Pumping Iron - Production

Production

The film began as a look at bodybuilding from the perspective of a newcomer to the sport; to this end, the production had hired the slimly built actor Bud Cort, with the intention of following Cort's development from a physically slight man to a muscular, strong bodybuilder. Cort trained at Gold's Gym for a brief period, taking lessons from Schwarzenegger, but ultimately felt that he was wrong for the project; Cort and the producers amicably parted ways, and the documentary team began to focus more intently on the established bodybuilders at Gold's.

In order to compensate for the loss of Cort's narrative arc, Butler decided to capitalize on Schwarzenegger and Ferrigno's contrasting personalities and cast the film as the story of a heroic but "sinister" underdog (Ferrigno) against a charismatic, powerful "villain" (Schwarzenegger). To this end, Butler intentionally avoided filming Ferrigno's training sequences with bright lighting and emphasized the open-air atmosphere of Gold's Gym and the sunlight at Muscle Beach for Schwarzenegger's training sequences. Schwarzenegger claims to have helped Butler in casting himself as a villain, citing his story about not returning home for his father's funeral as having been told to him by a French bodybuilder; however, following the film's release, claims surfaced that Schwarzenegger had in fact refused to attend the funeral. Butler additionally cast the relationship between Mike Katz and Ken Waller as a sinister rivalry, filming the "football scene" where Waller decides to steal Katz's shirt after the fact in order to fill in a narrative gap. Waller and Katz were in fact close friends, and Waller's theft of the shirt was simply a spur-of-the-moment prank not intended to upset Katz to the extent that it did. Waller was later regretful of the football sequence, claiming that audiences at bodybuilding competitions continued to boo him for years after the film's release.

Following the Mr. Olympia contest, the production ran out of money and ended up in development hell for nearly two years. In an effort to raise funds, Butler arranged an exhibit with the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York: Bodybuilders would become "living sculptures," posing on rotating platforms while art critics analyzed the aesthetics of the bodybuilding physique and compared and contrasted the men to Greek sculpture. To increase interest in the event, Butler arranged for Candice Bergen to be a celebrity commentator; Schwarzenegger also agreed to appear as one of the "living sculptures," having received modest attention for his Golden Globe-winning appearance in the film Stay Hungry. The event proved to be a great success, generating more money than Butler had anticipated and allowing him to complete production on the film.

Upon its release, Pumping Iron became a commercial and critical success. Arnold Schwarzenegger's popularity grew beyond that afforded him by "Stay Hungry;" Ferrigno was shortly thereafter cast as The Incredible Hulk, a role he would continue to play in a variety of mediums into the 2010s. Although bodybuilding had been, prior to the film's release, a subculture regarded by many as being on par with early 20th century freak shows, the film normalized the idea to the point that interest in bodybuilding began spreading into mainstream American culture. In the years following the film's release, hundreds of commercial gyms began appearing across the United States as demand rose for access to weightlifting materials.