Legend (1985)
Visually spectacular, textually poor faerie tale improved by director's cut
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.
LEGEND (1985) leaves no doubt we’re watching something, faint praise for a motion picture with the ambitions and resources of this one. Its art and makeup departments granted generous budgets to design a traditional faerie tale with modern tools, it is dazzling to look at. The director’s cut addresses many, if not all, of the narrative problems plaguing an abridged theatrical version, but the movie’s artistic and commercial sensibilities are arm wrestling each other the entire time. After much grunting and sweat, each wears the other out.
Director Ridley Scott prepared his ascension from commercials to feature films by working on at least three scripts in the 1970s. In an interview with François Guérif and Alain Garel published in 1985, the director revealed that one project had been contemporary, another a black comedy, and another a faerie tale, the latter inspired by Scott’s reading of The Once and Future King by T.H. White and his love of Jean Cocteau’s film adaptation of Beauty and the Beast (1946). Scott was planning to shoot his fantasy film in Yugoslavia until financing evaporated. This led him to The Duellists, which starred Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel as French soldiers beefing for fifteen years during the Napoleonic Wars. A modest success, Scott followed it with a massive one: Alien (1979). The blockbuster did come at the cost of another project the director had toiled on. In an interview by Alan Jones published in Cinemafantastique magazine in January 1986, Scott began, “One of the reasons I wanted to make Legend was because of my aborted project Tristan and Isodole. After The Duellists I couldn’t see the point of spending another year of my life on what would essentially be another art movie that only a limited audience would see. For me it just wasn’t enough–not in monetary terms but artistic ones. So I dropped the idea and did Alien instead. I was right to do that in retrospect.”
Scott continued, “Then I prepared Dune for a year. All I saw with that project was another two-and-a-half years stretching in front of me before I ever got behind the cameras. Filmmaking is actually going out and doing it and not spending three years in preproduction. But I always wanted to return to the mythological or faerie tale idea as I’m one of those people who find the real world of no particular interest.” Given his name, novelist/ screenwriter William Hjortsberg could be mistaken for Scandinavian or possibly German, but he was born in New York. Hjortsberg briefly attended Yale Drama School, from 1962-1963, long enough to realize he was more partial to playwriting than set design. It was at Yale that Hjortsberg met novelist Thomas McGuane, whose friendship would help him publish his debut novel Alp, in 1969. Hjortsberg was so drawn to McGuane’s orbit that he followed the author to Livingston, Montana, country that would cast its spell on a number of actors or writers who bought property or worked there full-time. Hjortsberg published several novels–Gray Matters in 1971, Symbiography in 1973, Falling Angel in 1978–using them as calling cards to get work writing freelance magazine articles (mostly for Sports Illustrated) and screenplays.
Hjortsberg was employed by Roger Corman to adapt one of the producer’s ideas for a routine “hot pursuit” movie, which starred David Carradine and Kate Jackson and was released as Thunder and Lightning (1977). His fiction was building him a serious reputation for history, mystery and the occult, and his novel Falling Angel, with its potent mix of noir and the supernatural, would begin to attract the attention of filmmakers. In the fall of 1980, Ridley Scott invited William Hjortsberg to Los Angeles, where the director was in pre-production on Blade Runner (1982). Meeting for drinks at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Scott asked Hjortsberg if he’d be interested in scripting a live action faerie story for him. It turned out that the screenwriter had been scribbling “brief tales and fables” for his own amusement without anticipation anything would come of them. To demonstrate for Hjortsberg what he meant by a faerie story, Scott moved their meeting to the screening room of the hotel to project a 16mm print he owned of Beauty and the Beast.
