Mongo’s ornate backdrops and costumes, De Laurentiis enlisted Oscar-winner Danilo Donati. But as beautiful and intricate as many of the sets were, they weren’t always the easiest places for a director to shoot – partly because Donati didn’t always leave space to fit a camera.
“For Arboria, Danilo built these enormous trees, and I would say, ‘Dino, where am I going to get the camera in?’” Hodges laughs. “When I started filming I used to lie awake all night planning all the shots for the next day, and the following morning you’d find you’d forgotten there were three pillars in the way, and you had to rethink everything you stayed awake all night thinking about, because it wasn’t feasible. There was a sense of improvisation [that was like] shooting on location.”
Above the planet’s surface, the skies were similarly artistic, a swirling mass of marbled colour created – after much head-scratching – by injecting inks and paints into water, and filming them at high speed. “It was only when those skies started coming through that I really believed the film would work,” Hodges admits. “Up until then, I must be honest, I had grave doubts about what it was going to be like.”
Those skies were the backdrop for the movie’s climax, where Flash leads an army (or should that be air force?) of Hawkmen in an audacious attack on the War Rocket Ajax. With loads of actors dangling on wires, giant wings on their back, co-ordinating the assault was a logistical nightmare.
“Christ, I had an extra wire on my privates to keep me upright!” winces Blessed. “It took about five or six fucking days to get all the wires and the wings moving at the same time. I had a great bazooka in my hand and after many days of getting it all ready – they had fireworks and dynamite and special
‘SAM JONES HAS A BUBBLE OF PURITY ABOUT HIM’ BRIAN BLESSED
effects – they said, ‘Right, Brian, we’ve got all the wings going now. Action!’ I went, ‘Ah well, who wants to live forever? Squadron 40, dive!’ [Blessed makes shooting noises.][The director] said, ‘Cut, cut, cut… Brian, we put in the sound effects later! No sound comes from your bloody gun!’ I’ve never felt such a tit. I couldn’t ever get used to the idea, nor could Sam. He had a little revolver, and he’d go, ‘Bedang, bedang, bedang…’ Of course it had taken them bloody two weeks to get the effects together, and I fucked it all up by doing the gun noises!”
For Hodges, meanwhile, working with his hands-on producer could have been just as challenging as uniting Mongo’s feuding factions. De Laurentiis had a reputation as a control freak, and Hodges recalls walking off the movie in the first two weeks, demanding that if the producer was on set and had a problem with anything Hodges was doing, he was not to discuss it in front of the cast and crew – a condition De Laurentiis ultimately agreed to.
“On one occasion I caught Dino,” says Hodges. “We had a lunch break and he didn’t notice me – I was sitting there reading a paper on set. He went and looked through the viewfinder of the camera, and he started shouting, ‘Where’s the operator?” I came up behind him and said, ‘Dino, the shot’s not lined up, it’s nothing, get off!’ He ran away and I didn’t see him for three days! But we worked together really well. The more relaxed he became with what
I was doing, and once he realised that it was a comedy, it was a perfectly good relationship.”
Sadly, the shoot didn’t wrap quite so well for Jones. As a rising star, his agents and managers tried to renegotiate his contract – something De Laurentiis was not inclined to sign off on. So after production took a break for Christmas 1979, Jones was not flown back to the UK for ADR or reshoots in the new year. Hodges says that principal photography was complete by this point, though he brought in a double of Jones for “some wide shots” and “somebody to impersonate Sam’s voice. Most of the dialogue is Sam’s own voice, but some I had to re-voice”.
Jones recalls clearing the air with De Laurentiis some 20 years later, having phoned the producer to “make things right”. “After we talked I really felt that burden leave my shoulders and that things were alright,” he says. “But in any situation whether it be a movie set or a work environment or a war zone, whatever, there’s always going to be some tension and you have to correct it later on. When there’s millions of pounds or money involved, there’s a lot of pressure to get it done on budget and on time.”
The dispute also meant Jones was also unavailable to promote the movie on the American chat show circuit. His absence didn’t help the film’s chances at the US box office, where it didn’t come close to rivalling Star Wars, although it did do well in several other countries, including the UK. “I didn’t do as much [promotion] as I did for many other projects,” recalls Anderson. “It was sort of like, if they couldn’t use Sam they didn’t want to use anybody, because he was Flash Gordon.”
Forty years on, however, Flash’s unique mix of hilarious dialogue, memorable characters and that rocking Queen soundtrack have ensured it’s become space opera’s ultimate cult hit. “It was like an orphan child for so long, but just because of the sheer artistic energy in the film, it just came back on its own,” says Anderson. “Star Wars continues to last as a classic too, but Star Wars doesn’t make you laugh. Flash Gordon will put a smile on your face because it’s so silly.”
“I had some of my representation over the years tell me, ‘You’ve got to walk away from this image of Flash Gordon,’” says Jones. “I said, ‘Why? What are you talking about?’ Flash Gordon is one of the few [comic-book heroes] who does not have superpowers, he’s just a guy who has to operate with his wit and his athleticism – and me, Sam Jones, in real life it’s the same thing. I don’t ever want to walk away from it. I think it’s wonderful.”
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