April 8, 2025 • 18 mins
Robert explains why he repeatedly returns to Roar, a movie where the cast and crew are repeatedly for-real maimed by giant cats, when he needs to feel optimistic about the future of the human race.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, everybody, it could happen here or here, And this
is Robert Evans. We're a show about things falling apart,
and boy howdy, they sure seem to be doing just that,
as they always are and have been four years, you know.
In fact, anticipation of the end times I think is
probably close to the number one hobby in the United
States at this point. I suspect if you counted up
(00:27):
the dollar value of all the collapse themed movies, books,
prepping gear, monetize social media content, and of course religious
sects in the country, the apocalypse would be one of
our big industries. Doomsday prepping alone was an almost one
point two billion dollar business last year, and it's expected
to more than double by twenty thirty. Our popular fiction
(00:49):
can't even imagine a better future right now. Ninety percent
of modern future media takes place during or shortly after
an apocalypse. The odd exception today, like Bong Jun Ho's
recent Mickey seventeen, is so rooted in Trump's politics that
we only catch occasional glimpses of anything beyond it. In
other words, in our fiction, there's no respite from the news.
(01:10):
We watch a slow motion self inflicted global economic collapse,
and then relax with shows about mushroom zombies or literal
wage slaves created by mind control surgery. In other words,
it's bleak out there. Tomorrow could be the day Trump
invokes the Insurrection Act or uses the military to occupy Greenland,
or like one of a dozen equivalent horrors. We all
(01:31):
just know our coming in some form or another, even
if no one can say win. And I'm not here
today to tell you how we're going to get past
all of that or fix it, because I don't know.
So today I'm just here as a merchant of hope.
My job is to convince you that our species will
someday get past our bullshit and perhaps even lay claim
(01:52):
to the stars. And no Elon Musk isn't going to
have anything to do with that. But in order to
convince you of all this, I'm going to have to
talk about a movie. It's called Roar, and it is
technically a nineteen eighty one comedy adventure film about an
American naturalist. This guy lives on a nature preserve in
Tanzania filled with big cats. His family comes to visit
(02:15):
at the same time as a grant committee shows up
to evaluate his project, which has an unclear goal. He's
apparently just trying to prove people and giant cats from
all over the world can live together, which the movie
shows they can't. It's really immaterial what happens in the plot.
All I can tell you is how Wikipedia describes it.
I've watched this movie dozens of times, and I have
very little idea what it's supposed to be about. This
(02:38):
is because in any given scene, the script is only
ever a vague suggestion, as each scene starts with actors
trying to read lines and evolves into those same actors
trying to survive while being mauled by dozens of lions, tigers,
and panthers. I should probably step back a minute to
explain some things. Roor is largely the brainchild of Tippyhedron
(02:58):
and her husband Noel Marshall. If you're on the younger side,
Tippy Hedron was the female lead in a little movie
called The Birds. It is a horror film and also
an early apocalypse flick by Alfred Hitchcock. It's often credited
with inventing modern horror cinema. Hitchcock himself sexually and psychologically
harassed Hedron, but his worst actions came during a crucial
(03:20):
scene where Hedron was attacked by a flock of birds.
Up to the day of filming, Hitchcock had assured Tippy
the birds used in this scene would be animatronic, but
when the time came to shoot it, she spent five
days having hundreds of live birds hurled at her in
huge numbers by the crew. Hedron later described it as brutal, ugly,
(03:40):
and relentless. Carrie Grant, her co star, told her she
was the bravest woman he'd ever seen. Now, whatever other
impacts this had on Tippy, she has no discernible fear
of animals after this point in her life, though she
really should. Her husband, Nol is a bit more of
a mystery to me. He was an agent, a producer,
a film investor in, a serial entrepreneur whose best financial
(04:02):
decision was putting money mind what became the Exorcist. In
nineteen sixty nine, he and Hedron were in mosam Beaque
while she starred in the film Satan's Harvest, about which
less is said the better. This is only relevant because
during their time in Africa, they observed a pride of
lions lounging about an abandoned home, and this gave them
an idea. They wanted to make a movie about poaching
(04:22):
and conservation, something that could use the power of film
to save these majestic creatures being threatened by humanity. All
four of their children agreed to star in it and
to help with production, but there were immediate snags. They
wanted the film to be set in a big cat sanctuary,
but actual lion tamers warned them that it was flat
out impossible to keep so many large fee lines together safely.
