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George Butler
Making Pumping Iron

"The funny thing is that Universal literally threw me out of their offices when I came in to get money for Pumping Iron," George Butler recalls of his early attempts to make the documentary on bodybuilding. "They said Arnold Schwarzenegger was the biggest joke in history. 'Young man, get up and leave.'" Having collaborated with Hollywood producer Edward R. Pressman on the new documentary The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition, Butler remembers a time when their relationship wasn't so productive.

Future History

"I was a naïve young director trying to get Pumping Iron produced and I was looking for help and I thought maybe Ed Pressman would me help me out and produce it," Butler says of his first contact with the producer 30 years ago.

Butler introduced Pressman to Schwarzenegger, but Pressman wasn't interested in producing the documentary featuring the thick-accented Austrian. Nonetheless, Pressman, owner of the rights to the Conan the Barbarian series of books, kept going to rough-cut screenings of the film – and he took notes.

As fate would have it, five years later, Pressman produced the first Conan movie, with Schwarzenegger in the title role. It went on to be a surprise box office smash and set the man with the pecs on the road to movie stardom.

Looking back on that watershed film, Butler remembers when the same people who threw him off the Universal lot had a change of heart years later. "The head of production at Universal got up at a big dinner in Hollywood, as reported to me by my friends, and said, 'I want you to know the future of Hollywood is Arnold Schwarzenegger.'"

The impact of Butler's first feature documentary is enormous, having a lasting impact even the biggest of box office blockbusters fail to hold. Butler has all the evidence he needs when considering, "Pumping Iron probably caused more cash flow than Star Wars. It opened 100,000 gyms in America, made bodybuilding a bigger sport than jogging, caused a fitness revolution, and made Arnold a billionaire one way or another."

Catalyst

An English & Classics major at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, there was nothing in Butler's education to prepare for him making films, other than having a good education.

Starting out as a writer for Newsweek, Butler was about to be drafted into Vietnam as a marine lieutenant, but he took a different route. Having joined Vista (a group similar to the Peace Corps) instead, he was sent to Detroit in 1967, right after the Great Riot.

"When I arrived in Detroit, there were burned out tanks in the streets and a war going on in America," Butler remembers.

While in Detroit, he published a newspaper there and took up photography. This led to his involvement as a photographer for a book called Pumping Iron.

While working on the book, Butler caught on to Schwarzenegger's charisma, thought he should be in the movies, and proceeded to make a test film about the Mr. Olympia contestant.

Later on, in a room filled with 100 potential investors, Romulus Linney (actress Laura Linney's father), got up in front of all of Butler's friends and said, "George, if you ever make a movie about Arnold Schwarzenegger, you will be laughed off 42nd Street."

Ironically, today one of Schwarzenegger's more burdensome investments, Planet Hollywood, is located right off 42nd Street in the heart of Times Square.

Lessons Learned

With The Endurance now making its way into theatres, Butler sees parallels between his experience in getting Pumping Iron produced and the work ethic of the man at the center of his new film, Ernest Shackleton.

"You just have to be persistent in these matters," Butler affirms. "Do exactly what Shackleton did, which is never say 'never.'"

Back to The Endurance

• Originally published at MovieHabit.com.