Conan the Barbarian (1982): Part 1 of 2
Don’t Mess With Texas, Pumping Iron, Like A Rolling Stone
In recognition of one of nature’s most dazzling spells–unveiling hours more light a day–Video Days celebrates March with five sword and sorcery films from another time.
CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982) was the opening act in a summer movie festival that in 1982 included a dozen future classics: Mad Max 2 (released as The Road Warrior on May 21 in the U.S. and Canada), Rocky III, Poltergeist, Star Trek II, E.T., Blade Runner, The Thing, The Secret of N.I.M.H., Tron, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and An Officer and a Gentleman. Where Conan falls on that list might depend on the viewer’s awareness of the Marvel Comics line or the pulp fiction by Robert E. Howard it was adapted from, but as a fusion of sight and sound, it enthralls for much of its running time, building a world from the ground up and announcing the arrival of a major film star, perhaps the biggest in terms of musculature ever.
Robert E. Howard was born in Peaster, Texas, in 1906. An only child, his father was a traveling physician. Howard’s mother, Hester Jane Ervin Howard, the emotional center of his life, struggled with tuberculosis. Howard grew up in the oil boomtowns of the Texas Panhandle, eventually settling in Cross Plains, roughly 160 miles northwest of Austin. His mother’s love of poetry, Howard’s interest in boxing, and the hardscrabble environment of West Texas shaped his fiction, which combined fantasy, ancient settings, and heroes of formidable strength. To meet the demands of the pulp market, Howard wrote quickly. He became a defining contributor to Weird Tales during the Great Depression and also published in Argosy, Action Stories, Oriental Stories, and Sports Story Magazine. This led to a fruitful correspondence with author H.P. Lovecraft, with whom Howard often debated culture and history. Many credit Howard with founding the “sword and sorcery” genre. His characters included Solomon Kane, an English Puritan who battled witches and vampires; Red Sonya of Rogatino, a Polish-Ukrainian fighter who faced the Ottoman Turks during the Siege of Vienna in 1529; and Conan the Cimmerian, a warrior of the prehistoric Hyborian Age—a mythic era Howard placed after the fall of Atlantis and before recorded history.
Despite his publishing success, Howard struggled with his share of inner turmoil, including an intense attachment to his ailing mother. In 1936, she slipped into her final coma, and hours before her death, Howard shot himself in the head with a revolver. He died at the age of 30. Howard’s work might have faded into obscurity if not for Lancer Books, which in 1966 published Conan the Adventurer, a collection of tales centering on the warrior, with larger-than-life cover art by Frank Frazetta that would define Conan’s look. The success of Lancer’s paperbacks led Stan Lee, seeking a popular literary character to launch a new comic line, to select Conan. With Marvel Comics associate editor Roy Thomas overseeing the writing of mostly new stories, Conan the Barbarian was one of the best selling books the publisher of The Fantastic Four, The Amazing Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk ever printed, running for 275 issues from 1970 to 1993, captivating a new generation of fans.
Edward R. Pressman was in his early thirties and had already produced two pictures for writer/ director Brian DePalma–Sisters (1973) and Phantom of the Paradise (1974)--and in an executive producer capacity, raised financing for Badlands (1973), the acclaimed directorial debut of screenwriter Terrence Malick, which Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek starred. In 1976, Pressman was invited to a screening of a new documentary titled Pumping Iron. The film chronicled the 1975 Mr. Olympia bodybuilding competition, in which Brooklyn’s Lou Ferrigno competed for the title against Arnold Schwarzenegger, the so-called “Austrian Oak.” The documentary helped launch personal fitness in the U.S. and introduced Schwarzenegger to a global audience. In spite of his name, accent and background, the bodybuilder had the amusing notion of launching an acting career. Arnold had been featured prominently as a weightlifter in Stay Hungry (1976), a romantic comedy starring Jeff Bridges and Sally Field. As an early demonstration of Schwarzenegger’s finesse with the international press, the Golden Globes awarded him New Star of the Year for his performance.