(04:43):
This would eventually prove to have been very accurate advice.
After a while, one tamer introduced them to their first
tame lion, and, for reasons known only to God, he
suggested to this traumatized movie star and her family of
charmingly deranged Californians that they could just get their own
bigg and trained them by adopting animals confiscated from their
previous owners, generally sketchy zoos and circuses. So a lot
(05:08):
of these cats had never known the wild, and they'd
often been badly mistreated given them. This was the nineteen seventies.
We must assume that some had been confiscated property of
Coke dealers, Tippy and Noll had no professional or legal
qualifications to care for dozens of big cats. When the
authorities eventually found out, there was trouble, although since Hedrid
and Marshall were rich, they bought their way out of
(05:29):
said trouble by purchasing a rural compound and having a
house built specifically for they and their dozens of apex
predators to live. While lions had inspired the initial vision,
the compound in California soon filmed with big adopted cats
of every kind. Tippy and her husband took them in
and raised them among and around their own children, who
came to see the animals as something between pets and family.
(05:52):
When they actually started filming the movie that became Roar.
Making any kind of movie had become secondary to the
act of caring for these men any many giant traumatized kiddies.
As I noted earlier, the plot to Roar is kind
of immaterial. I've never watched it with the sound on.
I can tell you, though, that none of these cats
were trained in any really meaningful way, which meant that
(06:14):
every scene devolved into the same spectacle. The casts surrounded
by dozens of giant cats, stumbled through a few lines
before one or all of the cats began to bite
and claw them, at which point each scene becomes about
surviving from one moment to the next. Roar took more
than five years to film in more than a decade
to actually make. No cats were harmed during the production
of this movie, but more humans were injured than in
(06:36):
any other film production on record. Of the one hundred
and twenty or so cast and crew on Roar, more
than one hundred suffered significant injury, often more than once.
Jan Debout, the cinematographer, had his scalp ripped off by
a lion, requiring one hundred and twenty stitches. He went
on to make Speed and Twister. Melanie Griffith, Tippy's daughter
and a future star herself, left production at one point
(06:58):
because she was worried a big cat might rip her
face off. She ultimately returned and immediately had a large
chuntic of her face ripped off, requiring extensive surgery. This
all sounds horrifying and impossible to justify, but before you
make a final judgment, I want to remind you of
two things. One, for all its horrors and severe injuries,
fewer people were killed on the set of War Than
(07:20):
in Alec Baldwin's recent film Rust. The second thing that
you must remember is that Roar is a work of
art on the level of Moby Dick. If you watch
it enough, among the right people and in the right headspace,
you can come to a deeper understanding of every facet
of human existence. I've taken a lot out of it
over the years. Recently it has convinced me that we
will one day get over our bullshit and escape the
(07:43):
present hell that our species seems mired in. I know
that doesn't make much sense now, but give me some time.
I'll explain why. But first it's probably time for some ads.
We're back, and the first thing I need you to
(08:05):
understand about all of these fucking cats is that in
every mauling caught on tape, and there are dozens of them,
I see no anger or malice in the actions of
these cats. I don't even see hunger. It's clear to me,
as a cat owner that the cats didn't see these people,
Tippy and her family and the cast and crew as
prey or as a threat. If anything, they saw them
(08:25):
as fellow big cats, cousins and close kin who they
extend to kind of familiarity and perhaps even a kind
of love that, since they are cats, is expressed primarily
by batting at them with claws that hit like bowie
knives embedded in the hood of a speeding camri. If
you have cats of your own, you understand now. Given
that nearly every person on this film was badly injured,
(08:46):
including Tippy, who got ganggreen from infected cat wounds, and
all of her children, you might feel inclined to judge
who are a knol or both of them for risking
their kids' lives to make this insane movie. I understand
the impulse, but I believe it to be an error.
