Pumping Iron, was released on January 18th, 1977, but the film’s influence can still be felt 40 years later. Most movies come out, and they either hit or they don’t, and then they age, and they either catch on as cult phenomena or they don’t. Years later we argue whether they still hold up, if we talk about them at all. Pumping Iron, meanwhile, belongs to that tiny segment of movies whose cultural influence doesn’t just hit and recede, but actually seems to wax and wane throughout different periods, its importance rising and falling like a stock. It belongs to that category of movies that, actually, kind of changed the world in some small way.
Directed by George Butler and Robert Fiore, partly based on a book written by Butler and Charles Gaines, Pumping Iron essentially did for bodybuilding what The Endless Summer did for surfing. In a way they’re cultural siblings. Pumping Iron sold the same California beach culture Endless Summer was selling, but in a way that was actually recreatable in, say, Omaha. If The Endless Summer was a Beach Boys surf song, Pumping Iron was a Beach Boys car song (and yes, the people in Endless Summer would probably kill me for comparing them to noted non-surfers the Beach Boys). Point being, if you were an impressionable American in 1977, you may not have had access to a coastline, but you almost certainly had access to a weight bench.
Documenting Arnold Schwarzenegger’s search for his sixth straight Mr. Olympia title at the 1975 Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympia competitions in Pretoria, South Africa (at the height of apartheid, a time when South Africa was desperately trying to present a more moderate face to the world through dumping money into sport — something the film doesn’t really go into), Pumping Iron not only launched the careers of Schwarzenegger and his rival, Lou Ferrigno, it basically created bodybuilding as a mainstream phenomenon. Bodybuilding existed before, sure, but only in a fringe way. For evidence, see Arnold’s winning purse that year: $3,000. That Pumping Iron was shot in 1975 and not released for another two years should testify to how esoteric the larger public considered it.
“We shot a test film and I screened it in New York for a hundred investors and Laura Linney’s father (playwright Romulus Linney) got up and said, ‘George, if you ever make a movie about Arnold Schwarzenegger you’ll be laughed off 42nd Street,'” co-director George Butler told IronAge in 2009. “What you’ve got to understand is that back in the early ’70s bodybuilding was the least glamorous sport in the world. The prevailing view was that it was purely homosexual, that bodybuilders were totally uncoordinated, and that when they grew older that their muscles would turn to fat and that they had no intelligence whatsoever. Charles Gaines [Butler’s co-author of Pumping Iron the book] said that it was like trying to promote midget wrestling. It was so tawdry… everyone we knew was laughing at us.”
This tawdriness probably extended to bodybuilding’s chief proponent at the time, a magazine and supplement magnate named Joe Weider, the guy who originally brought Schwarzenegger to the U.S. Among the assertions Weider makes in a 1976 Rolling Stone article on Schwarzenegger is that “homosexuals covet bodybuilders, but bodybuilders aren’t homosexuals.” The proof: “The women they’ve married all have big boobs. […] You go to Arnold’s parties, you see girls with big breasts.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger, then one of a handful of “professional” bodybuilders without a regular day job, was even then the most famous bodybuilder of all time, which probably didn’t mean much to non-bodybuilders. He’d starred in only one movie, Hercules In New York (aka Hercules Goes Bananas), seven years earlier (in which his thick accent was entirely redubbed and he was credited as “Arnold Stang”). He then had a small, memorable part in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye and, after the events of Pumping Iron but before its release, a significant role in Stay Hungry, a Bob Rafelson film set in the bodybuilding world and co-written by Gaines. Yet to hear Butler tell it, Schwarzenegger’s name actually hurt the movie:
“When I was trying to get Pumping Iron going I was very short on money so I went to this lab in New York and I had just come back from shooting the initial part of the film and I asked them if they’d give me some credit, which is the kind of thing they normally do when you get going in the movie. This was a place called DuArt Lab and the owner of it is someone named Irwin Young. So I went in with my hat in my hand and asked him if he would give me $15,000 worth of credit. He said, ‘Tell me what you’re doing,’ and I said, ‘Well I’m making a movie about bodybuilding.’ Then he said, “Does it have anything to do with Arnold Schwarzenegger?’ and I said, ‘Yes.’ So he said, ‘Forget it. I won’t give you any credit. I had a movie in here called Hercules in New York and they never paid a bill and they owe me 30 grand.'”
