A SURPRISE HIT
‘TMNT’ still cult classic 30 years later
Thirty years ago, the film equivalent of a dollar slice of cheese pizza steamed into cinemas nationwide — an independent flick shot on a shoestring budget and a scrambled schedule the previous summer.
“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” derived from a niche graphic novel, seemed a most unlikely candidate to emerge as a box office smash.
It would go on to net more cash than any indie movie in history, at the time.
The creation of the highest grossing film the weekend of March 30, 1990, took wing with a phone call fielded by Steve Barron more than a year earlier.
The Irish-born filmmaker received a ring from director Anthony Minghella, who worked with Barron on the puppet-based British TV series “The Storyteller” and wanted to alert him to a comic book about four pizza-loving, crimefighting ninja reptiles living in the sewers beneath lower Manhattan.
A Hong Kong-based film production company, Golden Harvest, wanted to flip the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles into a cheap movie.
Barron’s interest was piqued, and he met with Golden Harvest to start plotting a course. But, he told the Daily News recently, he wanted to get Jim Henson, the legendary puppeteer, onboard.
When Barron first raised the idea with the brains behind Kermit the Frog, the late puppeteer said, “It sounds like they fight, they’ve got nunchucks, they’ve got sais, they’ve got swords. And I’ve got ‘Sesame Street’ and ‘The Muppets.’ ”
The director in turn tried to sell Henson that, though the movie would be dark, it wouldn’t be meanspirited. Eventually he got a call back. Henson signed on.
Also on Barron’s to-do list: a meeting with Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, the comic book artists who created Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello and Raphael in the early ’80s. The director linked up with the pair at Mirage Studios in Northampton,
Mass.
Eastman recalled he was keenly aware of the stakes for the franchise: a movie misfire, he felt, could derail his heroes, who were enjoying the flattering light of a popular, goofy animated kids TV series with a beloved theme song.
Barron arrived at the meeting with a pile of the original comic books, annotated with sticky notes. The graphic novelists exhaled.
Meanwhile, at Jim Henson’s
Creature Shop in London, engineers got to work constructing seaweed-green neoprene suits with animatronic mouths.
But what looked wickedly cool in a studio proved wickedly exhausting to wear. For the four actors behind the masks, the process of putting on the equipment sucked up at least a half-hour each day. In the heat of the Wilmington, N.C., studio where much of the filming took place, the foam suits were weighed down by the actors’ sweat, like Nerf footballs dunked in a pool.
Josh Pais, the New York actor inel’s side Raphael’s suit, tended to combust. “He used to have these little meltdowns,” Barron said. Pais said his aggravation helped him dive into the character of the hotheadedturtle.
“You were sealed in, and your body temperature would start to rise,” Pais said.
Pais fashioned the turtle with a brawny New York accent, one he drew from the voices of youngsters he knew growing up in Alphabet City.
The movie told a story of a rugged old New York, shot through a hazy lens. A crime wave washes over Manhattan, and a mysterious criminal operation called the Foot Clan menaces the city.
This crime syndicate relies on the thievery of teenagers, who worship at the altar of a villain called The Shredder.
To give the film its New York flavor, the crew headed to the city for four days. . The filmmakers repurposed a derelict warehouse on Roosevelt Island as the Foot Clan’s headquarters, with the Manhattan skyline looming.
Copying Tim Burton’s Batman blockbuster from the year before, the movie was visually dark and thematically heavy — “a serious take on a silly subject,” as Eastman put it.
“We weren’t necessarily going for the poppy, colorful, comic book look,” Barron told The News. “We were going for some gritty, earthy reality.”
When the film, shot on a bill of roughly $8 million, reached theaters, it grossed $25 million its opening weekend. It went on to make more than $200 million. Three decades later, it remains a cult classic.
New Line Cinema, the only American studio willing to take a chance on the project, had paid $2 million for the movie.
“It’s obviously very rough around the edges,” Barron admitted as he looked back on the film. “We were short in resources. But long in heart.”