Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Texas adman turned ‘Benji’ filmmaker dies at 84
Joe Camp, a Texas adman turned filmmaker who bootstrapped his way to a smash-hit with “Benji,” the 1974 live-action film starring a shaggy-haired pooch, after being turned away by Hollywood studios, died Friday at his home in Bell Buckle, Tennessee. He was 84.
His son Brandon Camp said he died “after battling a long illness.”
In a statement, Camp’s family noted his “unwavering belief in the power of storytelling.” That devotion, they said, “propelled him into a career that challenged and ultimately triumphed over Hollywood convention.”
“Joe knows how to tug the heart strings,” media executive and former Walt Disney Studios Chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg once said about him. “He’s a very emotional guy, and for a filmmaker, that’s a positive trait.”
Camp’s breakthrough movie grossed more than $270 million in today’s dollars and spawned five sequels, not to mention television projects, toys, books and other merchandise. But it almost never made it to theaters when Walt Disney Pictures and a host of other studios passed on the movie after it had been shot in Mckinney.
The cold shoulder left Camp with only one clear choice to get the movie in front of an audience: Do it himself.
“Everybody told me, ‘You don’t know anything about distribution,’ ” he told a Dallas Morning News reporter with a smile in 1987. “But then we didn’t know anything about making a movie either.”
Less than a decade before the film’s release, the family was living a typical suburban life. Camp worked as an advertising copywriter and Carolyn, his wife, was a stay-athome mom in Richardson.
But Camp had a childhood dream of making movies. He grew up on Disney films. “Walt Disney really was his idol,” said his son Brandon, himself a director. “‘Lady and the Tramp’ was one of his favorite movies, and he began to wonder why there had never been a live-action version of ‘Lady and the Tramp,’ and specifically what he meant was a film in which the dog was truly the protagonist, not just a helper, or some sort of hero that went from one place to the next and pulled someone out of a well.”
Studying the family’s Yorkshire terrier, Benji, one night, Camp fleshed out his idea.
“I watched him react to whatever I was doing, to sounds outside,” Camp said in 1987. “And I realized that dogs do talk. They talk with their eyes.”
After a strong reception in Dallas, Camp took the movie “marketby-market,” according to Brandon, assembling media campaigns in individual U.S. cities before eventually taking the movie overseas in a strategy that would be virtually impossible to execute today.
“‘Benji’ was a local success city by city. It wasn’t like this global box office phenomenon,” Brandon said.
Camp went on to turn “Benji” into a franchise with “For the Love of Benji” in 1977, “Oh Heavenly Dog” starring Chevy Chase and Jane Seymour in 1980, 1987’s “Benji the Hunted” and 2004’s “Benji: Off the Leash!”
Camp is survived by his wife, Kathleen, his two sons, Joe and Brandon — both filmmakers — and his stepchildren David, Dylan and Allegra.