The project languished until Butler had the bright idea to stick Schwarzenegger and Ken Waller (more on him later) in the Whitney Museum, posing on rotating discs to raise money. The beefcakes, amazingly enough, first became a hit among the art critics of New York. From another interview with George Butler:
“I decided to put on a bodybuilding posing exhibition at the Whitney Museum with Arnold and several others that a curator there named Palmer Wald agreed to host. We invited all the prominent art critics, because we felt bodybuilding was a genuine art form. We set up 500 chairs, even though the museum thought that was wishful thinking. Then it started to snow heavily, and it seemed like we would hardly have anyone show up. Soon I was called to look out the window, where there was a line so far down the block you couldn’t see the end. In the end, 2,500 people squeezed in somehow. The cash register was overflowing, so people started throwing their $10 bills into a pile on the floor behind it. When the investor saw that pile of cash, he knew this was worth backing.”
Pumping Iron initially played The Plaza Theater in New York, a small venue where Butler says it “broke every box office record.” It was sold to PBS for $30,ooo and began airing in heavy rotation later that year, influencing a generation.
“[Bodybuilding] had been around for the first 70 years of the 20th century and other than Muscle Beach and Charles Atlas and Steve Reeves’ Hercules movies, and when we started there were basically three gyms in New York. There was Mid-City which was owned by Tommy Minichiello at 48th and 8th. There was a Union Square gym downtown, which was mostly gay, and there was Siggy Klein’s gym somewhere up near Columbia, and that was it. The only one that was really active as a bodybuilding gym was Mid-City. There was one Gold’s Gym in Venice and there was Vince Gironda’s gym in the Valley, and Bill Pearl had a gym up near Pasadena and there were a couple of Vic Tanny’s and that was it in Los Angeles. There might have been 25,000 people in America lifting weights at the time and? Boom? In 1982, after the release of the movie and the book, an A.C. Nielsen poll showed that 34 million people were lifting weights in America. It was like an atomic bomb going off. And if anyone can come along and say, ‘Well, there really were 38 gyms in New York when you began, George,’ (Laughing) I’d like to know the addresses of all of them right away, because they weren’t there.”
In 2008, documentarian Chris Bell released a documentary, Bigger, Stronger, Faster, opening up about bodybuilding and his flirtations with steroids, painting a compelling portrait of an entire subculture of men brought together by their mutual attraction to the Schwarzenegger mystique — which Pumping Iron was largely responsible for creating.
As Bell describes it himself in a voiceover: “I never saw Gone With the Wind or Casablanca, but I can tell you every line of every Arnold movie. […] I was just 12 years old and there was an explosion of ass-kicking in America. […] I wanted to tear off my shirt and be ripped, tanned and larger than life.
And as IronAge‘s interviewer (quoted above) told Butler, “[The Pumping Iron book] is what inspired me to take up bodybuilding. When I was about ten I remember thumbing through a copy in a department store and coming to the picture of Arnold with a topless girl on his shoulders and I thought, ‘That’s what I want to be.'”
The Urtext Of Arnold-ness
Pumping Iron‘s influence wasn’t just a passing fad. I came of age during what I like to think of as Pumping Iron‘s second (or possibly third) renaissance, well into the ’90s and early 2000s. For those of us who grew up with Arnold (much like Chris Bell above), Pumping Iron served as this kind of urtext of Arnold-ness — a depiction of Arnold at his most pure, before he was softened and diluted by the demands of commerce.
