[News] Yorkie Inspired Benji Writer

[fasteddie]

Good story. Great to hear he stuck to his guns and didn't give in to the big bad corporate bosses.
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Joe Camp had just watched a TV clip of Lady and the Tramp, an animated Disney film with dogs talking, plotting and falling in love, when it occurred to him: What if I wrote a movie from a real-life dog's point of view?

That was more than 30 years ago, so a leading canine role wasn't the norm, although not unheard of - i.e. Lassie and Rin Tin Tin.

Camp stayed up late reading that night, while Benji, the family's Yorkshire terrier, idled in the background. He noticed Benji react to a siren down the street, to another dog barking next door.

Camp put down his book and ran around the floor on his hands and knees. He hovered in a corner and trembled. "Oh no!" he screamed, acting terrified.

He wanted to see what Benji would do. The dog's staring eyes said what his bark couldn't: "Whatever in the world is the matter with you?"

Early the next morning, Camp sat down at his typewriter. By dawn, he'd drafted the short story of some kids who get kidnapped and the dog that sees it go down.

He named the screenplay after his best friend and took it to movie studios. They told him it wouldn't sell, so Camp wound up producing Benji himself. It was released in a few markets in late 1974, qualifying the movie for Academy Award consideration. It opened in wide release in 1975. Sequels followed; the rest is history.

Which tends to repeat itself.

Benji is back.

This time, Camp says, Hollywood execs wanted his script for Benji: Off the Leash! But they insisted on adding a few "poop jokes" to tickle the children, some minor violence and sexual innuendo to titillate the parents. That stuff sells family films these days.

Camp refused. Benji would stay as wholesome as always. He found investors to bankroll the movie, which opens in 1,100 theaters today.

Working on a tight budget, Camp is promoting the film himself through preview screenings and traveling to churches and animal shelters. This week, Camp prepared for segments on Good Morning America and Entertainment Tonight.

But in an era of sultry music videos, high-tech action scenes and savvy animation, can a pop culture virgin like Benji still save the day?

* * *
To Camp, the dog is the lead character in any article about his movie. From a hotel room in Dallas, where he was promoting the film, Camp told how the original Benji lived in a shelter before a trainer rescued him, and how he searched nationwide for the current Benji. He wanted just the right pup: one with big brown eyes and an even bigger personality. There he was, in a small town in Mississippi.

But maybe the real story begins 59 years ago, when Camp was 6 and sitting in a theater in Little Rock, Ark. He cried as the end credits rolled for Song of the South, a Disney classic about a little boy and a wise old man who befriends him. From then on, Camp wanted to make movies, the kind that made people feel as good as he did that day.

Years later, he enrolled at the University of Mississippi, a school that didn't have a good filmmaking program. He planned to transfer to UCLA, until that college rejected his application. So Camp stayed in Mississippi, majoring in marketing and advertising. It was a big disappointment. But in time, his stay at Ole Miss paid off for Benji. The Lord, he says now, knew best.

God plays as big a role in the Benji story as anybody, in a behind-the-scenes sort of way.

As a young adult, Camp went to church because that's what good guys did. God didn't really "slap him in the face" until he was in his 30s and working for an ad agency. It's a long story. The short version begins with Camp and two friends writing scripts to break into TV comedy. A spiral of events involving a Southern Baptist church and Jerry Van Dyke, Dick's brother, eventually led to their first writing job: a script for a 1960s sitcom called That Girl. With each development, Camp began to see God in all that he did.

He even saw God after Hollywood snubbed the original Benji in 1968. Producers doubted that a real dog could act in a leading three-dimensional role with feelings and smarts. True, TV had had Lassie and Rin Tin Tin. But Camp would argue - likely to the chagrin of some fans - that they were sidekicks, that their stories came from the humans' point of view. "Your heart was really with the kid," he says.

Those advertising and marketing skills from college kicked in. Camp raised nearly $1-million from private investors to produce and market the film. He finished in 1973, did some test-market showings in 1974, put the film in limited release later that year and in wide release in the summer of 1975. The title song,Benji's Theme (I Feel Love) sung by Charlie Rich, earned an Oscar nomination.

Over the next dozen years, Benji starred in several TV specials and two more motion pictures, and he co-starred with Chevy Chase in Oh! Heavenly Dog. Then Camp's wife, Carolyn, had a stroke in 1988. The couple wanted to spend more time together and put Benji rights into a partnership agreement. The dog hadn't seen the big screen since.

When Carolyn Camp died in 1997, Camp's attention turned back to the canine star. Camp won a lengthy legal battle to regain sole rights to Benji and wrote a new script. This time, Benji is born in a puppy mill. He endears himself to a young boy, who raises the mutt despite his father's orders to let him die.

Again, Camp says, he went to Hollywood and negotiated with three film studios. Each wanted the script, but only if it could also control the final content. The studios wanted Benji to appeal to children used to hints of sex and violence. They wanted bathroom humor, or "poop jokes," as Camp calls them. Like, "pardon the language," he says, "farting."

That's what kids today want, he says one studio exec told him.

We asked for the names of these studios, but Camp wouldn't say. We called Disney and DreamWorks, two major producers of kids films, and asked what ingredients sell family movies these days. Public relations reps either didn't call back or declined to comment.

But Camp knew he couldn't sell out Benji. More than the film was at stake. In 2001, he remarried, adding three stepchildren to his family, two 11-year-olds and a 14-year-old. He and his wife, Kathleen, set strict rules to shield the kids from media pundits and "Britney Spears trash-wear." That meant no TV, only select movies and historically based miniseries on video, such as Roots and The Winds of War.

The couple goes to the theater but screens movies carefully. Sometimes not carefully enough, though. Camp says he let the kids see Shrek, for instance, but regretted it. The hints of sex and mature jokes made it inappropriate for kids, he says.

With that, he turned down Hollywood's demands for Benji. "I did a lot of praying," he says.

* * *
From heaven came Benji's financial angels, one of whom describes himself as a self-appointed "sheriff" of Shocco, Miss., and 67 years old, "Doggone it!"

His name is Jim Ritchie. He's a former IBM salesman who later owned a software consulting firm. Remember Ole Miss? Ritchie pledged Sigma Nu there, just like Camp. They're old frat buddies.

So is Sherman Muths, whose son by the same name, Ritchie and a third fraternity brother rallied potential investors. Many of them knew Camp from his days in college and from a short stint living in small-town Gulfport, Miss.

Camp met with about a dozen of them at a time, pitching Benji: Off the Leash! as an entertaining family movie. In all, Camp says, old frat brothers helped raise from 60 to 70 percent of the $11-million it took to produce and market the movie.

"I just think he's doing the right thing," Ritchie says by phone. The story is all about the principles kids should learn: love, hope and "the good guys win."

Sherman Muths III, 40, says he previewed Benji and it looked just right for his 7- and 4-year-old daughters. They even rented the old Benji movies.

With Camp's background and Benji success, investors should get their money back plus profit. "We're not expecting a flop by any means," Muths says. But this Benji, like the first, must overcome the odds. Camp spent about $5-million on advertising, small change compared with what big studios spend. He had to time the opening for the end of the summer or else be overshadowed by the season's flurry of blockbusters, such as Spider-Man 2 and I, Robot.

Can Benji do it again? Will he be a hit?

Camp answers cautiously: "I can only hope and surmise that that's part of God's plan."

http://www.sptimes.com/2004/08/20/Fl...or_Benji.shtml