What the Hell Happened to Sam J. Jones?
https://lebeauleblog.com/2020/02/04/what-the-hell-happened-to-sam-j-jones/
Savior of the Universeshare
Every good Star Wars fan knows that George Lucas initially set out to make a Flash Gordon movie. When he couldn’t get the rights to his favorite sci-fi serial hero, Lucas set about making his own mythology. It worked out rather well for him.
The success of Star Wars in 1977 changed everything. Studios were scrambling to find the next space adventure. Paramount promoted its Star Trek revival from a TV series to a motion picture. Disney prioritized The Black Hole which had previously languished in development. Glen A Larson was inspired to create Battlestar Galactica and Lucas sued him.
Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis held the rights to make a Flash Gordon movie. Originally, he worked with legendary Italian director Federico Fellini to bring the hero to life on the big screen. Following the success of Star Wars, De Laurentiis could no longer afford to wait. So he turned to another esteemed director, Nicolas Roeg.
Yeah, Nicolas Roeg, the guy who directed Don’t Look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth nearly took the reigns of Flash Gordon. That would have been a very, very different movie from the one that got made. Roeg worked on his version of Flash Gordon for roughly a year before splitting with De Laurentiis over creative differences.
During pre-production, Danilo Donati was hard at work designing the movie’s out-of-this-world costumes and sets. According to screenwriter Lorenzo Semple, Jr., Donati’s did his own thing. “The stuff he designed was fantastic, but it had nothing to do with the story, and would actually be un-shootable. For instance, he spent $1 million on the Arboria set, which was used in one shot.”
King of the Impossible
With Nicolas Roeg out, De Laurentiis went shopping for a new director. He courted Sergio Leone, but they couldn’t agree on the tone of the movie. Like Roeg, Leone was interested in adapting the original comic strips drawn by Alex Raymond in the 1930’s. But De Laurentiis saw comic strips as inherently frivolous and wanted to go in the direction of camp.
Semple, who wrote for the Adam West Batman show, struggled with the tone of the script. “Dino wanted to make Flash Gordon humorous. At the time, I thought that was a possible way to go, but, in hindsight, I realize it was a terrible mistake. We kept fiddling around with the script, trying to decide whether to be funny or realistic. That was a catastrophic thing to do, with so much money involved.”
Eventually, De Laurentiis settled on Mike Hodges to direct Flash Gordon. Hodges was a huge step down from Fellini. Roeg or Leone but he was available and he would do what De Laurentiis asked of him. Hodges had recently been fired from The Omen II when the producers on that movie that he was too slow.
Flash Gordon Approaching
De Laurentiis auditioned hundreds of actors in search of his leading man. Supposedly he met with Kurt Russell and Arnold Schwarzenegger before settling on Jones. What put Jones over-the-top was something he did before he began acting. No, not the Playgirl pictorial…
I found out later his mother-in-law was watching a TV game show called The Dating Game which I went on. I lost the date, but Dino’s mother-in-law saw that episode and said “Dino, I think that’s your Flash Gordon right there!
It took roughly a year of meeting with De Laurentiis for Jones to get the part. When he did, the Italian producer made him dye his hair blonde and wear blue contacts to change his eye color. Screenwriter Semple was unimpressed. “Sam Jones was absolutely abominable as Flash. He was so awful in everything he did, that it didn’t encourage one to make improvements.”
By all accounts, Flash Gordon was a difficult shoot. To a large degree, Mike Hodges was forced to improvise as no one could agree on the tone of the movie. The actors were shuffled from rehearsal for once scene to filming another. In between, they learned how to use various weapons and props.
Nothing But a Man
Flash Gordon was undoubtedly a huge opportunity for an unknown like Jones. Decades later, he admits, he didn’t handle it well. De Laurentiis scolded Jones for his rowdy behavior off the set. After Jones got into a fight that could have delayed filming, De Laurentiis told him to knock it off. But the young actor didn’t listen.
Instead, he followed the advice of his agents and lawyers. They encouraged Jones to hold out for more money. “If I was to do it all over again I would have taken a meeting one on one with him, and told all my attorneys and representatives to back off.”
That came back to bite Jones in a big way. The production broke for the holidays and Jones returned home. After Christmas, the rest of the cast resumed work to loop their dialog, but De Laurentiis didn’t fly Jones back to England. Instead, he hired someone else to dub all of Jones’ lines. He was devastated.