In the film, Arnold openly discusses having grown up wanting to be special, like Jesus or a dictator, and long before he became governor there were signs that this wasn’t that crazy a dream. The effect he had on people, both in the film shot in 1975, and on viewers in the future, was incomparable. In college I remember sitting around my friend Steve’s living room, which had a black and white print of Arnold posing on the wall (to this day the only example of a heterosexual man flexing in his underwear that other heterosexual men used to adorn their walls), watching Pumping Iron over beers before we’d go out, glorying in the ridiculousness of it. Steve would always shush us before his favorite part, “It’s coming up, it’s coming up!” he’d yell, waving us to silence before the shot of Arnold turning sideways to inspect himself in the mirror after a set of dumbbell flies. “Look how wide he is!”
To be sure, Schwarzenegger was a marvel. You didn’t necessarily have to be into working out to appreciate the singular quality of the man’s body. At least, I think. I actually was really into working out. It’d be hard to overstate how much an integral part of every young man’s life weightlifting was in the late ’90s and early 2000s. The clearest expression of this is probably Jersey Shore, which premiered in 2009 during the dying days of the fad and was dedicated to its subjects’ perfect tackiness. Their mantra of “gym, tanning, laundry” doubled as the death rattle of peak bodybuilding. Jersey Shore was where ’90s and early 2000s phenomena went to die, and be resurrected ironically. Trying to become as jacked as Arnold was near the top of the list.
And Schwarzenegger himself made all that okay by convincing us that getting super buff wasn’t essentially masturbatory, but, in fact, art. In one of his first monologues in the film, he says:
Good bodybuilders have the same mind as a sculptor has. If you analyze it, you look in the mirror and you say: I need more deltoids, more shoulders, so you get the proportion right. So what you do is exercise, and put those deltoids on. Whereas an artist would just slap some clay on each side. […] I mean obviously a lot of people look at you and they thing it’s kind of strange what you’re doing, but those are people who don’t know much about it. It’s not any stranger than going into a car and trying to go a quarter mile in five seconds. I mean that’s strange to me.
Years before he entered politics, Arnold was already a master of messaging. In Pumping Iron he managed to position checking yourself out in the mirror as an essential activity, a sport, something more akin to the film director looking through an imaginary frame made with his fingers than Bluto puffing his chest out and strutting around town like a jackass.
See, inextricably tied up with his magnificent physique was the fact that Arnold was just so f*cking cool. He was, essentially, a freak, engaged in a fringe activity. And this was an aspect the movie never let you forget, clearly evident even in the way the film frames its shots.
Arnold was on a mission to change people’s perceptions of bodybuilding, and it worked because he did it without trying to hide anything. You think lifting weights is gay? Arnold didn’t give a shit. He literally let Pumping Iron film him playing grabass in the shower with his jacked buddies (another shot that always cracks me up). There’s a shot of Arnold flexing in a prison yard. And think about that for a second, that a guy could show up to a prison and flex in his underwear and the prisoners would gather round to watch, just as grateful for the entertainment as if they were watching Johnny Cash play guitar. The camera records the classic reaction of two presumably hard-boiled cons gawking at him. “He’s got a beautiful body, man,” one says to the other.
Arnold was so comfortable with himself that he offered up the possibility that people would respect you and whatever weird shit you were into, so long as you were open about it and could explain it patiently and articulately. During the course of the movie, he admits idolizing dictators, reveals that he skipped his own father’s funeral because it was two months out from a competition (two months!), and holds forth on how satisfying for him it is to feel like he’s cumming everywhere. This was a man who refused to be shamed by any of his considerable kinks. And for this, he was rewarded with a life that seemed to involve nothing but working out with this buddies, playing on the beach, and frolicking with hot babes.
Obviously, this was endlessly appealing to 19-year-old me, and 19-year-old mes in many times and places since. It’s impossible to watch Pumping Iron without fantasizing about what it must’ve been like to live in Southern California in the ’70s.
