Ghost Mail Weekender

Happy Sunday Voornaam,

With Halloween celebrations waning, resident cinephile Dominique is still thinking fondly about scary movies.
Here’s a quick fact to get us going: one of the films with the greatest return on its budget was none other than The Blair Witch Project. This stalwart (and some would argue, pioneer) of the “found footage” genre of horror films was made on a shoestring budget of just $200,000. Beyond their thriftiness, the Blair Witch filmmakers also showed a talent for viral marketing, running a clever grassroots marketing campaign that almost convinced audiences that what they were seeing on the screen was real. By the time all the coins were counted, the movie grossed an incredible $248 million, or roughly 1,243 times its budget. Nothing scary about that!
A much scarier thought is retirement, especially when financial institutions run ad campaigns that try to convince us that we will all live past 100. How exactly are you supposed to make enough in 40 years to sustain yourself for another 35?
Is it true, though? Does an average life expectancy increase mean that each of us will live to an incredibly old age, betting our last few pennies on games of bingo or bridge in the hope of affording another year of retirement? Perhaps not, as Dominique Olivier explores in her column this week.
Read on for a tale of a movie with far too many untrained cats on set, as well as the Fast Facts themed around Hollywood.
Have a lovely day and enjoy what we've brought you!

The Finance Ghost (follow on X) | Dominique Olivier (connect on LinkedIn)

We're living longer... I think

A whole lotta lions

TL;DR: Dubbed “the most dangerous film ever made”, the 1981 action comedy “Roar” had 132 big cats on the cast list - and none of them were trained.
Chances are you’ve never heard of a movie called Roar, mostly because it was somewhat of a box office flop. However, the film did go on to garner a bit of a cult following in later years. Not because of its storyline, direction or stellar cast; rather because of the sheer amount of maulings that took place during its production.
The Roar story began in the late 1970s, when legendary actress Tippi Hedren and her husband, Noel Marshall (producer of The Exorcist), decided they wanted to make a movie starring real, live lions. The inspiration? A trip to Africa, where they had seen an abandoned game warden’s house taken over by a pride of lions. It was such a bizarrely romantic image that they immediately wanted to capture something similar on film. A movie, they thought, might help spread the word about habitat loss and maybe even raise funds to help big cats in captivity.
Originally, the couple planned to just rent trained Hollywood lions. But when they realised they’d need way more lions than they could borrow, they decided to raise their own - right in their suburban house in Sherman Oaks, CA. Unsurprisingly, their neighbours were less than thrilled about being roared awake at the crack of dawn every morning. Eventually, Hedren and Marshall bought a secluded ranch in Soledad Canyon, 40 miles north of LA, to serve as both their home and the “African” set for the movie. After years of collecting, breeding, and raising cats of all kinds (including tigers and cougars, which, despite not being African, were added to the storyline), they had one of the largest private collections of big cats in the world.
While the storyline left much to be desired, the film is filled with jaw-dropping footage of humans interacting with big cats in ways that had never been captured on camera - probably because said interactions were just as terrifying as they were incredible. “It’s like Walt Disney decided to make a snuff version of Swiss Family Robinson”, one critic memorably wrote.
There were no visual effects, no CGI, and almost no trained animals. Scenes were often improvised on the spot, with the crew waiting for the lions to “perform” something spontaneous. The lions in question were somewhat used to Hedren, Marshall and their children (all of whom acted in the film), but they were a whole lot less fond of the rest of the film crew. Over the film’s 5-year production, more than 70 crew members and actors were injured in varying degrees by their wild cast members. Director of photography Jan DeBont was scalped by a lioness and needed 220 stitches, yet he still finished the project. Melanie Griffith, Tippi’s daughter, needed reconstructive surgery after a lion clawed her face, and Tippi herself fractured her leg when an elephant threw her off its back. Noel Marshall nearly lost his leg to gangrene after a particularly nasty lion bite.
As if that wasn’t enough, nature also threw every possible disaster at the production: floods, mudslides, wildfires, even a mysterious disease that took out part of their big cat population. At one point, monsoon rains hit, lions escaped when fences washed out, and nervous sheriff’s deputies had to shoot one of the star lions to protect the public. Real-life Jumanji, anyone?
When Variety dubbed Roar the “most disaster-plagued film in the history of Hollywood,” they clearly weren’t exaggerating. We’re a bit surprised that they didn’t just pivot at this point and rename the movie “Exodus”.
Alas, the carnage didn’t stop with the on-set maulings - it also made it into the accounting books. The movie's budget quickly spiralled out of control, hitting $17 million (most of it from Tippi and Noel’s own pockets after investors understandably bailed). It only grossed about $2 million worldwide, leaving them in massive debt. After spending 11 years and the vast majority of their fortune on a box office flop, you have to wonder if Tippy and Noel ever looked back and wondered what their lives would have been like if they had just rented a smaller number of lions.

Dominique's fast facts: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

An assortment of facts that will take you only a minute to read.

For Disney’s 1939 live-action version of The Wizard of Oz, Bert Lahr, who played the Cowardly Lion, had to wear a full-body suit made of real lion hair.

Jim Carrey wasn't entirely faking his attitude as the Grinch in How the Grinch Stole Christmas. The role required him to wear mounds of makeup and prosthetics, which in turn made him really uncomfortable and grumpy. Working with him was such a harrowing experience that special effects makeup artist Kazuhiro Tsuji had to seek therapy after filming.

Those prominent, breathtaking shots of cornfields in Interstellar weren't crafted with CGI. Director Christopher Nolan insisted on having 500 acres of real corn planted for the movie, and the filmmakers even turned a profit by selling the corn they didn't destroy while filming.

The bees you see in the 1992 horror classic Candyman were all real. This includes the bees coming out of Tony Todd's mouth in the movie's most memorable sequence - a dental dam prevented the insects from sliding down the actor's throat. He got stung 23 times while filming the disturbing scene but was nicely compensated for his pain, since he had negotiated a bonus of $1,000 for every sting.

In the iconic opening scene of Scream, Drew Barrymore’s character Casey Becker phones 911 and desperately screams for help. Unbeknownst to both Barrymore and the crew, she was on the line with a real 911 operator in every take, since the film's prop master forgot to unplug the phone she was using. She called the emergency number repeatedly - screams and all - until the police called back in the middle of a take.