Being the true story of one of the greatest, loopiest, sci-fi movies ever made. First published by Empire online, 2017.
Sometime in early 1979 Mike Hodges, the British director of The Terminal Man and Get Carter, found himself aboard The Concorde flying from Heathrow to New York. As the world’s first, and apparently last, supersonic airliner levelled out of its alarming climb and approached its cruising speed of Mach two, the besuited business tycoons aboard sipped their G&T’s and began to pull out sober reading matter for the three and a half hour flight. Hodges, though, had something very different to occupy his time. “After an almost vertical takeoff, they opened their briefcases and took out computer readouts or whatever,” Hodges remembers. “I, on the other hand, took out the bumper album of the original Flash Gordon strips. They probably thought I was retarded.”
The swanky Concorde booking was a typical flourish courtesy of producer Dino De Laurentiis, the increasingly infamous European mini-mogul who appeared to have emerged straight out of central casting. De Laurentiis had arrived in Hollywood from his native Italy at the start of the decade with grand ambitions, and a seemingly endless supply of money from what were often rumoured to be dubious sources and had rapidly caught and ridden the wave of independent producers who were then reshaping the Hollywood landscape. Death Wish, Serpico and King Kong all bore the De Laurentiis imprimatur. Now De Laurentiis had set his imperial ambitions on Flash Gordon.
Hodges had been drafted in at the last minute, with the previous director having been ignominiously fired. It would now be down to Hodges, who had happily admitted to a general ignorance of both comic books and special effects, to shepherd Gordon to the big screen. As he was drawn, like millions before him, into the tale of the lantern-jawed championship polo player transported to the planet Mongo to do endless weekly battle with the evil Emperor Ming, a distinctly kaiser-like despot goosed with an oriental twist via a Fu Manchu moustache, Hodges could have had no idea of the strange congruities and echoes of Flash’s interstellar trip that the one director was about to take would manifest. “As it turned out, sixty thousand feet above our planet, and travelling at well over a thousand mph, was the perfect way to meet Flash for the first time. The madness,” he recalls 35 years later, “had begun.”
Flash Gordon was a child of The Great Depression, the result of a circulation war between King Features, which syndicated cartoons to thousands of newspapers across the USA, and its rival, The John F. Dille Syndicate. In 1929 the Dille Syndicate had introduced its readers to Anthony ‘Buck” Rogers and, rattled by the time travelling character’s immediate success, King Features had ordered Alex Raymond, a 22-year-old staff artist, to come up with something with which King Features could compete.
The Winter of 1933, when Raymond and writer Don Moore began work, was a bitterly cold one even by New York standards. Outside their office temperatures plunged to minus eight and though they might have been cheered a little by the relaxing of prohibition, it is hardly surprising that escape from the grim, chilly realities of depression life was uppermost in his mind. The first panels he and Moore worked on are, then, ablaze with colour and action: WORLD COMING TO END! screams a newspaper headline. Strange New Planet Rushing Towards Earth. Only Miracle Can Save Us! A mere 12 frames later, with Flash and Dale secreted aboard the insane Doctor Zarkov's rocket ship, and with the words ‘to be continued’ inked in bold Flash’s adventures on Mongo, which would endure in one form or another ever since, had begun.
With those few pen strokes made over 80 years ago, and over which Hodges had pored in a supersonic airliner that seemed to have leapt from one of its frames, it’s not unreasonable to say that Raymond wildly altered the future of pop culture. Despite his own chequered history on screen, Flash Gordon would crystalise an heroic ideal that would dominate both movies and comic books for decades to come. When Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster conceived Superman in 1938 it’s clear they looked to Raymond’s character for inspiration, inverting the Flash Gordon story, stranding their heroic alien on a fallen earth and lifting elements of Flash’s costume while they were at it. Marvel and D.C.’s Universes are packed with superhero variations on the Flash theme. From Dan Dare to James Tiberius Kirk, Flash Gordon’s inky DNA is shot through our notions of what a hero (and superhero) is like a jagged bolt of lightning, his popularity in the pre-war years only magnified by the three Universal serials starring Larry ‘Buster Crabbe churned out between 1936 and 1940.
