How “Pumping Iron” influenced the bodybuilding industry
How “Pumping Iron” influenced the bodybuilding industry
This month for our “Econ Extra Credit” segment, we’re watching the 1977 documentary “Pumping Iron,” featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno. The film did a lot to pull the sport of bodybuilding into the mainstream. But how much of it was real?
At first, the documentary wasn’t catching the attention of investors. “All the investors always said, ‘Look, the training is terrific, what they’re doing is terrific,’ and all this. ‘But how much can we look at this footage of them doing squats and chin-ups and situps and all this? It’s boring,’” Schwarzenegger said in a 2002 documentary on the making of “Pumping Iron.”
Drama and conflict would definitely attract attention. But the marketing decision to pump up those qualities in the tale not only helped the film’s success, it also helped set the narrative for the sport, according to Oliver Lee Bateman, a historian and journalist.
The storyline is simple — good versus evil, underdog versus long-standing champion. “This is just the framework through which viewers have become accustomed to seeing bodybuilding, like it has to be done through this kind of narrative,” Bateman said in an interview with Marketplace’s David Brancaccio.
The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
David Brancaccio: You know, it’s not just a documentary film that tells us about this sport, it actually is in dialogue with the bodybuilding industry itself. It changed the trajectory, I think, of powerlifting.
Oliver Lee Bateman: Yeah, that’s correct. Before “Pumping Iron,” bodybuilding was an activity that was growing certainly slowly, but it was very much a subcultural activity. And it was very much an activity with a lot of negative connotations. You know, bodybuilding magazines were the sort of thing you might keep under your bed, you know. When if you were involved in bodybuilding, that was something that you, you might spend hours on it, but you’d keep it to yourself. But “Pumping Iron,” by telling the story that it did in the way that it did, it really, really reshaped the discourse on bodybuilding nationally.
Brancaccio: I mean, some of this is the raw charisma of Arnold himself. I mean, he has a special quality, and it just, you know, lights up the screen.
Bateman: Yeah. The goal initially was, “We’re going to film these bodybuilders doing bodybuilding stuff. And we’re also going to have this, you know, slender fellow.” And some of the listeners might remember him from the “Harold and Maude” movie, Bud Cort, in the film, you know, doing exercises with the athletes, and that would sort of be the initial narrative arc or something like that. And as this was coming together, it just didn’t work. You had all this footage, Cort didn’t feel that his participation added anything. And they had to kind of, on the fly, figure out how to reshape — and this is where the marketing aspect of this comes in — to reshape all this footage into something that was meaningful. And so what they did was they decided to center on the conflict between Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is obviously the most charismatic thing in the film. His charisma is the most, like, lasting legacy of the film. And he participated in it, as he talked about in a “making of” documentary 25 years later, by emphasizing his own sort of villainous or egotistical qualities, as the upstart, you know, future Incredible Hulk actor, Lou Ferrigno — you know, the tallest guy in the movie, partially deaf, dealing with a lot of issues — is portrayed as this kind of would-be up-and-coming, underfunded, urban Arnold-killer. And that was going to be the arc of the film. And that’s how they very carefully recut everything.
Brancaccio: And it’s funny. It’s like, I want to ask you, well, can you call this a documentary? But the other voice in my head is saying, “Have you seen reality television, you know, currently?” They build fake narratives with fancy editing, and it’s now become de rigueur.
Bateman: Yeah, this is in many ways the template for a lot of our more carefully edited reality television shows from the ’90s on. From lots of the documentaries we watch, I mean, some are just the sort of camera eye things where they point the camera at the subject and go. But others, you know, in fact, some of the most entertaining ones that we watch, they’re very carefully constructed to present a particular story that might not be the story as seen by the participants. And that was certainly the case here.
Brancaccio: So this film, “Pumping Iron,” pumps up the rivalries, and it’s successful. And you think this film helped take bodybuilding from some sort of narrow subculture into the mainstream?