The first thing you need to see to understand the
deeper dynamics going on with War is a picture from
a Playboy magazine photoshoot of Tippy's husband and co star,
(09:09):
Noel Marshall. He's in his office on his typewriter and
this fully grown male lion gets up on his desk
because it wants attention again normal cat behavior, And despite
the best efforts of this animal, who has to weigh
five hundred pounds, no Old Marshall won't stop focusing on
his work, and so the cat inches away from his
face roars. The sound of a male lion's roar is
(09:31):
deeply imprinted on all of us, an epigenetic memory passed
down by the handful of our ancestors who heard the
sound up close and lived to tell the tale. It
has such a foundational impact on our mind that Metro
Goldwyn Meyer the film Studio, used it to open every
movie they made from nineteen twenty eight on. I believe
they did this because the sound is a sort of
(09:51):
hack to compel our attention. It pulls an audience out
of whatever state of mind dominates their outside lives and
makes them more attentive to the film that is to come.
And so the first thing you need to understand about
the people who made Roar is that Marshal, upon having
a living adult lion inches from his face roar, gives
the creature a look that says, hey, man, can you
(10:12):
give me a second. I'm like, I'm in the middle
of something. I bring this up so that you will
understand that these were not people operating on anything close
to the same wavelength as you and I. Their lives
and their choices are to outsiders inconceivable. There's another great
photo from the set of that Playboy's shoot. While the
camera people roamed the Heddron compound, one of them caught
(10:33):
a shot of Tippy's adolescent daughter, Melanie, jumping into a pool.
An adult male lion, which he must have considered to
be in some way. A member of the family sees
this girl passing by in the corner of its eye,
and that motion ignites an instinct inside it, so like
any cat of that size in the same situation, it
reaches out to bite her. Afterwards, the Hedron family and
(10:53):
the cast and crew had complicated feelings about what happened
that extended to the present day. Tippy divorced Mark almost
as soon as the filming finally wrapped. She is alleged
that while Roar was being made, he utterly ignored her
well being. She also does not seem to have ever
seriously considered leaving. She later wrote that she quote was
into it every bit as much as he was, and
(11:14):
that production was an obsessive, addictive drama. John Mitchell Nol's son,
who acted in the movie and like everyone else, was
mauled repeatedly, came to own the rights to Roar when
his dad died in twenty ten. Dad was a fucking
asshole to do that to his family, he said recently.
He also said this, it was amazing to live through that.
I should have died many times, but I kind of
(11:36):
want to do it again. If you have any friends
or family who have survived extended periods of every combat,
there's a good chance they may have expressed a variation
of the same feeling. This is because trauma is sometimes
a drug taking. It can be more than just hell.
It's often also a high, which is one thing that
drives a lot of people crazy. I need to take
(11:56):
a moment away from Roor to talk about some people
that I'm in twenty seventeen in Iraq during the desperate
and ferocious urban combat against ISIS. The closer I drew
to the front, the more guys I met who were
elite veterans of the Iraqi Special Forces. They did the
bulk of the fighting. These were mostly young men, ranging
from the tail end of their teens to their twenties.
(12:17):
Many had grown up in places like Fallujah fighting from
the time they were seven or eight. Sometimes younger, they'd
been born into the US occupation. In many cases, their
earliest memories were as runners ferrying supplies and information to
the older men and teenage boys who did most of
the fighting. When the opportunity presented itself, they sometimes dropped
grenades or improvised explosive devices on US troops, most of
(12:39):
whom were teenagers themselves. Now. They fought against ISIS in
close quarters, building to building a few weeks at a time.
Periodically they'd rotate off the front and would go to
Erbil an hour or two away. Many of them were
gangsters in their spare time, running drugs and guns and brothels.
They spent their days off in a drunken haze of
Turkish amphetamines. Than they would drive back to the front
(13:00):
new brightly colored Mustangs and dodged chargers. The trunks fold
to bursting with so many machine guns and rocket launchers
they can only be closed with bungee cords. The guns
and rockets were useful at a distance to soften up
enemy positions and the impossibly dense warrenlike urban environment of
Mosl's old city. In every building, on every block, the
fighting terminated with door to door, room to room battles,
(13:21):
where the most useful weapons were hand grenades, combat knives,
and pistols. In that order. I don't know if any
of these guys were, at that point that I met them,
capable of feeling what u Ori would recognize as fear.