But, by 1956, the year Alex Raymond died in a car crash, Flash was feeling his age. The comic books, which Raymond had ceased writing at the beginning of WWII, had been almost wholly replaced in the comic-reading public's affections by the spandex-clad supermen and women that Flash had helped to create. The Universal serials were consigned to TV reruns that filled time cheaply on local networks across the United States.
Including, it turned out, a small town named Modesto in Southern California. Where, two years earlier, the Lucas family had proudly installed their first television.
“Flash Gordon is such a forgotten corner of the culture, and yet, if we actually listen to George Lucas, he says that people have overstated the influence of other aspects, like Kurosawa, and understated the importance of this silly little serial from the late thirties and early forties,” Chris Taylor, author of the magisterial How Star Wars Conquered The Universe has said. If anything Taylor understates the case. Lucas tips his hat to the series he had watched on a virtual loop as a boy from the very opening frames. The iconic title crawl, its text vanishing to a point on the horizon, apes Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe right down to its quixotic four-point ellipsis as do the trademark wipe and iris cuts. Princess Lea’s soon-to-be-famous bagel hairdo was ripped off from Princess Fria’s (you say Fria, I say Lea . . . .) in Raymond’s Flash Gordon In The Ice Kingdom Of Mongo. Even the structure of the movie, the fact that it begins with Episode IV, owes much to the chapter structure of the television repeats that viewers would join at random points. “We decided we were making a Flash Gordon-type adventure and we’re coming in at Episode Four . . we’re just racing through the story, not explaining anything,” producer Gary Kurtz told Lucas biographer John Baxter.
Sometime in the early 1970s, Lucas and his friend and fellow filmmaker Edward Summer were to be found sneaking into King Features, where Summer had been ordered to scan the original Raymond artwork to microfiche and destroy (the horror!) the originals. Lucas and Summer liberated them and found them new digs. And when he submitted an early draft of Star Wars the cover bore a panel from one of Raymond’s comic strips: an image of Flash and Ming, swords drawn, an almost identical scene to Obi-Wan’s final duel with Darth Vader.
Lucas’s original plan had, unsurprisingly, been to simply adapt the comic strips and so, in the early 70s, he had visited King Features to ask about the rights, where the young tyro was told that they were already thinking of a movie, one to be directed by none other than Italian maestro [ital] Federico Fellini. “He was very depressed,” Taylor reports Lucas’s friend Francis Coppola saying. “But then he says, ‘Well, I’ll just invent my own.”
The standard genesis story of the only ‘pure’ Flash Gordon movie that would, thus far, be made, nearly a decade later in 1980, was that it was the result of De Laurentiis cashing in on the by-then unparalleled success of Star Wars. But in fact, De Laurentiis had been thinking about a Flash Gordon project long before. Back home he had bankrolled a handful of Federico Fellini’s films and had been on the lookout for a U.S. project for the director. Fellini, who was rumoured to have worked on an Italian Flash Gordon knock-off comic strip after Mussolini banned the originals, and had been a fan since he was a boy and first came across the strip in adventure magazine L’Avventuroso in fascist Italy. “It is very hard to explain just how much the coming of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon meant to boys of my generation,” he writes in Fellini on Fellini. “When we began to read about the astounding adventures of this galactic hero, fascism was at its height, its gloomy, dreary rhetoric in full flood. Flash Gordon, on the other hand, seemed an unbeatable hero from the very beginning, a hero who belonged to real life even though his actions took place in distant, fantastic worlds.”
Fellini eventually declined, but by 1977, with Lucas’s smash still ringing the box office tills like no film in decades De Laurentiis decided to exploit his option. And for a director, he had a startling idea: Nicolas Roeg.
“Nic was the coolest dude on the planet in those days,” recalls Michael Allin, the Enter The Dragon writer who worked for a year on the screenplay with Roeg. “He was London, he was arty, he was an auteur and he knew everybody and everybody knew him. But he couldn’t crack the studios because he had such huge fucking integrity.” It might seem difficult to imagine what drew Roeg, by then director of individualistic, existential masterpieces such as Walkabout, and The Man Who Fell To Earth, to Flash; though their central notion – of a character trapped in an alien landscape they struggle to understand – certainly has resonances with the Flash Gordon story.
