Is This Just A Hoax??

It's a hoax. There is no Grizzly 2. I have the script, but i was never filmed. The people who have claimed to have seen it lied.

I actually worked on this film as a member of crew.

It was filmed in Budapest Hungary in 1983 on a Russian Military installation - a tank training base (we could see mock-ups/silhouettes of M-1 Abrams tanks on railroad tracks). At night all hell would breakout with night battles about once a week with no warning - flares, tank rounds exploding, small arms fire. We built a small baseball field for entertainment of crew (Hungarians ended up being great baseball players) and at night Russian troops would come out and use sticks and rocks to play after we had left the site. We started leaving the balls, gloves and bats for them to use. Never lost a one.

The film was a joint venture with MaFilms of Hungary.

As to the cast, yes they were all involved. George, Laura and Charlie were all campers who were attacked by the bear just prior to the fictional concert where the main attack was to take place. First film for all three I believe. John Rhyes Davies (btw - a really nice guy) was the hunter "Buchard" who was tasked with killing the bear.

Louise Fletcher was the Superintendent of the fictional national park.

Steve Inwood (Saturday Night Fever) was the park ranger and Debora Forman (Valley Girl) was his daughter who fell for the lead singer in the fictional band (band was called Predator -actors first name was Nigel but could not remember rest of name).

Nick Maley (Jaba the Hut SE makeup Creator) was the special effects leader designated to create the puppet-tronics bear for the final scenes. Never worked on film - always looked like a toy. He and his SE crew worked on location for about 12 weeks before folding up camp.

To shoot the fictional concert scene audience, a real concert was put on with Nazareth as the lead and another band Totaquello (sp?). Largest gathering of Hungarians since the revolt in 1957 - featured in international papers and US Papers.

Was American driven but had a British, French and Hungarian production team. There were translators for the Hungarians since they did not speak English but after the production ended we found out they could all speak great English - gave them a fantastic advantage in negotiations - all the way down to the taxi drivers shuttling people back and forth to shoot.

Deborah Raffin and her husband, Michael Viner (who at that time owned the LA Rams) was detained by the Russians after taking pictures near another Russian military base. Ended up they had their camera confiscated.

Vilmos Sigmond was originally the DP (was brought to Yellowstone park for preproduction work - look and feel of American National Park (which this was supposed to take place on) but he ended up with a conflict. László Kovács was brought in - note the gap in 1983 for his CV. What I remember him most for was his always calling for "more smoke."

Hungarian were really great people to work with.

Interesting foot note - They tried to finish the film with its missing finale in 1984 using half scale models and small people with a human actor inside bear costume.

Last I ever heard about the production was that it was in a vault in Paris with all sorts of litigation around it.

Note: The stage for the final concert stage had an elaborate setup that from the crowd looked like a bird with wings (this was about 300 feet wide) with computer controlled lights that could simulate the wings, a head that came out of the top with flames coming out of its nostrils and feet that came up with search lights on them. It was pretty cool except that President Regan put a moratorium for computer equipment to go the eastern block and soviet countries just before the site was built - they had to sneak an Apple II in that controlled the staging and lights in parts under the seats of the truck drivers bringing in items for the production. Also, the KAL flight 700 was shot down over Kamchatka while we in production - behind the iron curtain. It had us all worried on how far it was going to escalate and what the heck were we going to do in event of trouble? Rode it out without any problem though.

No..........it's not a hoax any longer. A workprint has leaked.

"Fate rarely calls upon us at a moment of our choosing."

I know I’m 15 years late with an answer, but the movie is out - and it’s as bad as you’d imagine. Nonsensical script, bad acting, characters we don’t care about, and editing that makes the whole mess even more confusing. This makes Grizzly look like an Academy Award winner.

It might have been BETTER if this existing were a hoax. After spending the time to film it, why it wasn't released back then, I have no idea. But, even though it is only an hour and a quarter, there is next to ZERO grizzly action in this. A large majority of it is concert footage of people you have never heard of. What grizzly "attacks" there are are basically people like Clooney, Sheen and Dern screaming in one shot, a grizzly arm swinging in another shot and that's it. This film has those three stars in early roles for a pretty brief time. But, this also has Louise Fletcher and Jonathan Rhys-Davies as a kind-of, sort-of Native American hunter. The weirdest part is that this release is awkwardly stitched together from the original footage with random purchased-from-the-Internet stock footage of trees and wildlife. Plus, it has been given a chipped together "film score" made, once again, of bits and pieces of "music" purchased off the Internet. Seriously bad, and not even a shadow of William Girdler's so-very-enjoyable original. They should have just shown us a cut using the originally-shot footage and left it at that.