Arnold is an egomaniac who also comes off generous much of the time, like when he gives a young bodybuilder advice on his posing — “little guys some times want to hide” — the gist of which is that life is about having the guts to put yourself out there. And in so doing, he pulls the classic supermodel move of convincing us all that what we’re seeing isn’t unattainable beauty, but rather achievable self-confidence. Even now he’s so convincing that I almost believe him. No wonder he became a politician.
Heroes And Villains
Cultural impact aside, Pumping Iron as a movie absolutely holds up, from opening credits to closing credits. The former of which, by the way, will make you yearn for the days when documentaries had their own porny title tracks.
The characters aren’t just compelling, they’re iconic. Mike Katz plays the babyface, in pro wrestling parlance. An ex-lineman for the New York Jets and a three-sport superathlete in high school, he makes an unlikely underdog in Pumping Iron. But as a balding family man and high school teacher, who describes taking up weightlifting after getting teased and being called “Jew boy” growing up, Katz is the underdog in the amateur competition to last year’s winner and this year’s favorite, Ken Waller. While Katz horses around with his kids and says he doesn’t think he’ll be able to respect himself unless he wins, Waller, the perfect ginger villain, casually tosses the pig skin with some mega-jacked buddies while bragging about his sabotage plans.
“I’m going to hide Katz’s shirt,” Waller says, to the soundtrack of his own nefarious-sounding villain music.
Incidentally, it does shatter the mystique a little to find out that the part where Waller “planned” the shirt sabotage was actually filmed after the sabotage.
IRONAGE: One case in particular that everyone talks about is the ‘missing t-shirt/crusher scene’ and the onscreen friction between Ken Waller and Mike Katz. How much of that was real?
GEORGE BUTLER: The only tricky thing involved there is that Waller evidently stole Katz’s t-shirt because we got on film Katz saying, “Where’s my t-shirt? I bet Waller took it.” And so, we filmed the before after.
“Creative liberties” aside, the Katz/Waller dynamic is so perfect that it almost wouldn’t work in fiction. Ken Waller belongs to an exclusive club of too-good-to-be-true documentary villains, the only other example of which who even comes close is Billy Mitchell, the feather-haired hot sauce magnate from King of Kong: A Fistful Of Quarters. And like King of Kong‘s Steve Wiebe, Katz is depicted as the good-natured family man taking on the overconfident reigning champ. Only Katz doesn’t quite make good, coming in a heartbreaking fourth in the amateur competition. The devastation on Katz’s face after the match, when he hears Ken Waller announced as the winner from the green room, wishing him well and trying to put a happy face on it (not realizing Waller stole his shirt) is one of the only times I’ve ever felt compelled to hug a giant jacked bodybuilder covered in baby oil. Katz is so sympathetic that if Pumping Iron had come out any later, after the advent of reality television as a cultural phenomenon, you’d just assume he was hamming it up.
Lou Ferrigno and Arnold Schwarzenegger have a similar dynamic, with Ferrigno playing the underdog, the deaf giant with the overbearing, slightly obnoxious father trying to compete with the Schwarzenegger juggernaut. The two even have this Rocky IV dynamic, with Schwarzenegger working out in an open, airy gym, taking naps on sunny beaches when he gets too tired from frolicking with bikini models, juxtaposed with Lou Ferrigno pushing dumbbells in claustrophobic wood-paneled basements in Brooklyn, surrounded by only his family. But it was another hit movie that took direct inspiration from Pumping Iron: Saturday Night Fever, whose writer, Nik Cohn, reportedly modelled John Travolta’s family after the Ferrignos.
Trivia points aside, Ferrigno/Schwarzenegger never quite becomes the David-Goliath story that Katz/Waller does, or that the filmmakers maybe intended when they started shooting , and not just because David is 6’5″ in this analogy. For one thing, Pumping Iron resists turning Ferrigno into an easy sob story or cheap inspiration porn. Plenty of other readings paint Ferrigno as the brave deaf kid, overcoming bullying and poverty (he wore one hearing aid because his family couldn’t afford two!) to build himself into this guy who’d go on to play the Hulk. In Pumping Iron, his deafness is really only mentioned once in passing. In certain scenes, like when Arnold leans over to whisper something into Ferrigno’s ear onstage (where Ferrigno wouldn’t be able to read his lips), you wonder whether he (and maybe even the filmmakers) had forgotten.