In his introduction to the published version of the Legend screenplay in 2002, Hjortsberg wrote, “The prospect of writing an epic faerie tale held great appeal. My brief fictional efforts in that vein had largely been ironic in tone, modernist takes on the genre. I wanted to play it straight this time and hopefully create a classic, a story with elements which would echo eternally in the public imagination, like glass slippers and magic beans, pumpkins that turned into golden coaches and cannibalistic witches living in gingerbread houses. Great faerie tales live forever. This is as close to immortality as any writer might imagine.” Hjortsberg returned to Los Angeles to meet with Ridley Scott in the kitchen of the director’s rental house, in the a.m. before Scott was due at work. They didn’t start with much, and spent a week batting around ideas. As the director elaborated to Cinemafantastique, “To begin with, I only had the vague notion of something in pursuit of the swiftest steed alive, which, of course, was a unicorn. One aspect I was very definite about was that I wanted the outside world shown as economically as possible. To that end we settled on the solitary clockmaker’s cottage. Originally the quests were more prolonged and involved the classic earning process, but all these had to be substantially reduced. I was nervous about getting too complex in filmic terms. Every quest story tends to have side quests that depart from the main thrust of the story in order to get a weapon or a super power. I wanted to give Legend a more contemporary movement, rather than get bogged down in too classical a format.”
In their kitchen conferences, Hjortsberg proposed that a commoner, perhaps a miller, would be infatuated with a princess, whose curiosity has drawn her out of the safety of her castle to flirt with him. In a playful mood, the princess slips off a ring and chucks it into a pond, proclaiming that whoever retrieves the ring will have her hand in marriage. The boy dives in after the totem but when he emerges, darkness has taken over the land and swept the princess away. Scott loved it and told Hjortsberg to get back to Montana to start writing. Living in a cheap rented apartment with a view of the Absaroka Mountains, Hjortsberg relied on Faeries, the illustrated compendium of folklore by artists Brian Froud and Alan Lee, as a reference, copying their witch Jenny Greenteeth and goblin Jimmy Squarefoot and even referring to them as such in his first draft. Five months later, Hjortsberg had completed a 145-page draft, titled Legend of Darkness. Scott loved it, believing he’d found the right balance between American romanticism and European stoicism.
Arnon Milchan, an Israeli entrepreneur who’d gotten his start with a small agricultural chemical company he’d inherited from his father, had been appointed Israel’s sales agent to a variety of companies, including Bell Helicopter, Magnavox and Raytheon. What Milchan really wanted to do was produce movies. He recalled Ridley Scott approaching him with two projects. One was a musical about a spaceship that crashes in Jerusalem. The other was Legend of Darkness. The producer much preferred the latter and got to work setting up major studio financing and distribution. Those who recall Hjortsberg’s first draft described it being wondrous–the unicorns conjuring a trail of posies wherever they step, Darkness being a griffin–and expensive. Given Scott’s love of Walt Disney animation, which in films like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940) and Fantasia (1940) trended toward the dark and operatic, Walt Disney Pictures was their first stop. Scott explained to Cinemafantastique, “When we were trying to sell the project it was very dark in tone. I tend to lean in that direction, anyway. The fear of distributors at that time was extraordinary. When we submitted it to Disney, I tried to reassure them that my intention was not to go too far in that direction, but they couldn’t seem to understand such a change of pace, considering my previous work.”