Pressman had invited a friend to the screening of Pumping Iron named Edward Summer, owner of Supersnipe Comic Art Emporium in Manhattan. Pressman pointed out that there had to be an appropriate film vehicle for a performer with Schwarzenegger’s gifts. In a making-of documentary produced for the 2000 DVD release of Conan the Barbarian, Pressman recalled, “And Ed immediately turned and said, ‘Well, Conan, of course!’ So he took me to his comic book store and showed me the world of Frank Frazetta and the world of Conan, which at that point I was not familiar with. And that started me on a journey–first to get the rights, and at the same time meeting Arnold. Together, we spent close to five years trying to get the film set up.” In 1977, with little more than belief and a stack of comic books, Pressman met with Schwarzenegger in Los Angeles to pitch the actor his vision: not one sword and sorcery film, but a series, a new entry to be produced every two years. Schwarzenegger had never heard of Conan, but the kinetic Frazetta illustrations Pressman showed him hooked his curiosity, while the popularity of the Marvel Comics line may have landed the actor’s attention.
The deal Arnold’s reps negotiated in the fall of 1977 was by far the most financially lucrative Schwarzenegger had ever been offered: five films, $250,000 for the first, $1,000,000 for the second, $2,000,000 for the third and so on, plus 5% of the net profits. The roughly $10 million deal was contingent on all the movies being made, of course, and Schwarzenegger refusing offers to play other Conan-like characters, as he had in his first movie, the silly Hercules In New York (1970). Schwarzenegger booked supporting roles in The Villain (1979) opposite Ann-Margret, and the TV movie The Jayne Mansfield Story (1980) with Loni Anderson, in which Schwarzenegger played Mansfield’s husband, Hungarian bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay. Pressman’s negotiations with Robert E. Howard’s estate for an option on the film rights to Conan dragged on for two years. The producer would ultimately cut the Howard estate a check for $7,500, and surrender at least $100,000 in legal fees. By that time, Pressman had engaged Edward Summer and Roy Thomas to work under the table on a story treatment. Paramount Pictures–then a powerhouse executive regime led by Barry Diller as chairman, Michael Eisner as studio president and Jeffrey Katzenberg as president of production, with Don Simpson and Dawn Steel as junior executives–agreed to put up development costs for Conan.
Paramount’s offer was predicated on Pressman bringing in a top screenwriter to adapt a script. The producer had been impressed by the writing sample from a screenwriter named Oliver Stone titled Platoon that in 1978, nobody wanted to produce. In The Oliver Stone Experience by Matt Zoller Seitz published in 2016, Stone stated, “I’d read and loved all the Conan books, and I loved the comics, and I really had a vision of this thing as a … I guess it was before all the series or franchise stuff became popular, but I’d seen the first Star Wars, so I could see a series of twelve movies! James Bond came to mind. It could have lasted, because it’s a great story! If you follow him, he starts out a nobody, he becomes king in the end, but then he walks away from the kingdom and finds more adventures. In other words, he rises to the top but he walks away, like Siddhartha, and then he becomes something else, becomes Old Conan. So the idea was really a twelve-film series, I guess like what they did later with Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings.” [Referencing an appointment at Paramount with the “murderer’s row” of Diller, Eisner, Katzenberg, Simpson and Steel at the table, Stone, an Army infantry veteran twice wounded in Vietnam, admitted to Seitz, “That was the worst meeting I ever had in the movie business.”]
Stone actually started writing before Schwarzenegger’s deal was closed and shifted gears to tailor Conan for the actor. “I could see him also as a Tarzan figure, more Edgar Rice Burroughs than Robert E. Howard, and that was the way he was drawn by Frank Frazetta. I always thought Frazetta’s Conan was a little overdone, though. There was another fellow I went to who was English, Barry Windsor-Smith. Beautiful, classical renderings, he did the original Conan comics. We got him to do the hero’s drawings in The Hand (1981).” Pressman compared Stone’s 141-page screenplay–simply titled Conan, dated August 1, 1978, based on the stories of Robert E. Howard, with later additions by L. Sprague De Camp and Lin Carter–to Dante’s Inferno. Hell on earth. In the making-of documentary, Stone stated, “I had a lot of mutants, a lot of animals. I was into DNA cloning, all that stuff, a long time ago. It really made sense. I was never able to realize it on film, that vision. I saw armies of forty, fifty thousand mutants coming at each other.” Having already bet on Terrence Malick and Brian DePalma early in their directing careers and ready to put his chips on an unproven leading man in Arnold Schwarzenegger, Pressman was willing to gamble on Oliver Stone, who wanted to direct Conan.