These were the men and boys whose bodies formed the
petting edge of the fighting against ISIS and MOSL on
occasion when they kidnapped Ice. As fighters, some of them
committed war crimes with the ease and with as much
(13:43):
thought as you and I give to breathing. This is bad,
of course, unforgivable, but I've never really given much thought
to judging them for it. Where would I even start.
A thing I've come to understand in my travels is
that human beings are capable of contorting themselves into the
most incredible shapes in order to fit into the times
they're forced to live in. This has been the story
of our entire long journey on this earth, and if
(14:05):
there is one reason our species has survived above all
the others, it is our capacity for infinite variety and
infinite contexts. We can make ourselves into anything if we're
given the right incentives, and to an extent, you can't
judge individual humans without judging the incentives The world we
collectively create presents for them. We evolved, and we still
(14:26):
live in a world where trauma and pain are inevitable,
and those of us who survive the worst things that
life can throw at us tend to become addicted, sometimes
to the cause of the trauma, but nearly always to
the people we experience it with. This is why the
cast and crew of Roar often reported feeling almost addicted
to spending time among these gigantic predators, and it's why
(14:47):
many kept coming back despite being repeatedly maimed. Roar happened
because the core cast and crew exhibited radical empathy for
roughly one hundred and forty large cats and for each other,
and almost exercised z hezero critical judgment Beyond that point. Now,
I will understand if you still feel that nothing could
justify the decision of two parents to risk their children's
(15:09):
lives in such folly. And I know this essay is
supposed to be my ultimate enduring optimism about mankind's potential,
and I'm going to get to that, but you know,
we still live in twenty twenty five. So first, here's ads.
(15:31):
So here's my best step at explaining why I find
Rar inspirational. There's a scene about three quarters of the
way through this movie, after roughly an hour straight of
watching the Hedron, Marshall family and their friends get repeatedly
mulled for real by giant cats, and in this scene,
John Marshall finds a dirt bike and engineers a scenario
that I am certain has never happened before or since
(15:52):
in the history of this planet. He rides away from
the home where his family is trapped and draws several
dozen lions, panthers, and tigers away by making them chase him.
The cats assume this is a game and repeatedly try
to murder or maim him, but he continues building up
speed in an ever greater tale of the most lethal
killing machines to evolve on this planet. You can see
(16:13):
from the look in John's eyes in this scene that
he has no idea. If he seconds away from death,
it would have been physically impossible to stop or control
this number of giant cats. The only reason this number
and variety of lions, panthers, and tigers would ever have
existed together at any previous point in world history would
have been across a distance of thousands of miles of
(16:35):
rugged wilderness. But thanks to Tippean Knowles insane dream, and
thanks to the deranged and utterly unjustifiable commitment of many
of the crew and their family, a moment of utter
novelty occurs where this singular assortment of big cats watches
as a man fleeing in terror from them on a
dirt bike does one of the sickest jumps in film
(16:55):
history and lands directly into a river, and then keeps
right until he is charged by a juvenile African elephant,
which the Hedrons also kept on their property. In its uniqueness,
this moment has to rival, if not exceed, the moon landing.
After all, considerably more men have stepped foot on the
Moon than have achieved what John Marshall does in this scene,
(17:17):
although some of that may be due to the fact
that it is extremely illegal for anyone today to even try.
And this is why I encourage you to watch Roar
My Dear Friends during the Dark Times, not because it's
a good movie, but because it reveals what is best
about humanity. What piece of art could better illustrate the
infinite possibilities within us. If a group of human beings
(17:39):
can learn to live among lions and tigers, despite the
constant guarantee of severe injury without really understanding why is
it so mad to think that perhaps we two can
transcend the barbarities of our age and become something better,
or at least something far stranger than money grubbing fascists.
