Lord of the Flies (1963)

I'm sitting here with Lord of the Flies on Roku. I watched a twenty minute video first of director Peter Brooks talking about the making of the movie. It sounded surprisingly easy. His first big problem was getting the producer not to put in too much money. The studio kept raising the budget and wanted to punch up the story. They thought there should be girls in it and thought the kids just sitting around an island wasn't enough---they should be GOING somewhere. Like it's a really big island and they're trying to get to some other place on the island.

Brooks gave up on that producer. They got $300,000 from someone else to make the movie and spent half that money paying back the studio for that they had put into it so they could get the rights to the story back.

The $150 thousand they say the movie cost is equal to $1.25 million today, which is still a fortune for anything but a movie.

They filmed in Puerto Rico. Some of the kids' Moms came along and pitched in to take care of them. Other parents came to visit during the filming and they were put to work.

If it were me, I would be afraid of having a kid walk off and get lost or disappear into the ocean. I'd want a few lifeguards standing by. I saw a "documentary" about a photo shoot of swimsuit models in a remote location far from help and it had the photographer worried. He thought the models were terribly brave to agree to it.

The kid who played Simon said that when they filmed the scene of him being killed, the director made it very, very clear to the kids that they were to not actually stab or kill him. So the director did give some thought to safety issues.

There was a '70's movie called Bugsy Malone, a gangster musical performed entirely by children. It was filmed in England. Jodie Foster was in it and said she was terrified of the English kids. So Lord of the Flies was probably pretty accurate in how the kids were portrayed.

When they made another, Americanized Lord of the Flies in the 1990's--they made it about wealthy American military school kids on their way home from a field trip to Australia--a critic said it wasn't the same. The British are so civilized. Watching American kids spiral into savagery doesn't seem like nearly as big a deal, but he was wrong. Realistically, American kids would have behaved so much better.