At that time, Disney wasn’t interested in a live-action reimagining of their animated classics. Universal Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox agreed to co-finance what was now titled Legend, Universal retaining distribution rights in the U.S. and Canada, Fox distributing the picture overseas. A production budget was dialed in at $24.5 million. Scott had wanted to work with Assheton Gorton–the art director of Blow Up (1966) — on Alien and Blade Runner, and finally landed him for Legend. Needing a forest fit for a storybook, they considered filming at Yosemite National Park in central California, but the practicality of rigging sufficient light or working with prosthetic makeup outdoors drove the show indoors, to Pinewood Studios in England, where the filmmakers fabricated their forest on the 007 Stage, erected to shoot the submarine base for the James Bond extravaganza The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). To build the dells, hills and valleys necessary for a dramatic-looking forest, some 20,000 tons of soil were imported. In audio commentary recorded for the issue of Legend on DVD in 2002, Scott stated, “And one of the trickiest things was, you don’t want to build one of these things one-sided. There’s no mattes in this, no CGI because it didn’t exist in those days. I didn’t want a matte because mattes always look like mattes. I wanted it to be real, so I built each tree with a full three-hundred sixty degree trunk …”
Scott continued, “The cyclorama in this studio I think was, let’s say fifty feet high. I made, on runners, massive steel frames. I made mirrors that went fifty feet up and ran on runners all the way around, so whichever way I looked when I lined up a shot I would have the back of the tree reflected in the mirror, so the forest went on forever. And it worked great until we started to feed a lot of pigeons in the forest, and the amusing thing would be when they decided to take off in the morning, they’d fly around, fly down in the forest and fly straight into a plastic mirror.” The woods in Legend took craftspeople fourteen weeks to construct. Meanwhile, Tom Cruise–posed to become a star following his debut as a leading man in the blockbuster Risky Business (1983) and a modestly successful high school football drama titled All the Right Moves (1983)--chose to work for Ridley Scott next, taking the role of the commoner, named Jack o’ the Green. Cruise was 21 years old when filming commenced, and the impossibility of finding a female lead as young and talented and popular to play the princess, Lili, led to the casting of Mia Sara, making her film debut at the age of sixteen.
The process of casting Darkness was unique. Scott told François Guérif and Alain Garel, “First I thought of Peter O’Toole, but he was so skinny and so pale. I had never seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), but I was looking for someone to be the sorceress of the swamps. One of the actresses from The Rocky Horror Picture Show seemed to fit that role. Then I saw Tim Curry and I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is Darkness.’ I like the control he has over himself. He is very physical and powerful, theatrically speaking. He knows when he needs to stop. It was great to work with him.” Earning the commission to create the makeup effects for Legend was Rob Bottin, who’d barely been old enough to buy a beer when he designed the werewolf transformations for The Howling (1981) and the stunning alien organisms for The Thing (1982). Curry all but disappeared under the hulking, devilish makeup Bottin devised for Darkness. Scott continued, “The Beast in Cocteau is never horrible. When I was a kid, the beginning of the movie made me very afraid, but every soon you realize there is something else. I wanted that with Darkness. I didn’t want to put a barrier between the audience and him. We could have created a monster that was terrible, disgusting, really horrible to look at, but we wanted something between beast and man. And we wanted to give the character the most depth possible. I wanted Darkness to be healthy, not disgusting psychologically and physically, because I had the feeling that Evil treats itself better, more often than not, than Good.”
Visual effects supervisor Richard Edlund had been consulted to solve how Ridley Scott might cast actors of average stature as the little people of Legend. “At one stage I wanted Mickey Rooney to play one of the characters but at 5’2” next to 5’8” Tom Cruise he didn’t look that tiny. Edlund came up with a method of shooting everything on 70mm and taking that negative and shrinking the actors to any size we wanted to make the illusion more realistic. The budget for this alone was enormous and affected everything so I had to axe it and take the gamble on finding an ensemble of good, small actors.” Swiss actor David Bennent (17) and British actor Annabelle Lanyon (23) were cast as the sprites, Gump and Oona. Billy Barty, who was old enough to have appeared in The Wizard of Oz (1939) as a Munchkin but strangely hadn’t, accepted the part of Screwball, while Carl “Cork” Hubbert, another little person, was cast as Brown Tom. American stage actor and Obie Award winner Alice Playten had been cast as the goblin Blix when Scott phoned to ask what she thought of the drawings she’d been shown for her character. Playten confided that she thought of Blix as Keith Richards. Scott and Bottin agreed that the rocker had a great face and used him as their model for Playten’s makeup. To play the unicorns, six white Andalusian horses were acquired in Spain, and in thirty hours, driven to France and ferried across the English Channel to their job site.