I don't know how we escape the darkness that seems
to quach a bit further with each passing day, but
(18:02):
I do know this. If we can make war, we
can do anything.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources for it could Happen here, listed directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
Cool media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, everybody, it could happen here or here, And this
is Robert Evans. We're a show about things falling apart,
and boy howdy, they sure seem to be doing just that,
as they always are and have been four years, you know.
In fact, anticipation of the end times I think is
probably close to the number one hobby in the United
States at this point. I suspect if you counted up
(00:27):
the dollar value of all the collapse themed movies, books,
prepping gear, monetize social media content, and of course religious
sects in the country, the apocalypse would be one of
our big industries. Doomsday prepping alone was an almost one
point two billion dollar business last year, and it's expected
to more than double by twenty thirty. Our popular fiction
(00:49):
can't even imagine a better future right now. Ninety percent
of modern future media takes place during or shortly after
an apocalypse. The odd exception today, like Bong Jun Ho's
recent Mickey seventeen, is so rooted in Trump's politics that
we only catch occasional glimpses of anything beyond it. In
other words, in our fiction, there's no respite from the news.
(01:10):
We watch a slow motion self inflicted global economic collapse,
and then relax with shows about mushroom zombies or literal
wage slaves created by mind control surgery. In other words,
it's bleak out there. Tomorrow could be the day Trump
invokes the Insurrection Act or uses the military to occupy Greenland,
or like one of a dozen equivalent horrors. We all
(01:31):
just know our coming in some form or another, even
if no one can say win. And I'm not here
today to tell you how we're going to get past
all of that or fix it, because I don't know.
So today I'm just here as a merchant of hope.
My job is to convince you that our species will
someday get past our bullshit and perhaps even lay claim
(01:52):
to the stars. And no Elon Musk isn't going to
have anything to do with that. But in order to
convince you of all this, I'm going to have to
talk about a movie. It's called Roar, and it is
technically a nineteen eighty one comedy adventure film about an
American naturalist. This guy lives on a nature preserve in
Tanzania filled with big cats. His family comes to visit
(02:15):
at the same time as a grant committee shows up
to evaluate his project, which has an unclear goal. He's
apparently just trying to prove people and giant cats from
all over the world can live together, which the movie
shows they can't. It's really immaterial what happens in the plot.
All I can tell you is how Wikipedia describes it.
I've watched this movie dozens of times, and I have
very little idea what it's supposed to be about. This
(02:38):
is because in any given scene, the script is only
ever a vague suggestion, as each scene starts with actors
trying to read lines and evolves into those same actors
trying to survive while being mauled by dozens of lions, tigers,
and panthers. I should probably step back a minute to
explain some things. Roor is largely the brainchild of Tippyhedron
(02:58):
and her husband Noel Marshall. If you're on the younger side,
Tippy Hedron was the female lead in a little movie
called The Birds. It is a horror film and also
an early apocalypse flick by Alfred Hitchcock. It's often credited
with inventing modern horror cinema. Hitchcock himself sexually and psychologically
harassed Hedron, but his worst actions came during a crucial
(03:20):
scene where Hedron was attacked by a flock of birds.
Up to the day of filming, Hitchcock had assured Tippy
the birds used in this scene would be animatronic, but
when the time came to shoot it, she spent five
days having hundreds of live birds hurled at her in
huge numbers by the crew. Hedron later described it as brutal, ugly,
(03:40):
and relentless. Carrie Grant, her co star, told her she
was the bravest woman he'd ever seen. Now, whatever other
impacts this had on Tippy, she has no discernible fear
of animals after this point in her life, though she
really should. Her husband, Nol is a bit more of
a mystery to me. He was an agent, a producer,
a film investor in, a serial entrepreneur whose best financial
(04:02):
decision was putting money mind what became the Exorcist. In
nineteen sixty nine, he and Hedron were in mosam Beaque
while she starred in the film Satan's Harvest, about which
less is said the better. This is only relevant because
during their time in Africa, they observed a pride of
lions lounging about an abandoned home, and this gave them
an idea. They wanted to make a movie about poaching
(04:22):
and conservation, something that could use the power of film
to save these majestic creatures being threatened by humanity. All
four of their children agreed to star in it and
to help with production, but there were immediate snags. They
wanted the film to be set in a big cat sanctuary,
but actual lion tamers warned them that it was flat
out impossible to keep so many large fee lines together safely.