The other reason it defies easy categorization is Arnold himself, who has the uncanny ability to say things that on paper sound downright supervillainous while remaining oddly charming. He explains avoiding personal relationships to focus on his weightlifting (which makes sense only to aspiring, early 20-something members of the He-Man Woman Hater’s Club) and skipping his own father’s funeral as if this were all the most natural thing in the world. Over and over he uses his secure knowledge that he’s the best as another weapon against his competitors. Highlighted, perhaps, by the story of when he sabotaged another bodybuilder before a big show because he thought the guy was an asshole. He told the same story in the 1976 Rolling Stone piece:
“A guy came in and said he wanted to learn a new technique in posing; the old ones he’d already perfected. So I had him pose for me and the guy looked like an idiot. So I said, ‘Okay, if you think you’re a good poser now, I’m going to make you much better’ — and make you look like a bigger idiot.
“So I told the guy that the new system in posing is to scream while you’re posing. And he said, ‘How does this work?’ And I said, ‘It’s obviously a secret. It’s from America. Whoever does it first in Europe will obviously be the winner of many contests.’
“He got oiled up — a big mess — and I said, ‘The lower your hands are in a pose, the lower you have to scream, and the higher your hands are over your head, the higher you have to scream.’”
He growls —”Oooooh-aaaaiee!” — then goes on.
“The guy said, ‘That sounds kind of impressive. That really will let people know that you’re up there.’ So I trained the guy for two days, and a week later was the Mr. Munich contest. And I told him that he should swear not to tell anybody, because I was afraid somebody would tell him, ‘You’re stupid.’”
He continues, conspiratorially. “So he promises, and the Mr. Munich contest comes around. I told him that he should run out with a loud scream. And he ran out, dripping with oil, and started screaming, ‘Oooooh-aaaaaiee!’ with weird eyes.
“They pulled him off the stage and drove him away. They took it so seriously. He kept screaming, ‘Arnold! Help! They don’t understand me!’ He came back a week later and said, ‘What happened?’ And I said, ‘They weren’t educated enough.’
“I only do that when a guy’s really an asshole. If somebody comes to me and says, ‘Arnold, I really need help,’ I will take the time and sit down with the guy and put him on the program that will definitely help.
“But if somebody comes to me and says, ‘I have the best routine and, as a matter of fact, I’m stronger than you are, and I have bigger arms than you, but I want them to be much bigger . . . How do I do it?’ — then he can be 100% sure that I will fuck him up.”
The fact that Arnold is a cocky sociopath oddly doesn’t diminish him. He belongs to that rare class of people for whom life seems really easy, whose resulting chill is so magnetic that you just want to be around them. As if maybe you can soak up whatever it is they have and become a little breezier yourself. (Matthew McConaughey also comes to mind.)
Arnold and Lou pumping up backstage before the big show kind of says it all: Arnold calmly exhaling as he smoothly pushes the dumbbells into place, while Lou huffs and grunts like a pregnant bison across the room. Something Arnold, of course, doesn’t fail to notice. “It should be quiet in here, Louie! Like a church.”
If you watch the movie closely, you know that Arnold’s calm (to say nothing of trying to make Louie self-conscious) is partly gamesmanship. He’s not nearly so quiet when he’s working out at Gold’s earlier in the film. But it doesn’t really matter, because it’s a perfect expression of the film and its appeal in microcosm. Life is easy for Arnold, because he lets it be. Pumping Iron presents us with simple formulas like this, which is why it endures. Bigger is better, confidence is beauty, honesty is charm. Who wouldn’t want to believe that?