Bateman: Without this film in its role in launching the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, as he would over the next, like, 10 years he would become an unavoidable presence in Hollywood, without that part of it and then, without the sort of engaging way that it presents bodybuilding, there is no bodybuilding throughout the ’80s. Like, there is no fitness explosion throughout the ’80s without the combination of sort of Jane Fonda aerobics and Arnold Schwarzenegger bodybuilding. And the understanding of bodybuilding through the ’80s as this kind of sport and as it’s marketed to the public through the ’80s is always done in this sort of heroes versus villains. The marketing of bodybuilding’s always done in this way because without it, it’s just not that interesting in and of itself. It’s a lot of, it would be a lot of just hours upon hours of performing repetitions of exercise.
Brancaccio: And as a younger guy, you had seen this film? It made a difference in your life?
Bateman: Yes. I first watched it on a VHS tape copy sometime in the early- to mid-’90s with my older brother and father and sort of took it hook, line and sinker that this was the story. And I just took this as, like, a face-value depiction of the bodybuilding world. And then a few years later, I think the DVD release of this comes out. And it contains this, like, hour-and-a-half documentary on the making of “Pumping Iron,” which is to me more interesting than “Pumping Iron” itself because it’s about the marketing of “Pumping Iron.” And the role that Schwarzenegger, in working with director George Butler, had in shaping his character and the other characters on the screen. So initially, as the VHS tape, it had this impact on me. I mean, I wanted to be, at that sort of age, some kind of muscleman or something growing up. It just seemed, like, cool based on the film. But by the time I watched it again, on its 25th anniversary, I was just more interested in the marketing aspects of it. I was like, “Wow, this is the only way you can do this.” You know, in all the work I’ve done in the fitness industry sense, it’s all been informed by that fact that it has to be formulated or marketed in a certain way. Or nobody’s going to care about this thing.
Brancaccio: Good versus evil, good guys versus bad guys, very strong, charismatic characters, that kind of stuff.
Bateman: Yeah, absolutely right. And you know, they’ve made, and you can watch them on Netflix, an acquaintance of mine, Vlad Yudin, has made these “Generation Iron” documentaries that depict latter-day rivalries, you know, Phil Heath and Kai Greene, two more recent bodybuilders, in exactly the same relationship. You know, Phil Heath, the champion, Kai Greene chasing him. And this is just the framework through which viewers have become accustomed to seeing bodybuilding, like it has to be done through this kind of narrative. Or, you know, if you’ve ever watched one of these shows, if you’ve ever gone to one of these shows, as I have and sat up front and watched the posing, there’s no drama beyond that. You know, there’s this kind of elaborate posing and elaborate preparation by the competitors. But there wouldn’t be a huge or even, like, moderate public interest in this spectacle without narrative.
Brancaccio: So in the film, a lot of the competition plays out at these competitions. There’s a big one in the film in South Africa. Those live competitions at those venues are a little less important in this world of social media?
Bateman: Certainly, in the past 10 years as the fitness influence community has grown, as people have been able to tell stories about themselves as bodybuilders or you know, muscle people, without these competitions, without these muscle pageants, they definitely have diminished in importance. And certainly, the COVID and the pandemic events of the past three years, which forced a lot of disruptions and rescheduling and so on, didn’t do any favors either. But the Olympia that’s depicted in this film, the 1975 Mr. Olympia where Schwarzenegger wins his sixth overall Mr. Olympia, that is a far more important event culturally than any recent Olympia. Like you could, I mean that one just happened right now and you’d be hard-pressed to go out into the general public and ask anyone who won it or even anyone who was in it.
Brancaccio: Yeah. And these days, if you’re particularly sculpted, that’s your thing, you could post on Instagram and the world would see you that way.
Bateman: Absolutely. I mean, some of the names that people are able to conjure up are these folks who have 7 and 8 million follower accounts on Instagram. In a way, it shows sort of like that social media has kind of democratized the production of this sort of thing. Like you can be a character like Schwarzenegger is in the film just by filming yourself with a cellphone camera and some filters.
Brancaccio: So Oliver, do you still lift?
Bateman: Oh yeah. Yeah, my basement is just a complete gym setup. So I’m talking to you here in the office, and right outside the office, I can pump iron.
Brancaccio: So clearly not one of those people who ran out and bought weights at the beginning of the pandemic for the first time. That was not you.
Bateman: No, I was loaded down.
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