(04:43):
This would eventually prove to have been very accurate advice.
After a while, one tamer introduced them to their first
tame lion, and, for reasons known only to God, he
suggested to this traumatized movie star and her family of
charmingly deranged Californians that they could just get their own
bigg and trained them by adopting animals confiscated from their
previous owners, generally sketchy zoos and circuses. So a lot
(05:08):
of these cats had never known the wild, and they'd
often been badly mistreated given them. This was the nineteen seventies.
We must assume that some had been confiscated property of
Coke dealers, Tippy and Noll had no professional or legal
qualifications to care for dozens of big cats. When the
authorities eventually found out, there was trouble, although since Hedrid
and Marshall were rich, they bought their way out of
(05:29):
said trouble by purchasing a rural compound and having a
house built specifically for they and their dozens of apex
predators to live. While lions had inspired the initial vision,
the compound in California soon filmed with big adopted cats
of every kind. Tippy and her husband took them in
and raised them among and around their own children, who
came to see the animals as something between pets and family.
(05:52):
When they actually started filming the movie that became Roar.
Making any kind of movie had become secondary to the
act of caring for these men any many giant traumatized kiddies.
As I noted earlier, the plot to Roar is kind
of immaterial. I've never watched it with the sound on.
I can tell you, though, that none of these cats
were trained in any really meaningful way, which meant that
(06:14):
every scene devolved into the same spectacle. The casts surrounded
by dozens of giant cats, stumbled through a few lines
before one or all of the cats began to bite
and claw them, at which point each scene becomes about
surviving from one moment to the next. Roar took more
than five years to film in more than a decade
to actually make. No cats were harmed during the production
of this movie, but more humans were injured than in
(06:36):
any other film production on record. Of the one hundred
and twenty or so cast and crew on Roar, more
than one hundred suffered significant injury, often more than once.
Jan Debout, the cinematographer, had his scalp ripped off by
a lion, requiring one hundred and twenty stitches. He went
on to make Speed and Twister. Melanie Griffith, Tippy's daughter
and a future star herself, left production at one point
(06:58):
because she was worried a big cat might rip her
face off. She ultimately returned and immediately had a large
chuntic of her face ripped off, requiring extensive surgery. This
all sounds horrifying and impossible to justify, but before you
make a final judgment, I want to remind you of
two things. One, for all its horrors and severe injuries,
fewer people were killed on the set of War Than
(07:20):
in Alec Baldwin's recent film Rust. The second thing that
you must remember is that Roar is a work of
art on the level of Moby Dick. If you watch
it enough, among the right people and in the right headspace,
you can come to a deeper understanding of every facet
of human existence. I've taken a lot out of it
over the years. Recently it has convinced me that we
will one day get over our bullshit and escape the
(07:43):
present hell that our species seems mired in. I know
that doesn't make much sense now, but give me some time.
I'll explain why. But first it's probably time for some ads.
We're back, and the first thing I need you to
(08:05):
understand about all of these fucking cats is that in
every mauling caught on tape, and there are dozens of them,
I see no anger or malice in the actions of
these cats. I don't even see hunger. It's clear to me,
as a cat owner that the cats didn't see these people,
Tippy and her family and the cast and crew as
prey or as a threat. If anything, they saw them
(08:25):
as fellow big cats, cousins and close kin who they
extend to kind of familiarity and perhaps even a kind
of love that, since they are cats, is expressed primarily
by batting at them with claws that hit like bowie
knives embedded in the hood of a speeding camri. If
you have cats of your own, you understand now. Given
that nearly every person on this film was badly injured,
(08:46):
including Tippy, who got ganggreen from infected cat wounds, and
all of her children, you might feel inclined to judge
who are a knol or both of them for risking
their kids' lives to make this insane movie. I understand
the impulse, but I believe it to be an error.
