As the title implies, Matthew Robbins' 1981 adventure film "Dragonslayer" is the tale of a sorcerer's apprentice named Galen (a pre-"Ally McBeal" Peter MacNicol) who tries to liberate the kingdom from a menacing airborne reptile.
Like the dragon itself, the film flew away from theaters quickly and got disappointing box office returns despite good reviews and terrific performances from MacNicol, Sir Ralph Richardson as his mentor, Caitlin Clarke and an unknown Ian McDiarmid, who'd later gain cinematic immortality as Emperor Palpatine in the "Star Wars" saga.
The few people who did see the film in theaters would have witnessed a dragon that required no suspension of disbelief. While Robbins and a massive crew worked hard to make that happen, home video audiences didn't get to properly see the efforts of two studios (Paramount and Disney).
As Robbins explains in a Zoom conversation, "... when it was transferred to VHS tape and DVS it really was a subpar mechanical process. I really don't know if anyone or a robot was responsible. It was so murky and fuzzy and grainy and third-rate. It was unviewable. I couldn't watch it."
Robbins, who directed and co-wrote (with producer Hal Barwood) the movie, pronounces the acronyms as though they were curses.
But he's in a better mood these days, because the new 4K Ultra HD edition that hit the market recently offers picture and sound that weren't available outside of the big screen when the movie opened. And a chance to introduce the film to a new generation.
"My grandchildren are a little too young to see it," he says. "It'll freak them out."
If the filmmaker was surprised by how the movie vanished from the marketplace, Paramount's new restoration was also unexpected.
"I was informed of it once they had taken the decision," he says. "I didn't agitate for it. It was purely out of their own enthusiasm. A whole team of people, audio and video, who had been doing restorations of other Paramount films from the library and made them up to date.
"I can't really answer technically everything that they were able to, but with the equipment they had. And when I was witness to the alterations that were being made, it was very much in the spirit of the leading edge of today's technology about getting rid of the matte lines, getting rid of all the grain and the night skies of seeing deeper into the shadows, even finding detail in the highlights."
AN EYE TO THE FUTURE
It probably didn't hurt that the dragon was created by Industrial Light & Magic, the visual effects company George Lucas founded in 1975 to make "Star Wars." At the time, they were known for their ability to make interstellar travel and dogfights look real, but they used miniatures and practical and optical effects to make the dragon look as real as MacNicol.
They weren't a creature shop at the time. Also, Robbins had worked with Lucas on his debut film "THX 1138," but getting the effects shop's cooperation wasn't a given.
"They weren't, and they had not done it," he says. "And (dragon supervisor) Phil Tippett was more than ready to oblige. When we walked in with 'Dragonslayer,' we were assuming actually that I was going to do it because we were connected. We weren't part of Lucasfilm, but we were first cousins, so to speak. We were family, and they were eager, all of them, to get out of those star fields and ships and get into another world."
In addition to the technical adjustments, it helps that Barwood and Robbins had a storyline that doesn't seem antiquated despite its sixth century English setting. The film features women who do more than wait for Galen to save them from becoming a dragon dinner. Valerian (Clarke) poses as a boy to avoid being drawn into the lottery for being sacrificed to the beast, and even when her lack of Y chromosomes is obvious, she provides Galen with warnings he'd better heed.
Clarke worked primarily on stage before cancer took her life in 2004. "Dragonslayer" is a rare chance to see what she could do.
"We cast her because we felt that she had a lot of presence on the screen, but she could also be convincing as a male and then a female," her director recalls. "I've been asked about it, and I wish I could say that I was being prophetic in some way, but it was part of the story that we need to put in there, and it seemed to have its own logic."
TRAGIC LOTTERY
That logic actually came from what happened to men of Robbins' own generation when he was young. He and Barwood felt that they were being sacrificed to a different sort of dragon. Like the maidens in the film, those who didn't have money and connections were likely to be drafted to serve in Vietnam.
"When we were at film school at USC (University of Southern California), all of us were very much tyrannized by ... the lottery, and it was your birthday that determined whether you were going to be called up," he says. "In my case, I was at USC with Hal Barwood, George Lucas, Randal Kleiser ("Grease") and all those USC filmmakers of that inner group. My birthday came up No. 9, and I was very much in danger of being drafted. I was under considerable tension for a few weeks."
Robbins is obviously proud of "Dragonslayer," but it's part of a much longer résumé.
He and Barwood wrote "The Sugarland Express," which was Steven Spielberg's theatrical debut and "MacArthur." He also directed "*batteries not included," "Corvette Summer" and "The Legend of Billie Jean." He has also been a frequent collaborator with "Dragonslayer" fan Guillermo Del Toro, who joins Robbins on the audio commentary on the 4K disc. The two collaborated on the scripts to "Mimic," "Crimson Peak" and the Oscar-winning "Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio."
In "Dragonslayer," the king comes off as hypocritical and conniving, and authority figures seem suspect in "The Sugarland Express" and "Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio" as well. When I brought that up to Robbins, I soon learned that the auteur theory has limits when one considers that Barwood, Spielberg or others might have had more influence on the material than he did.
"I'm thinking now quickly [and] trying to shuffle my cards with a response," he says. "In the instance of 'Pinocchio,' it's like a prime mover. You look at his work (particularly in 'Pan's Labyrinth' and 'The Devil's Backbone'), and the whole anti-fascism thing, and [Del Toro]'s got a lot to say that is very specific. It's not a sub-theme you might find in 'Corvette Summer' or 'The Legend of Billie Jean.'
"My favorite part of directing was working with the actors on bringing what I had written to life with the actors. My least favorite part of moviemaking has always been dealing with the opinions of the money people, the studio people. I'd be interested in reading what you have to write about that."