By October 1977, Roeg was sequestered in the Sunset Marquis in Hollywood with long-time collaborator Allin, but the Flash Gordon movie they conceived would be a very different one to the film that was finally released. “We worked for days, talking ourselves into this crazy-ass project,” recalls Allin. “Nic loved the idea that the dialogue bubbles were for the kids but the images were just so stark raving erotic. Nic’s version was going to be a comic book story but for adults. Ming was a God. Flash and Dale were Adam and Eve and Ming was an evil deity chasing them across the universe. Our Ming's ambition was to conquer the universe by destroying populated worlds, leaving no survivors except chosen females with whom he would populate their world in his image. Flash/Adam's task was, in Dino's words, to save-a-da-world!"
Roeg subsequently decamped to London where, through the winter and Spring of 1978, a 30-strong team began work on production designs (a few of which still tantalisingly survive in the BFI Archive) while Allin ploughed through further drafts of the screenplay. De Laurentiis though, unbeknownst to either, was apparently becoming increasingly unhappy with the way the project was shaping up, even more so given the rapidly escalating budget. What had been conceived years ago as an artsy project for Fellini, and possibly offered for Roeg along those lines, was now projected to cost in the $25 – $30 million range. His plans to shoot the movie cheaply in Italy were scotched by the fact that his sound stages there, informally known as Dinocitta, had fallen into disrepair during his recent Hollywood adventures, his daughter Rafaella was the subject of Mafia kidnapping threats and the intransigent Italian labour unions refused to work weekends. After an abortive, if typically ambitious, plan to buy Pinewood, De Laurentiis settled on renting twelve soundstages at Shepperton.
“A human sacrifice is required when a project is deemed to have gone wrong,” Flash Gordon’s second screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jnr. once said of one of his own frequent firings. “It makes everybody feel good and gives the project a whole new life.” In the case of Flash he was the beneficiary of the sudden departure of Roeg, and a few weeks later, when he found that Semple had been already hired behind his back, Allin. But Nic Roeg had been an unusual choice of director in the first place his replacement was, in his own way, equally unlikely. Hodges, a former television director then nursing his wounds after departing The Omen II in unhappy circumstances, had established a reputation for gritty, spare movies seemingly totally at odds with the flamboyantly camp, effects-heavy demands of Semple’s new, more conventional, Flash Gordon screenplay.
Having arrived in New York Hodges was confronted with legendary designer Danilo Donati, who, Hodges suspects, might never have actually got round to reading the script, who proudly unveiled his grand vision for the film’s astounding vistas in De Laurentiis’s office. Included among other improbable marvels was a full-scale three-lane freeway passing through the forests of Arboria. “I tentatively asked how we could possibly actually realise this,” the practically-minded director had asked De Laurentis. "We'll get McAlpine to build it," De Laurentiis declared. When Hodges pointed to the cars speeding along and enquired who would be building those, De Laurentiis had informed him he had a team from Fiat working on it.
“So I had a producer who spoke mangled English and a production designer who spoke none at all. Both, like Ming, seemed to have arrived from another galaxy,” he recalls. “Once I realised that the film was in many ways out my control, I relaxed and made it up as I went along. I loved it.”
Among Flash’s panoply of pleasures is one of the most eclectic casts ever assembled for a motion picture. For Flash, De Laurentiis had pondered both Kurt Russell, who rejected it as too bland, and then unknown Arnold Schwarzenegger, whom he would later cast as the lead in Conan the Barbarian. “I couldn't see any name actor wanting to play Flash,” says Hodges. “He's an all-American hunk, decent, honourable, but, most importantly, naive. That's a difficult role to cast. Dino's mother-in-law saw Sam Jones [whose sole performance of note had been in Dudley Moore/Bo Derek vehicle ‘10’] in a TV show called Hollywood Squares. We flew him to London, dyed his hair blonde and that was it. Unfairly awarded many rotten tomatoes for his trouble, I think he's absolutely perfect.”
Max Von Sydow arrived as a pal of De Laurentiis, as did Broadway belter Topol. “I've never seen an actor have such a good time as Max playing Ming. Cracking his finger joints and doing little jigs, he relished every moment,” smiles Hodges, while lesser roles were decanted from personal Rolodexes and theatre bars across London. “John Osborne was a mate who loved having an excuse, any excuse, not to write,” recalls Hodges of the unlikely casting of the angry young playwright as an Arborian Priest. (He had provided a similar excuse by casting him in Get Carter.) “I remember John was there for the first memorable day on the set of Arboria, Timothy Dalton's leafy domain. Danilo, who seemed to design sets mainly for his own personal enjoyment, had constructed trees so enormous we couldn't get the camera in.”
