Flash Gordon (1980): The Gloriously Chaotic Behind-the-Scenes Story

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Flash Gordon (1980) collage with movie poster, behind-the-scenes sketches, and characters in red and black sci-fi imagery.

The 1980 film Flash Gordon shouldn't work. The star went AWOL. The director was improvising around sets he hadn't approved. The producer had never heard of Queen. And nobody on the production could agree on what kind of film they were making. Here's how one of cinema's most lovably broken blockbusters came to exist.

It Started With George Lucas Getting Told No

Before Star Wars, George Lucas wanted to adapt Flash Gordon. He approached Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis for the rights and was turned down flat. Lucas went off and invented his own space opera instead. When Star Wars became the biggest film in history, De Laurentiis decided it was finally time to dust off his Flash Gordon rights and cash in. The inspiration and the cash-in are the same story told from opposite ends.

De Laurentiis even hired Gilbert Taylor as cinematographer. Taylor had shot Star Wars itself, and was brought in specifically to give Flash Gordon a hazy, dreamlike visual quality. The man who lit the Millennium Falcon lit Ming's throne room. That connection between the two films went all the way down.

The Director Chair Changed Hands Several Times

De Laurentiis first hired Nicolas Roeg, who spent a full year developing a deeply serious, metaphysical version of the material. He wanted Flash as a cosmic messiah, with a crystalline, abstract Mongo replacing the classic comic-strip designs. De Laurentiis looked at it and said, "I don't want to make that picture."

Roeg walked. Federico Fellini and Sergio Leone were both approached. Fellini had actually worked on Flash Gordon comics during World War II and held the original film option rights that had blocked Lucas in the first place. He came to meetings and left. Leone read the script and declined, feeling it wasn't faithful enough to the source material. As a nod to Fellini's involvement, Princess Aura's pet in the final film was quietly named "Fellini."

The director's chair eventually went to Mike Hodges, whose previous film was the gritty 1971 British crime classic Get Carter. Hodges had originally been lined up to direct the sequel if Roeg handled the first picture. Now he was doing both jobs at once, on a production already in motion.

The Cast Was Mostly Accidental

Kurt Russell turned the lead role down, calling the character too one-dimensional. Arnold Schwarzenegger was rejected because of his accent. Sam J. Jones got the job after appearing on The Dating Game, losing the date, and getting spotted by someone connected to De Laurentiis. The producer later described him as "a blond, buff, American boy, in great shape and even capable of acting," which sets that last criterion somewhere near the floor.

Jones had to bleach his dark hair blond for the role. Melody Anderson, cast as Dale Arden, dyed her natural blonde hair brown. Flash was supposed to have blue eyes, but Jones couldn't wear contact lenses during screen tests without losing his ability to read his lines, so that detail was quietly dropped.

Max von Sydow wore a Ming costume that weighed over 70 pounds and left him able to stand for only a few minutes at a time. He was genuinely excited to be there; he'd loved the comics as a boy. Timothy Dalton was there for the paycheck. Brian Blessed was living a childhood dream: Prince Vultan had been his favourite comic character, and he threw himself into the role for a reported £30,000.

The supporting cast is worth a closer look too. Richard O'Brien, fresh from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, plays one of Prince Barin's men on Arboria. Kenny Baker, the actor inside R2-D2 in Star Wars, appears as a dwarf in the torture chamber. And keep an eye on the opening airport scene: the worker glimpsed just after the hailstorm begins is a young Robbie Coltrane, nearly two decades before he became Hagrid in Harry Potter. The film was practically a talent incubator for people who'd go on to define other beloved franchises.

Nobody Agreed on What Film They Were Making

Director Hodges told his cast to play everything completely straight. De Laurentiis expected something loud and macho. The Italian crew and the English crew couldn't communicate clearly with each other. Melody Anderson later recalled: "The English thought they knew, and the Italians thought they knew, and the actors were caught in the middle of all this confusion."

The costume and production designer, Danilo Donati, an Academy Award winner who spoke no English, essentially built whatever he wanted and let Hodges improvise scenes around the results. As Hodges told Radio Times in 2020: "He's absolutely brilliant, I loved him, but he just really went off, basically, on his own, and did what he wanted to do." Armour cracked, wings tore, and helmets broke mid-scene. Most of what made the final cut was held together with duct tape.

Hodges later called it "the only improvised $27 million movie ever made." The famous football fight in Ming's throne room, including Dale's cheerleading routine, was entirely made up on the day by Jones and Anderson. As Anderson put it: "There was no time to prepare. We would just create and throw things in as we went along."

When audiences laughed at the first screenings, De Laurentiis was furious. He thought they were laughing at the film, not with it. He had the cheerleading scene re-edited, insisting it be played more seriously. In a film about an alien emperor trying to destroy Earth with a planet-sized moon drill. Serious.

It's a dynamic that echoes across plenty of troubled productions. The filming of Dr. No, the first James Bond film, had its own catalogue of on-set improvisation and creative clashes as the franchise tried to figure out what it was.

The Star Went AWOL

Jones clashed with De Laurentiis throughout production. He got into fights during filming, ended up in hospital at one point with an injury to his face, and De Laurentiis reportedly burst into the operating room to make sure the wound was treated without leaving a scar. When the Christmas break arrived, Jones flew to Los Angeles and didn't come back.

De Laurentiis found a stand-in and kept shooting. Jones refused to record his post-production dubbing sessions. Most of the dialogue audiences hear from Flash Gordon in the final film belongs to a professional voice actor named Peter Marinker. Jones's name is on the poster; his voice largely isn't on the film. It took years for anyone involved to acknowledge this publicly.

After release, Jones sued De Laurentiis demanding he honour the contracted trilogy and make two further films. Jones lost. The sequels were never made.

Queen, Pink Floyd, and a Producer Who'd Never Heard of Either

Hodges wanted Pink Floyd for the soundtrack and even played their music on set during production. De Laurentiis, who had never heard of Queen when their management approached him, reportedly asked, "Who are the Queens?" They got the job anyway and were given unusual creative freedom. Brian May later recalled: "We were given the license to do what we liked, as long as it complemented the picture."

The decision to weave film dialogue snippets into the album was the band's own idea, Roger Taylor's specifically. That instinct, to lean fully into the camp and make the music inseparable from the film, is probably the single biggest reason Flash Gordon is remembered at all. The film underperformed badly in the US. The theme song has outlasted almost everything else from 1980.

It wasn't the first time an unconventional funding or creative arrangement saved a film that the mainstream wasn't sure about. George Harrison personally bankrolled Monty Python's Life of Brian when every major studio passed on it, on the grounds that he simply wanted to see the film.

The Film Nobody Expected to Last

Flash Gordon took just over $27 million at the domestic US box office against a budget somewhere between $20 and $35 million depending on whose figures you believe. It performed significantly better internationally, particularly in the UK, but the planned trilogy was finished before it started. Screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr. blamed Star Wars: "People expected something like 'Star Wars.' 'Flash Gordon' is basically just silly, in an inspired way."

Forty-five years later it's a genuine cult classic. The 2005 UK DVD included a Brian Blessed commentary track that won "Commentary of the Year" from Hotdog Magazine. A 2018 documentary, Life After Flash, explored both the film's legacy and what happened to its troubled star. Hollywood has periodically discussed a reboot, though nothing has made it to screen.

For those interested in other films that pushed at what cinema could get away with, the 1933 Czech film Ecstasy caused a global scandal for reasons that feel almost quaint now, but fundamentally changed what audiences expected the screen to show.

The chaos of Flash Gordon, it turns out, was the whole point.