Through Wednesday, a big-cat drama at least 22 times more nerve-wracking than the Netflix documentary “Tiger King” is streaming online in care of Drafthouse Films and the Music Box Theatre. I can only speak for my own eyebrows, but mine hit the ceiling in astonishment a minute into “Roar” and they haven’t descended since.
Objectively terrible, yet full of queasy suspense regarding the blood shed for real by members of the cast and crew, this is a cinema miracle of the lowest order. Here’s the origin story. Chicago native Noel Marshall, former agent and one of the producers behind “The Exorcist,” traveled to Zimbabwe in 1969 accompanying his actress wife, Tippi Hedren, who was shooting a thriller called “Satan’s Harvest.” A Mozambique game preserve excursion got them thinking about a screenplay dealing with a brave researcher in Africa living among the felines, and an eventful reunion with his Chicago wife and kids coming to visit after three years apart.
In 1971 Hedren, best known for Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” and “Marnie,” began raising lion cubs with Marshall at their three-bedroom house in Sherman Oaks. The idea was to get everybody and every species under the same roof and comfortable with each other prior to filming. Marshall, who’d never directed, cast himself as Hank, the researcher. The rest of the leads went to Hedren, her sons John and Jerry, and her daughter, Melanie Griffith.
After the police paid a call about raising lions in their L.A. suburb, the Marshall/Hedren clan relocated to a ranch in Santa Clarita, Calif., and began collecting more than 100 additional non-human (and non-union) members of their dream project. Filming, mostly on the ranch, started in 1976. Lions, tigers, jaguars, even a bull elephant from a Canadian animal park joined the ensemble. A six-month shoot turned into three years. Then, including various delays, three turned into 11.
Accounts differ on just how many actors and behind-the-scenes workers suffered injuries on “Roar.” Hedren says it was a mere seven; others, including one of her sons, claims it was 72. No one disputes the worst of the incidents, including cinematographer Jan de Bont getting scalped by a lioness and requiring more than 200 stitches. (He went on to direct “Speed” and “Twister,” but “Roar” remains the most nerve-wracking thriller he ever made.) Hedren got bucked off an elephant and fractured her leg, not to mention multiple scalp wounds from run-ins with her big-cat costars.
We’re just getting started! Writer-director-actor Marshall was hospitalized with gangrene. Griffith’s head ended up in a lion’s mouth for many minutes, after she made the decision to return to filming after a particularly rough day. She ended up needing facial reconstructive surgery. Her stepbrother John later told the New York Post: “Dad was a f——— a——— to do that to his family.” Hedren and Marshall divorced soon after their movie limped to completion.
Throughout “Roar,” the look of fright, exhaustion and stunned disbelief on Hedren’s face suggests the look of an actress who’d rather be getting pecked half to death filming “The Birds.” Again.
What happens, storywise, in “Roar”? Hilariously little. The entire film consists of Hedren and company newly arrived in Africa from Chicago. While Dad, a braying monologist in Marshall’s amateur interpretation, keeps busy elsewhere dealing with poachers, mother and children square off continually with their strange new home’s combative apex predator residents. The cats are just curious, of course, the movie keeps telling us. But you never know in “Roar” how much actual danger the characters are supposed to be in, because the actors didn’t know, either.
The musical score favors impish melodic snatches recalling the famous “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” theme, Gounod’s “Funeral March of a Marionette.” The lightheartedness somehow makes “Roar” even madder. And then, for the only possible ending to this unaccountable treasure, an end-credits ballad hands us such lyrics such as “here we are in Eden” and, in the film’s one true moment of self-awareness, a line about “the madness we’ve seen.”
You know what? I’ll still take over it over the live-action “Lion King.” If “The Lion King” had been raised in Sherman Oaks alongside Werner Herzog’s “Grizzly Man,” the result would be “Roar.”
“Roar,” $9.99 for a three-day rental via Drafthouse Films and the Music Box Theatre. Go to vimeo.com/ondemand/roarmusicboxtheater to rent.
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