By YORAM BEN-AMI (BearManor Media; 2021)

This entertaining memoir offers further proof that even the lousiest movies have interesting histories.  Lousy is indeed the word for 1984’s SHEENA, a mega-budgeted Columbia Pictures backed take on the comic book character Sheena, a white girl raised by animals who somehow becomes the queen of the jungle.  The film, which the author admits “could not be made today.  Nor should it be made,” can be viewed as a forerunner of both the white-woman-in-Africa movie craze that overtook Hollywood in subsequent years (see OUT OF AFRICA, A WORLD APART, I DREAMED OF AFRICA, etc.) and the comic book movie aesthetic that has all-but devoured modern moviemaking.

The Israeli born Yoram Ben-Ami was given the unenviable task of producing this mess after his previous film, the Chuck Norris low budgeter LONE WOLF McQUADE (1983), posted a nice profit.  Obviously that wasn’t the case with SHEENA, which went over budget quickly and never came close to recovering its costs.  The production was bankrolled by Coca-Cola, which owned Columbia and was looking to cash out some frozen assets (i.e. profits made in a foreign country that said country won’t allow to be spent outside it) in Kenya.  Hence the production of SHEENA, a rare Hollywood movie that was filmed entirely in Africa.

The director was the late John Guillermin, who was known for his headstrong and uncompromising approach.  On SHEENA, though, he got his long-awaited comeuppance in the form of a personal tragedy that occurred midway through the shoot, after which, according to Ben-Ami, “I could see he would never be the same again.”

The other major obstacle facing the filmmakers was the treatment of the animal performers.  The copious zebras, monkeys and elephants seen in the film all had to be flown into Kenya from the US, a process every bit as fraught as it sounds, after which most of the critters were let loose in Africa (which Ben-Ami admits was a morally questionable action).  Of the late Tanya Roberts, who headlined the film, we get very little info outside the obvious: that she made for pleasant company and looked good.

Perhaps the most upsetting stage of the production was SHEENA’S eventual premiere, which, needless to say, wasn’t well received at all.  Ben-Ami consoles himself with the words “The critics had no way of knowing—nor should it have mattered to them—the immense challenges we had in bringing SHEENA to the screen.  But we knew.”  And now so do we.