Legend commenced filming on March 26, 1984 at Pinewood Studios. With sixteen weeks on the 007 Stage in the can and ten more days to go, on June 27, natural gas utilized to light the bonfire of the faeries sequence had accumulated and caught fire, abundant polystyrene on the set serving as fuel. In a stroke of good fortune, the inferno broke out while cast and crew were at lunch, and there were no human fatalities as the building burned to the ground. Speeding up the construction of the stage they were scheduled to move onto, Scott acknowledged losing only three days of filming, the remaining forest scenes picked up at Pinewood in October. The 007 Stage would be rebuilt in time for the new James Bond film A View To a Kill (1985). Once Scott and Terry Rawlings–dubbing editor on The Duellists who’d been promoted to film editor to solely cut both Alien and Blade Runner–began assembling a work print of Legend into a version that could play for an audience, Universal penciled in a U.S. release date of November 6, 1985.
Ridley Scott admitted to having been a little envious of how terrific The Company of Wolves (1984)--a postmodern take on the Little Red Riding Hood tale based on the novel by Angela Carter–looked with its storybook forest in comparison to its cost, but also noted how the movie had struggled to cross over from the U.K. to the U.S. The director told Cinemafantastique, “American audiences couldn’t seem to grasp the denseness of the plot or the sequential build up of the story, which is one reason why I have eliminated a lot of the subtext and detailing from my original cut of Legend.” According to Rawlings, the first cut of Legend ran 125 minutes, which Scott and his editor trimmed to an efficient 113-minute version the director deemed ready to put before a test audience, in Orange County, California. The screening went poorly. Very poorly. Scott’s cut had screened at the Venice Film Festival in late August 1985, but Universal made the decision to move off its planned November release in the States to give Scott time to triage what wasn’t working.
The biggest alternation to Legend in the U.S. was the decision to jettison an orchestral score by Jerry Goldsmith and replace it with a score by electronic band Tangerine Dream, whose musical accompaniment for Tom Cruise in Risky Business may have been considered MTV-friendly and a part of that film’s appeal among teenagers. Goldsmith had clashed with Ridley Scott during the scoring of Alien, the director rejecting some of the composer’s work in favor of cues Goldsmith had written years earlier for Freud (1962) and cutting Goldsmith’s music out of the end credits entirely, inserting Howard Hanson’s Symphony No. 2, Romantic. Goldsmith, a fourteen time Academy Award nominee with one win, for The Omen (1976), would have had to fly to Europe to hear his music for Legend in a theater. David Bennent, who’d performed Gump with his own (German) accent, had his voice dubbed by Alice Playten, giving the character what studio executives considered an accent palatable to Americans. William Hjortsberg came back to write a title crawl explaining the world of Legend (“Once long ago, before there was such a thing as time, the world was shrouded in darkness,” it began). Several of the cuts were intended to refashion Jack from an unwilling hero into a hard-on warrior. In Scott’s version, the boy employs his wits to distract Meg Mucklebones (Robert Picardo) from attacking him in the swamp, while in the version made for the U.S.A., Jack simply cuts her down with his sword as quickly as he can. A 95-minute version of Legend would open in limited release in the U.K. on December 6, 1985, but the version that Americans would see was chopped down to 89 minutes.
When the Los Angeles Times reached out to Ridley Scott in January 1986 to comment about his film’s post-production woes, the director was not amused by implications his movie was in trouble. “I came out of advertising and marketing. So I believe when you do something to communicate, you must aim for the widest audience possible. To ignore that audience is utterly foolhardy.” Rather than force Tom Cruise to compete against himself–Top Gun set to open a week ahead of Memorial Day weekend–Universal scheduled Legend a month earlier, for April 18, 1986 in 1,187 theaters in the U.S. Critics summoned more derision for the film than the test audience had. In the Chicago Tribune, Gene Siskel completely wrote it off. “Oh, sure, I could tell you more about Legend–about how the princess turns into a Dark Ages disco queen and writhes in terror in front of a red devil. But I don’t want to remember any more about Legend than to make sure I include it in my ‘worst films of 1986’ list and never rent it when it comes out on video cassette.” Siskel gave the movie 1 ½ stars out of 4. Roger Ebert was more complimentary in his pan, for the Chicago Sun-Times. “Despite all its sounds and fury, Legend is a movie I didn’t care very much about. All of the special effects in the world, and all of the great makeup, and all of the great Muppet creatures can’t save a movie that has no clear idea of its own mission and no joy in its own accomplishments.” Ebert pinned it with 2 stars out of 4.
