Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Conan the Barbarian arrived in North American theaters on the 14th of May 1982, opening in 1,400 theaters simultaneously. Before that day, 1,000 people had been turned away at a Houston screening because tickets sold out. In Washington, D.C., lines of moviegoers spanned entire streets and caused traffic jams. What drew so many people to a sword-and-sorcery film about a slave who becomes a warrior? The film that landed with such force had taken over a decade to reach the screen, passed through multiple directors, gone through a complete reimagining of its script, and relocated its entire production from Yugoslavia to Spain. Its star had spent 18 months training before a single scene was shot. Its composer had written nearly two hours of orchestral music. And two swords forged for the production cost $10,000 each. How a bodybuilder named Arnold Schwarzenegger came to headline one of the most argued-over films of the 1980s, and why critics and scholars are still debating what the film means, is a story as layered as the Riddle of Steel at its center.

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• 2. A Decade in Development

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  Edward Summer first suggested Conan as a film project to executive producer Edward R. Pressman in 1975, showing him the Marvel Comics adaptations and Frank Frazetta's cover paintings. Pressman was immediately convinced, but it took two years just to secure the legal rights. Lancer Books had acquired those rights in 1966 and then gone into receivership, leaving the publishing rights frozen under court injunction. Glenn Lord and L. Sprague de Camp eventually formed Conan Properties Incorporated to resolve the dispute, and Pressman was awarded the film rights shortly afterward, spending more than $100,000 in legal fees and another $7,500 for the rights themselves.

  Paramount Pictures agreed to fund an initial budget of $2.5 million if a recognized screenwriter joined the project. Oliver Stone came aboard, and at the time he was, by his own account, going through a period of addiction to cocaine and depressants. Director John Milius later called Stone's resulting screenplay a "total drug fever dream", though he credited it as inspired. Stone's draft ran to four hours and was set in a post-apocalyptic future where Conan leads an army against a horde of 10,000 mutants.

  Milius discarded the latter half entirely. He kept scenes from the first half, including Conan's crucifixion, drawn directly from Howard's story "A Witch Shall be Born", and the Tower of Serpents sequence, derived from "The Tower of the Elephant". After a year of negotiations between Pressman and the influential producer Dino De Laurentiis, De Laurentiis took over the financing. Pressman surrendered all claims to the film's profits. De Laurentiis assigned production responsibility to his daughter, Raffaella, and the project finally had the backing to proceed.

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• 3. Building the Hyborian World

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  Principal photography was originally scheduled for Yugoslavia, but concerns about political instability following the death of Josip Broz Tito, combined with the Yugoslav film industry's limited capacity for large-scale production, pushed the crew to Spain. The move took several months; when filming began on the 7th of January 1981, production was based in a large warehouse 20 miles outside Madrid.

  Ron Cobb, the production designer who had recently completed work on Alien, directed the look of the world from a clear conceptual position: he wanted to "undo history", to build a fantasy world that nonetheless felt historically real. He deliberately avoided the Greco-Roman imagery that had dominated the sword-and-sandal films of the 1960s, instead constructing a visual amalgam of Dark Age cultures such as the Mongols and the Vikings. Forty-nine sets were built at a cost of roughly $3 million, using a construction workforce that ranged from 50 to 200 people, supplemented by artists from England, Italy, and Spain.

  The Temple of Set, erected in the mountains about 12 kilometers west of the city of Almeria, was the most expensive single structure. It stood 50 meters long and 22 meters high, built from various woods, lacquers, and tons of concrete, with a stairway of 120 steps, at a cost of $350,000. For the Wheel of Pain sequence, the crew worked in the province of Avila. Conan's crucifixion was filmed in March 1981 among sand dunes on the southeastern coast of Almeria. About one million pesetas' worth of marble shavings were scattered on the ground near Segovia to simulate snow.

  Where building large structures was impractical, the crew turned to miniatures. Scale modeler Emilio Ruiz constructed eight major models, including a 4-foot palace and a 120-square-foot representation of the entire city of Shadizar, which was positioned in front of cameras to make it appear full-sized and more than double the scale of the existing fort used for its construction. The entire Temple of Set and the Cimmerian village were burned down after filming wrapped on each.

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• 4. Casting and Training

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  Pressman and Summer had watched a rough cut of the bodybuilding documentary Pumping Iron in 1976 and agreed immediately that Arnold Schwarzenegger was the only choice for Conan. Paul Sammon, writing for Cinefantastique, said the former bodybuilding champion was practically the living incarnation of a Frazetta painting. Schwarzenegger was paid $250,000 and placed under a contract that prevented him from appearing in other sword-and-sorcery films.

  Milius wanted his lead actor leaner and more athletic, so Schwarzenegger undertook an 18-month training regimen before shooting began. He ran, lifted weights, climbed ropes, rode horses, and swam. He reduced his weight from 240 to 210 pounds. He also spent weeks in 1980 working with Robert Easton, a voice coach for numerous Hollywood stars, to improve his speech, and later rehearsed each of his longer speeches at least 40 times with Milius directly.

  The two other substantial roles went to novices. Gerry Lopez, a champion surfer who had only played himself in Milius's previous film Big Wednesday, was cast as Subotai. Schwarzenegger stayed at Lopez's home for more than a month before filming so they could rehearse together and build a rapport. Lopez's lines were ultimately redubbed in the final cut by stage actor Sab Shimono. Sandahl Bergman, a dancer with limited acting credits, was recommended to Milius by Bob Fosse, who had directed her in All That Jazz in 1979. Bergman won the Saturn Award for Best Actress for her performance.