The first thing you need to see to understand the
deeper dynamics going on with War is a picture from
a Playboy magazine photoshoot of Tippy's husband and co star,
(09:09):
Noel Marshall. He's in his office on his typewriter and
this fully grown male lion gets up on his desk
because it wants attention again normal cat behavior, And despite
the best efforts of this animal, who has to weigh
five hundred pounds, no Old Marshall won't stop focusing on
his work, and so the cat inches away from his
face roars. The sound of a male lion's roar is
(09:31):
deeply imprinted on all of us, an epigenetic memory passed
down by the handful of our ancestors who heard the
sound up close and lived to tell the tale. It
has such a foundational impact on our mind that Metro
Goldwyn Meyer the film Studio, used it to open every
movie they made from nineteen twenty eight on. I believe
they did this because the sound is a sort of
(09:51):
hack to compel our attention. It pulls an audience out
of whatever state of mind dominates their outside lives and
makes them more attentive to the film that is to come.
And so the first thing you need to understand about
the people who made Roar is that Marshal, upon having
a living adult lion inches from his face roar, gives
the creature a look that says, hey, man, can you
(10:12):
give me a second. I'm like, I'm in the middle
of something. I bring this up so that you will
understand that these were not people operating on anything close
to the same wavelength as you and I. Their lives
and their choices are to outsiders inconceivable. There's another great
photo from the set of that Playboy's shoot. While the
camera people roamed the Heddron compound, one of them caught
(10:33):
a shot of Tippy's adolescent daughter, Melanie, jumping into a pool.
An adult male lion, which he must have considered to
be in some way. A member of the family sees
this girl passing by in the corner of its eye,
and that motion ignites an instinct inside it, so like
any cat of that size in the same situation, it
reaches out to bite her. Afterwards, the Hedron family and
(10:53):
the cast and crew had complicated feelings about what happened
that extended to the present day. Tippy divorced Mark almost
as soon as the filming finally wrapped. She is alleged
that while Roar was being made, he utterly ignored her
well being. She also does not seem to have ever
seriously considered leaving. She later wrote that she quote was
into it every bit as much as he was, and
(11:14):
that production was an obsessive, addictive drama. John Mitchell Nol's son,
who acted in the movie and like everyone else, was
mauled repeatedly, came to own the rights to Roar when
his dad died in twenty ten. Dad was a fucking
asshole to do that to his family, he said recently.
He also said this, it was amazing to live through that.
I should have died many times, but I kind of
(11:36):
want to do it again. If you have any friends
or family who have survived extended periods of every combat,
there's a good chance they may have expressed a variation
of the same feeling. This is because trauma is sometimes
a drug taking. It can be more than just hell.
It's often also a high, which is one thing that
drives a lot of people crazy. I need to take
(11:56):
a moment away from Roor to talk about some people
that I'm in twenty seventeen in Iraq during the desperate
and ferocious urban combat against ISIS. The closer I drew
to the front, the more guys I met who were
elite veterans of the Iraqi Special Forces. They did the
bulk of the fighting. These were mostly young men, ranging
from the tail end of their teens to their twenties.
(12:17):
Many had grown up in places like Fallujah fighting from
the time they were seven or eight. Sometimes younger, they'd
been born into the US occupation. In many cases, their
earliest memories were as runners ferrying supplies and information to
the older men and teenage boys who did most of
the fighting. When the opportunity presented itself, they sometimes dropped
grenades or improvised explosive devices on US troops, most of
(12:39):
whom were teenagers themselves. Now. They fought against ISIS in
close quarters, building to building a few weeks at a time.
Periodically they'd rotate off the front and would go to
Erbil an hour or two away. Many of them were
gangsters in their spare time, running drugs and guns and brothels.
They spent their days off in a drunken haze of
Turkish amphetamines. Than they would drive back to the front
(13:00):
new brightly colored Mustangs and dodged chargers. The trunks fold
to bursting with so many machine guns and rocket launchers
they can only be closed with bungee cords. The guns
and rockets were useful at a distance to soften up
enemy positions and the impossibly dense warrenlike urban environment of
Mosl's old city. In every building, on every block, the
fighting terminated with door to door, room to room battles,
(13:21):
where the most useful weapons were hand grenades, combat knives,
and pistols. In that order. I don't know if any
of these guys were, at that point that I met them,
capable of feeling what u Ori would recognize as fear.