For readers of LA Weekly, Michael Dare dug the dagger in deep. “A magnificent example of visual storytelling and not much else. You get the feeling that if director Ridley Scott could have told this story with no words whatsoever, he would have done so gladly. Instead of a nice little bedtime story, he’s constructed a nice enormous bedtime story, a 5,000-pound Twinkie guaranteed to give an unparalleled sugar rush to all.” Whatever could be written about Legend, the competition it opened against stunk. Cannon Films chucked Charles Bronson into another substandard action thriller, Murphy’s Law, while Danny DeVito and Joe Piscopo starred in Wise Guys, a mob comedy directed by Brian DePalma with no laughs in it. The Money Pit, Police Academy 3: Back In Training and Gung Ho were hanging around in their fourth, fifth and sixth weekends of release. Legend opened #1 at the box office and without any new competition in its second weekend, held that spot. After four weekends in release, Top Gun and the films of early summer shoved Legend out of the top ten. Ridley Scott’s 113-minute cut was thought to be lost, but in a credit to Universal, a pristine answer print was discovered in 2000 and with the director’s approval, issued on DVD in 2002, with Jerry Goldsmith’s score restored. (Buyer beware, the 89-minute version of Legend is in circulation among streaming services).
The 113-minute version is the only acceptable version of Legend. It offers the viewer a few treats, first being the opportunity to spend as much as twenty minutes more in the storybook forest designed by Assheton Gorton, without a pixel of computer generated effects. Everything we see from duck feathers to demons were shot live and most of it looks fantastic. In an era when Ridley Scott was in friendly competition with Adrian Lyne and his brother Tony Scott to see which director could light a set in more spectacular fashion, Legend stands as an achievement in cinematography, Alex Thomson having lit Excalibur (1981) and Year of the Dragon (!985). The director’s cut allows us to spend enough time with Lili to not only detect something like a character–a precocious brat, perhaps even a Book of Genesis-styled temptress–but offers fewer distractions from Tom Cruise, whose presence as a nature boy is misbegotten, to put it mildly. Cruise–playing someone other than an American high school student for the first time in his film career–is a good actor being very badly directed. Surrounded by artifice on a soundstage, he’s asked to play the dutiful farm boy Westley from William Goldman’s novel and soon-to-be major motion picture The Princess Bride (1987) but without any of Westley’s athleticism or joie de vivre, two of Cruise’s strengths.
Rather than creating a myth chock full of fresh motifs for a new generation, Scott shoplifts from Disney and stripmines Star Wars. Legend is so sold on the Luke Skywalker-Princess Leia-Darth Vader model that it never questions if the story needed a boy and a girl. Lili enters a magic forest, defies nature by touching a unicorn, and could have easily been the character sent on a hero’s journey to set her blunder right. Jack’s presence in the story is as unnecessary as Jennifer Connelly’s young heroine in Labyrinth (1986) turning a corner and finding Keanu Reeves sitting there. By pretending that all of Cruise’s scenes are being played by Mia Sara, Legend can masquerade as a good film. Rob Bottin’s work is beyond peer, with Robert Picardo turning in another small but perfect performance in Bottin’s makeup, having played Eddie Quist in The Howling and the obnoxious aliens in Explorers (1985). The film was drawn up to top everything that had come before it, for example, having Picardo leap out of water in full prosthetics as the swamp hag, but the picture is shot and edited in a way that seems embarrassed of its technical ingenuity, refusing to share it with the viewer. Unlike Alien or Blade Runner, Legend largely resembles every other otherworldly film of its era, something critics latched onto and left to discover the film on their own, viewers can pick up on.
Video rental category: Fantasy
Special interest: Sword and Sorcery