One proposal would have paired Stone with a co-director in Joe Alves, the production designer of Jaws (1975) and art director of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), an expert in visual effects who was also interested in directing. Paramount–perhaps after their meeting with Stone–didn’t go for it. Pressman and Stone began the search for a director who could get Conan made. The producer recalled, “We spent a lot of time talking with different directors. We talked to Alan Parker. We spent a lot of time with Ridley Scott, and I remember being in London and Ridley or one of the directors we hoped would do it turned us down and we were sitting there totally dismayed not knowing what to do next.” Pressman knew that producer Dino De Laurentiis was in town at a hotel within walking distance of their own. Ready to wash their hands of Conan, Pressman and Stone sold the Italian mogul their film rights and screenplay, Paramount reimbursed for their development costs as well. This was possible because De Laurentiis reached an agreement with Ned Tanen, president of Universal Pictures, to finance and distribute Conan. Remarkably, considering the finished film, Tanen appraised Stone’s script as too violent and in need of being toned down, as well as made filmable.
De Laurentiis was working with writer/ director/ military historian John Milius on a project titled Half the Sky about mountain man Jedediah Smith and the American frontier. He believed Milius–a larger-than-life character who’d written the initial drafts of Jeremiah Johnson (1972) and Apocalypse Now (1979)--was the man to rewrite and direct Conan. In the making-of documentary, Milius recalled, “I knew nothing of Conan the Barbarian, or Robert E. Howard or any of the books or the comic books or anything until Oliver Stone came and told me about it. The one thing I knew about, that I was aware of, was Frank Frazetta’s paintings, and of course, I love Viking things, and I’d always wanted to do a Viking movie. And I was a surfer. One of my first names was Viking Man because I had this great big sword. Oliver had already written a script and I read it and it was really inspirational, probably because it was so insane. And then I saw that I could do a movie that I really wanted to do.” Milius spent nine months reading Howard’s pulp fiction and working on his own draft, occasionally submitting material to Stone for approval, but working alone. He salvaged some elements of Stone’s feverish script: Conan surviving the massacre of his village as a boy (the heads of his father and mother impaled on pikes by the raiders), an adult Conan being seduced by a witch, a 25-foot serpent protecting a stone the thief sets out to steal, and Conan being crucified to a solitary tree.
Conan’s partner in crime and lover, Valeria, was also retained. Milius picked a necromancer from Howard’s stories named Thulsa Doom to become Conan’s primary antagonist. He pruned Stone’s mutants from his script, as well as a great deal of fantasy, preferring an action film rooted in an ancient world that felt lived in. Milius’ love of samurai movies, as well as certain philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche (“That which does not kill us makes us stronger”) filtered their way into his script, which he titled Conan the Barbarian. The WGA would award “written by” credit to John Milius and Oliver Stone, based on the character created by Robert E. Howard. Speaking of the script in 2016, Stone mused, “It ended up bastardized. He had big ideas, Dino: ‘I’m going to do the Bible!’ But Dino was lacking in vision. He fucked up Conan, and he fucked up Year of the Dragon! John had big ideas and a sort of warped vision. Dino had no vision.” The mogul’s daughter, Raffaella De Laurentiis, who’d worked as a production assistant for her father on Hurricane (1979) and was twenty-six years old at the time, was promoted to producer, sharing credit with Buzz Feitshans, who’d line produced the ambitious Big Wednesday (1978) for Milius the director and the massive 1941 (1979) for Milius the producer.
Part 2 of my Conan the Barbarian retrospective coming Friday, April 3.