These were the men and boys whose bodies formed the
petting edge of the fighting against ISIS and MOSL on
occasion when they kidnapped Ice. As fighters, some of them
committed war crimes with the ease and with as much
(13:43):
thought as you and I give to breathing. This is bad,
of course, unforgivable, but I've never really given much thought
to judging them for it. Where would I even start.
A thing I've come to understand in my travels is
that human beings are capable of contorting themselves into the
most incredible shapes in order to fit into the times
they're forced to live in. This has been the story
of our entire long journey on this earth, and if
(14:05):
there is one reason our species has survived above all
the others, it is our capacity for infinite variety and
infinite contexts. We can make ourselves into anything if we're
given the right incentives, and to an extent, you can't
judge individual humans without judging the incentives The world we
collectively create presents for them. We evolved, and we still
(14:26):
live in a world where trauma and pain are inevitable,
and those of us who survive the worst things that
life can throw at us tend to become addicted, sometimes
to the cause of the trauma, but nearly always to
the people we experience it with. This is why the
cast and crew of Roar often reported feeling almost addicted
to spending time among these gigantic predators, and it's why
(14:47):
many kept coming back despite being repeatedly maimed. Roar happened
because the core cast and crew exhibited radical empathy for
roughly one hundred and forty large cats and for each other,
and almost exercised z hezero critical judgment Beyond that point. Now,
I will understand if you still feel that nothing could
justify the decision of two parents to risk their children's
(15:09):
lives in such folly. And I know this essay is
supposed to be my ultimate enduring optimism about mankind's potential,
and I'm going to get to that, but you know,
we still live in twenty twenty five. So first, here's ads.
(15:31):
So here's my best step at explaining why I find
Rar inspirational. There's a scene about three quarters of the
way through this movie, after roughly an hour straight of
watching the Hedron, Marshall family and their friends get repeatedly
mulled for real by giant cats, and in this scene,
John Marshall finds a dirt bike and engineers a scenario
that I am certain has never happened before or since
(15:52):
in the history of this planet. He rides away from
the home where his family is trapped and draws several
dozen lions, panthers, and tigers away by making them chase him.
The cats assume this is a game and repeatedly try
to murder or maim him, but he continues building up
speed in an ever greater tale of the most lethal
killing machines to evolve on this planet. You can see
(16:13):
from the look in John's eyes in this scene that
he has no idea. If he seconds away from death,
it would have been physically impossible to stop or control
this number of giant cats. The only reason this number
and variety of lions, panthers, and tigers would ever have
existed together at any previous point in world history would
have been across a distance of thousands of miles of
(16:35):
rugged wilderness. But thanks to Tippean Knowles insane dream, and
thanks to the deranged and utterly unjustifiable commitment of many
of the crew and their family, a moment of utter
novelty occurs where this singular assortment of big cats watches
as a man fleeing in terror from them on a
dirt bike does one of the sickest jumps in film
(16:55):
history and lands directly into a river, and then keeps
right until he is charged by a juvenile African elephant,
which the Hedrons also kept on their property. In its uniqueness,
this moment has to rival, if not exceed, the moon landing.
After all, considerably more men have stepped foot on the
Moon than have achieved what John Marshall does in this scene,
(17:17):
although some of that may be due to the fact
that it is extremely illegal for anyone today to even try.
And this is why I encourage you to watch Roar
My Dear Friends during the Dark Times, not because it's
a good movie, but because it reveals what is best
about humanity. What piece of art could better illustrate the
infinite possibilities within us. If a group of human beings
(17:39):
can learn to live among lions and tigers, despite the
constant guarantee of severe injury without really understanding why is
it so mad to think that perhaps we two can
transcend the barbarities of our age and become something better,
or at least something far stranger than money grubbing fascists.
I don't know how we escape the darkness that seems
to quach a bit further with each passing day, but
(18:02):
I do know this. If we can make war, we
can do anything.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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