Filmmaker documented Schwarzenegger and Shackleton
George Butler, a documentary filmmaker who introduced audiences to a charismatic bodybuilder named Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Pumping Iron,” and who later examined subjects as varied as explorer Ernest Shackleton, the ivory-billed woodpecker and his longtime friend John Kerry, died Oct. 21 at his home in Holderness, N.H. He was 78.
The cause was pneumonia, said his son Desmond Butler, an investigative reporter who covers climate and the environment for The Washington Post. Butler had continued making movies while also battling Parkinson’s disease, traveling to the Sundarbans in South Asia to film Bengal tigers for his latest documentary, “Tiger Tiger” (2015). An Imax version of the film is tentatively scheduled for release next year.
In a more than fourdecade filmmaking career, Butler directed and produced 10 documentaries, telling stories about conservation, adventure and ordinary people in thrall to obsession. His movies transported viewers to remote locations – including the frigid South Sea in “Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure” (2001) and the surface of the
Red Planet in the NASA chronicle “Roving Mars” (2006), both made for Imax – while also trying to move beyond stuffy documentary conventions.
“Just as Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer and Gay Talese gave a dramatic structure to nonfiction – and made it far more interesting than standard journalism – I’m trying to take the facts and adhere to the truth, but to give it a dramatic structure,” he told the New York Times in 1990, upon the release of a revised cut of his documentary “In the Blood.” The movie linked a hunting trip by President Theodore Roosevelt and his son with a modern-day safari by Butler and his son Tyssen, who served as the film’s narrator.
Growing up in East Africa, where his father was an Irish-born officer in the British army, Butler developed a love of the outdoors while drinking camel’s milk, hunting for his dinner and befriending an antelope that he treated like a member of the family. He later immersed himself in literature, even as he turned toward photojournalism and filmmaking; a frequent collaborator, cinematographer Sandi Sissel, once recalled that during a film shoot in Antarctica “he was always quoting Proust and various poems in four or five languages.”
Butler was perhaps best known for his first movie, “Pumping Iron” (1977), which helped bring bodybuilding and the sport’s reigning champion, Schwarzenegger, into the mainstream. Years before he became a movie star, action hero and two-term “governator” of California, Schwarzenegger was filmed psyching-out his opponents at the Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympia competitions, discussing the similarities between lifting weights and having sex, and posing like an ancient Greek sculpture come to life.
“The minute we met Arnold, both of us were just stunned,” author Charles Gaines, who co-wrote the film with Butler, said in a phone interview. Butler had been taking photos for magazines including
Vogue and Life when Gaines invited him to take pictures for a 1972 Sports Illustrated article about bodybuilding, kicking off their collaboration.
Although they had been impressed by bodybuilders such as Mike Katz, “none of them had the combination of charisma, charm, pure force of presence, good looks plus this immense physique that Arnold had,” Gaines recalled. He added that Butler was so impressed by Schwarzenegger, he left their first meeting at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan saying, “We should be this guy’s agent.”
Instead, they settled for featuring him in a nonfiction book, “Pumping Iron” (1974), followed by the documentary of the same name, which included some scenes that were staged. Butler codirected the film with cinematographer Robert Fiore, learning on the job, and said that he was less interested in bodybuilding as a sport than in documenting a subculture that he described as “the wackiest, zaniest, silliest, strangest world on earth.”
Few shared his enthusiasm, at least at first. Butler