******
- Verified Buyer
It is, as Arnold would typically say, simply terrific to finally discover the movie re-released as a DVD. Curiously enough, as someone who is featured as a member of the audience at Mountain Park when the sequences featuring Arnold guest-posing there were shot, I suppose I was a bit player in this movie. As it turned out, I was invited by Ed Jubinville, who ran the event, and got the chance to meet Arnold after the show. Yet my fondness for this expansive and revealing look into the intense subculture of bodybuilding is based more on the way it opened up the world of physical fitness and bodybuilding, which up to that point had been the subject of crude jokes and ridicule.This in many ways is a documentary, and photographer and videographer George Butler and author Charles Gaines (who wrote the original best-selling book, "Pumping Iron") took quite a risk in pushing this cultish film into the mainstream. Indeed, it originally played in arthouses and didn't become a hit until later. Yet it provided the spring for success Arnold needed to prove he could both emote and act (not many people understood the film was in fact scripted, such that many of the so-called stories and events were derived from the experiences of others,written into the film to provide a plot that otherwise didn't exist. thus events such as Schwarzenegger's father's death just before the Olympia (never happened that way), or Ken Waller plotting to undo Mike Katz.Likewise, the whole Mike Katz teeshirt routine. Still, at base this remains a fascinating look into the otherwise mysterious world of competitive bodybuilding, although the story described herein depicts a world that no longer exists as it did twenty five years ago. Nowadays bodybuilding is a big-money enterprise, and it has changed in the process of so evolving. People are in it for the money and the fame, and drugs play a much bigger part in the calculation than they did then. In that sense at least, it has lost its innocence. Still, for anyone so inclined, this is a memorable and intriguing story, featuring a numbner of world class strength athletes such as Schwarzenegger, Louis Ferrigno, Franco Columbo, Dave Draper, Serge Nubret, and Mike Katz, all then in their prime. This is a terrific movie, and one that I am sure you will enjoy