“I heard that they were doing Flash Gordon, they’d virtually cast it I think but they hadn't cast Vultan,” booms Brian Blessed to Empire about his own snagging of a role which would become career-defining. “I was asked to go along and meet Mike Hodges. And there was Dino. “I said ‘I’m bloody made for this. I saw it as a child, if you don’t give it to me I’m going to bloody kill you.’ Well about four weeks later he called me in again and I went to see him and Mike. And there were pictures on the wall from the comic books and they looked exactly like me. I said, ‘Look Dino! it’s bloody me!’ He said “No no, iza-da comic strip!’ Anyway, he left me with Mike and he said, ‘They’re offering it to you you know.’ It was £30,000 which was a bloody fortune then.”
De Laurentiis had tested dozens of actresses for the role of Dale Arden before settling on Dayle Haddon, a Canadian model who had previously graced the cover of Sports Illustrated’s legendary swimsuit issue, before unsettling on her mere days before the shoot commenced. “I had actually auditioned for the role,” Melody Anderson, then a former journalist turned T.V. actress with guest spots on Welcome Back, Kotter and Battlestar Galactica already on her C.V. tells Empire. “And I just went on my way, and then they called me up one day when I was in New York and said, ‘You’ve got the job but you’ve got to come over tonight.’ It was that crazy. I had to immediately go from New York. The moment I got to London they managed to dye my hair black. And we did a screen test to see how that worked and that was my first day at Shepperton.”
Flash Gordon shot for 17 weeks of principal photography which wrapped just before the Christmas of 1979 before reconvening for a 14-week second unit shoot, during which Hodges would wrestle with the movie’s special effects. It was during this frenzied period that Sam Jones fell out with De Laurentiis and embarked on an ill-advised strike requiring Hodges to redub the dialogue he and sound mixer Ivan Sharrock couldn’t salvage with a still (despite Empire’s best efforts) unidentified vocal stand-in. The precise details of the origins of the conflict are as lost in the mists of time as the exact proportion of the redubbed lines. (About five per cent says, says Hodges. Pretty much all of it, Jones has claimed.) But the row would have unfortunate aftershocks. With Jones unable to perform publicity duties the film’s press campaign was underpowered, particularly in the U.S. which had knock-on effects. “One of the biggest injustices was that we were not even nominated for any awards for costume or sets, and they were so brilliant,” recalls Anderson, now a practising psychotherapist. “Universal had kind of pulled back because there were issues working with Dino and the whole thing with Sam. It all got political. To think that it was not even nominated for production design! It was really unfortunate and unnecessary, as most conflicts are. It was a clash of the egos to an extent.”
Meanwhile De Laurentiis, in a genuine masterstroke, decided to furnish the film with a rock score. “I had wanted to have Pink Floyd,” admits Hodges. “Dark Side Of The Moon was blaring on the set when Queen came to visit. Very embarrassing. They were Dino's idea. A better choice: lighter, more humorous, more range.”
Flash was released to generally good reviews and internationally mixed box office on December 5th 1980. In the subsequent 35 years, multiple attempts to revive Flash have come to not very much at all. A much discussed, but apparently green-light-proof, remake has been on the cards for decades, passing via the groaning desk of Ridley Scott in the early 2000s to Breck Eisner, whose disastrous Sahara in 2005 killed both his involvement in big-budget action and his mooted star, Matthew McConaughey’s, chances of ever playing the role. Currently it resides with self-confessed devotee Matthew Vaughn. In 2007 Sci-Fi, in a naked attempt to reproduce the success of Superman spin-off Smallville, delivered its series Flash, which ran for a solitary season.
But despite this, in subtle ways, the Son of Mongo still almost single-handedly animates the current box office. Star Wars would be unthinkable without him, and what then is J.J. Abrams reboot, Disney’s theme-parks and newly minted continuing universe but a four billion dollar tribute? Marvel and D.C.’s much-mined universes are populated with heroes of many flavours, but all a variation of some sort or another on the template that Alex Raymond established nearly ninety years ago. He haunts the current esprit du movies like the tantalising gap between the words 'The End' and a solitary question mark. Flash is temporarily absent in person, perhaps, but still very much alive.
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