Trivia / Grizzly

• Follow the Leader: There is little in this movie not directly lifted from Jaws. A comparison can be found here.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Seeing as Grizzly II was never even finished (the executive producer disappeared with all of the funding before they could film most of the special effects scenes), bootleg copies are the only way you'll ever see it... that is, until the film was finally Saved from Development Hell in 2020.
• Never Work with Children or Animals: The filmmakers used a tame Kodiak bear named Teddy for shots of the Grizzly in action. By all accounts, Teddy was remarkably well-behaved to the point that he could not be induced to engage in menacing behavior by the filmmakers and maybe at times he looked too gosh-darn cute to appear like a threat. Teddy was induced to rear up and snap his jaws by feeding him marshmallows, but could not be made to roar, swipe or otherwise menace the actors. This forced the filmmakers to use creature effects, including a stuntman in a bear suit, for the actual attack scenes and to dub in bear noises made by the crew.
• Troubled Production: Grizzly II took a staggering thirty-seven years to see the light of day, as documented in this article by Brian Raftery for The Ringer.
  • For starters, the first Grizzly was subject to Hollywood Accounting by producer Edward L. Montoro, who insisted that it failed to turn a profit even as it made $30 million on a $750,000 budget, forcing screenwriters David Sheldon and Harvey Flaxman to sue him to collect their share of the royalties. Evidently, they eventually put it behind them, as Montoro asked Sheldon to write a sequel, with Sheldon agreeing on the condition that he also be allowed to direct. Montoro agreed, and Sheldon and his wife Joan McCall got to work on the script.
  • Montoro's reputation for embezzlement and general sleaze left investors leery of supporting Grizzly II. With Montoro unreliable, Sheldon and McCall turned to Joseph Ford Proctor, who had recently worked with Jerry Lewis — and didn't mention the fact that he was a serial fraudster who had scammed Lewis out of a million dollars. Another producer, the Hungarian-American Suzanne Nagy, pushed for the film to be shot in Hungary as both a cost-saving measure and in order to boost her native country's film industry. As the film entered pre-production, the budget and scale of the film swelled.
  • At some point, Proctor went behind Sheldon's back to install the Hungarian commercial filmmaker André Szöts as director despite his lack of experience working on feature films. Sheldon didn't find out until the Grizzly II team arrived in Hungary without him, and was not happy when he did — nor, for that matter, was Nagy. What's more, Szöts largely ignored Sheldon's script.
  • The spot that Nagy had picked out to shoot the film turned out to be the site of a Red Army training camp, and the Soviets were not interested in playing ball with a film production. The concert scenes especially, featuring bands like Toto Coelo and Nazareth, were a point of contention, as large gatherings like that were regarded with great suspicion by the authorities, especially when they were staged by people from the West. Nagy won over the Soviet general in charge by promising that the whole affair would be brief and self-contained. The audience of about 40-50,000 people was more than double what they anticipated, but it was fairly well-behaved, largely due to the threat of the Secret Police hanging over everything.
  • The morning after the concert scenes were shot, however, Nagy learned from her husband that Proctor had delivered some bad news: there wasn't enough money left to finish the shoot. An American surgeon, of all people, arrived to bail out the production with half a million dollars, not enough to finish it but enough to keep it going for now. Unfortunately, when Nagy went through the paperwork Proctor had left behind, she found a mountain of unpaid debts, and while she tried to keep this from the cast and crew, rumors still swirled and hurt morale on set. While Proctor denies it, virtually everybody involved agrees that Proctor had been embezzling money from the production, and skipped town when the gig was up. (He would later serve two separate prison sentences in Thailand and the US for unrelated scams.) What's more, the Hungarian crew was resistant to taking orders from Nagy, while they also got into fights with the Western special effects crew.
  • Production wrapped in fall of 1983, with all scenes shot except most of the special effects shots of the bear — rather important to have on a killer bear film titled Grizzly II, which was unreleaseable without them. It was hoped that these scenes would be shot in the US, but Hungarian officials, frustrated by the debts that Proctor had wrapped up, seized the animatronic bears as collateral. The production was told, without evidence, that the bears were destroyed in a warehouse fire, which took with it any chance of finishing the bear scenes for a production that could not afford to replace them. A rough cut screened for producer Arnold Kopelson, who could've provided the remaining funds to finish the film, was a disaster, as Kopelson hated what he saw of the film and threw the producers out of his house. Afterwards, Nagy spent the rest of The '80s trying to finish the film to no avail, and still occasionally spoke about it in the years after.
  • In 2007, the workprint of Grizzly II was leaked and became a popular bootleg, rekindling interest in a famous lost film. In 2018, Nagy decided to finally finish the film, using Stock Footage of grizzly bears in place of the lack of special effects, and it premiered digitally in 2021.
• What Could Have Been: According to a Double Toasted interview with Brad Jones, sometime around the release of The Disaster Artist, Grizzly II producer Suzanne Nagy^note who had initially contacted Jones several years earlier in a clash over Jones’ Cinema Snob review of the leaked workprint; the two later mended fences had several phone conversations with him about writing a Mockumentary-style adaptation of Grizzly II’s Troubled Production. Nagy’s vision apparently included some surrealist elements, like the bear doing interviews. Jones was interested, but eventually the conversations ceased, presumably as Nagy redirected her attention to finally finishing Grizzly II itself.

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