  James Earl Jones was offered the role of Thulsa Doom while he was considering auditioning for the role of Grendel in an animated project. When he learned that production was animated, he read the Conan script and accepted. During filming, Jones was simultaneously starring in Athol Fugard's A Lesson to Aloes on Broadway; the film crew coordinated schedules to accommodate his remaining performances. Jones frequently gave Schwarzenegger coaching on how to deliver his lines.

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• 5. The Swords and the Stunts

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  Stunt coordinator Terry Leonard, who had worked on Raiders of the Lost Ark, said that Schwarzenegger, Bergman, and Lopez performed most of their own fights and stunts. From August 1980, all three were trained by Kiyoshi Yamazaki, a karate black belt and master swordsman, who drilled them in sword-fighting styles intended to make them appear genuinely proficient. They practiced each individual move at least 15 times before filming it.

  Prop maker Tim Huchthausen worked with swordsmith Jody Samson to create the weapons Milius wanted. The two principal swords, Conan's father's blade and the Atlantean sword recovered from a tomb, were forged from carbon steel using hand grinding and heat treatment, with hilts and pommels cast through the lost-wax process. Inscriptions were added by electrical discharge machining. Four copies of each sword were made, at a cost of $10,000 per weapon. Because the finished blades were too heavy and unbalanced for actual use in fight scenes, lighter versions weighing 3 pounds were struck in Madrid from aluminum, fiberglass, and steel; the heavier versions appeared only in close-up shots.

  Milius also built a remote-controlled camera mounted on a motorized lightweight crane, called a minijib, that special effects supervisor Nick Allder had devised during production of Dragonslayer, to capture the action sequences from novel angles. For the mechanical effects, a $20,000 mechanical snake measuring 36 feet long was built for the Tower of Serpents sequence, its skeleton made from duralumin, the alloy used in aircraft frames, and covered in vulcanized foam rubber. Controlled by steel cables and hydraulics, it could exert between 3.5 and 9.0 tons of force. Its dimensions exceeded the set, so only the front portion could appear on screen.

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• 6. Basil Poledouris and the Score

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  Milius hired his friend Basil Poledouris to write the music before principal photography had even begun, which was unusual for the industry at the time. Poledouris was given access to the initial storyboards and was allowed to revise his compositions throughout filming. Milius, according to Poledouris, envisioned the film as an opera with minimal dialogue, and Poledouris composed close to two hours of musical material to fill that ambition.

  Poledouris made extensive use of a system called Musync, a music and tempo editing hardware and software tool invented by Robert Randles, which could automatically adjust tempos when the user repositioned beats. Conan the Barbarian was the first film to list Musync in its credits.

  The central composition, "Riddle of Steel", began as a poem Poledouris strummed on a guitar, written as if he were a bard for the barbarian. It grew into a piece for massive brass, strings, and percussion that also serves as Conan's personal theme. The film's main theme, "Anvil of Crom", opens with 24 French horns. For Thulsa Doom's appearance in the attack on Conan's village, Milius initially wanted a chorus modeled on Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, but after learning that Excalibur had already used that work, he asked Poledouris for something original. The resulting theme, "Riders of Doom", uses energetic choral passages with lyrics composed in English and roughly translated into Latin, set to a melody adapted from the 13th-century Gregorian hymn Dies irae.

  From late November 1981, Poledouris spent three weeks recording in Rome with a 90-instrument orchestra and a 24-member choir drawn from the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and the RAI National Symphony Orchestra. The cost of producing a stereo soundtrack was $30,000, and Raffaella De Laurentiis declined to pay it. Conan the Barbarian became the last film released by a major studio with a mono soundtrack.

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• 7. Reception and Legacy

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  The film opened at number one at the United States box office, taking $9,479,373 in its first weekend. Over eight weeks of tracking by Rentrak Theatrical, it grossed $38,513,085 in the United States alone. Worldwide ticket sales fell between $68.9 million and $79.1 million against a total production budget of $20 million. Universal Pictures received $22.5 million in rental after deductions, a sum greater than its investment in the film, qualifying Conan as profitable before a single home video copy had been sold. By 2007, home video releases had pushed the film's total gross earnings to more than $300 million.

  Critical response was divided in ways that the numbers did not reflect. Professor Kenneth von Gunden calculated that for every positive review, the film received two negative ones. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called it "a perfect fantasy for the alienated preadolescent"; Richard Schickel of Time called it "a sort of psychopathic Star Wars, stupid and stupefying." Sandahl Bergman, despite working in her first major film role, won the Saturn Award for Best Actress and the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year at the 40th Golden Globe Awards. Schwarzenegger was nominated for Worst Actor at the 3rd Golden Raspberry Awards.

  Scholars argued over what the film was actually saying. Some found fascist ideology embedded in its Nietzschean epigraph and the image of a Nordic warrior beheading a Black man. Others connected it to the political climate of Reagan's presidency and the promotion of individualism during the Cold War. Film writer Dave Saunders read Doom's compound as an analogue of the Kremlin and Conan's quest as a parable of American resistance to Soviet power. Decades of academic attention, home video releases, a sequel in 1984, and a reboot in 2011 followed from a film that its own director intended as an opera, and that its star considered his biggest opportunity to establish himself in the entertainment industry.

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