A New Breed of Benji Movie

By PHILIP WUNTCH  
Movie Critic

Joe Camp calls the upcoming Benji Off the Leash! a "new breed of Benji movie, no pun intended."

Although quick to say that it's "filled with laughs and good spirits," the producer/director/screenwriter feels that its themes are "more topical and contemporary" than those of previous Benji films.

"It tells of the link between animal abuse and human abuse," he says, gently but firmly rubbing the three-year-old mutt Benji, who looks at him trustingly. "The dog leads people to take a stand on serious issues."

Mr. Camp now lives in Valley Center, Ca., a community north of San Diego with his second wife, attorney and Benji collaborator Kathleen Wolff and her three children. Other members of the household include Benji and Shaggy, both of whom star in Benji Off the Leash!, and an assortment of cats, birds and goats.

"Our house is a zoo, and I love it. But I still consider Dallas my home," he says. "I lived here for 28 years. My oldest sons grew up here. We made the first Benji movie in McKinney 30 years ago."

Touring to promote the new film, which opens Friday, he looks tired but happy. He also seems mellow, an adjective seldom used by those who worked with him in Dallas. But his experiences during the 17 years between Benji Off the Leash! and 1987's Benji the Hunted make it easy to understand why he's attracted to serious themes in the new movie.

Those who attended the Dallas world premiere of Benji the Hunted remember his emotion-packed salute to first wife and frequent collaborator Carolyn Camp. After a stroke and subsequent complications, she died in 1997.

"After losing Carolyn, I never seriously considered suicide, but I thought about it and could see how people could get to that level," he says. "At first, I felt that to move forward would be to abandon Carolyn."

But move forward, he did. Always devout in his faith, he found solace in the works of Christian songwriter Steven Curtis Chapman, philosopher and author C.S. Lewis and retired surgeon Bernie S. Siegel.

"C.S. Lewis married late in life and then lost his wife to cancer, and his Observance of Grief helped a great deal. And Bernie Siegel's Love, Medicine and Miracles dealt with how attitude affects healing.

"In the long run, I've been very lucky. I've found two wonderful women who were w illing to put up with me. There's always a plan, and God lets me go my own way until I realize that's not the way he wants me to go. Then he slaps me around and says, 'Camp, you're not listening to me!'"

At times he yielded to a sense of abandonment but in retrospect feels certain of God's plan.

"I wanted to so badly to go to UCLA film school, but I was turned down. I felt like God had abandoned me. But had I gone to UCLA, I would probably have wound up in the studio mainstream, and Benji would never have been made."

He spent a year pitching Benji Off the Leash! to major Hollywood studios. Execs who were seriously interested in the film offered financial plums - but at too large a price.

"They wanted total control. They would have insisted on adding potty humor, sexual innuendo and violence, all in the name of giving kids what they want to see. I've always disapproved of some of the content of so-called family movies. They're filled with jokes about bodily functions and sexual references. I know full well that kids make jokes in private. I did. But that's where those jokes should be, not in a big public movie theater.

"But the studio negotiations came shortly after 9-11, when nobody wanted to invest in anything as risky as a family movie. We really needed money to make this movie, and the studios were willing to throw money at us. I did a lot of praying. I was certain we couldn't raise money independently. And then, within a period of two weeks, all our independent financing fell into place. I made the movie the way I wanted to. And if it's successful, it will send a message back to Hollywood."

Thirty years ago, the news that the original Benji came from an animal shelter resulted in one million rescues from shelters, according to the American Humane Association. Mr. Camp spent over three months searching for the canine star of his new film. He found her (yes, Benji is a girl!) in a Mississippi animal shelter. He also discovered an appealing mutt in a shelter in south Chicago. He and his family named the dog Shaggy and wrote the role of Benj i's buddy Lizard Tongue for Shaggy, whose movable facial attachment is long like a lizard's.

"After we found Benji and Shaggy, the story just came about naturally," he says. "We could tell that Benji had a fear of being abandoned. We wondered what had happened to her and we invented the story."

Sounds great, but did directing two canines prove difficult?

"Let's just say that Shaggy proved to be high-maintenance. Benji is more focused and took direction," the discreet filmmaker says.

The new film continues the tradition of other Benji movies in providing a dog-eyed view of the plot.

"In Benji movies, your heart and soul is with the dog," Mr. Camp says. "In other movies, your involvement is with the kids who become attached to the dog. I just want to make a movie that appeals to someone the way the early Disney movies appealed to me. And I hope to make this place a little better than when I found it."