Personae | People of Note
Charles Gaines, George Butler, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Cape Town, South Africa, 1975 after Mr. Olympia contest. (Automatic timer photo by George Butler.)
On assignment for Life to photograph a 1972 Mr. Universe Competition in Bagdad, Butler encountered the obscure sport of body building, and the personal charisma of the then reigning champion, Arnold Schwarzenegger. His experience there led to the conviction that, beyond the muscles, Schwarzenegger should be in movies.
Mr. Butler in the clean room photographing the Mars Exploration Rover, Spirit.
36 | Quarterly Winter 2009
himself to the photographer Enrico Natali and added photography to his writing skills. On assignment for Life to photograph a 1972 Mr. Universe Competition in Bagdad, Iraq, Butler encountered the obscure sport of body building, and the personal charisma of the then reigning champion, Arnold Schwarzenegger. His experience there led to the conviction that, beyond the muscles, Schwarzenegger should be in movies. It took three years to produce his first documentary based on Pumping Iron. The struggle to get funding for his first film project emphasizes the plight of the documentarian who explores the obscure and the unknown. The documentary Pumping Iron, however, was a huge commercial and critical success, catapulting Schwarzenegger into mainstream movies and transforming the place of the gym and the fitness industry in our culture. In an extensive Boston Globe article that appeared in the summer of 2003, Butler described a single week in his life that June. It was crammed with planning a trip to the rain forests of Africa’s Congo Basin for a documentary about the region’s lowland gorilla; this preceded an excursion from his family home in Holderness, New Hampshire, to Cape Canaveral, Florida, to film the first of two Mars Rover launches for the IMAX documentary, after which he was scheduled to begin filming for a documentary on the life of John Kerry, slated for release just before the 2004 presidential election. All this multi-tasking from a man who as a fourth former at Groton was labeled by his headmaster, Jack Crocker, as a lad with a “tropical (read, laid back) attitude” towards life on the Circle.