by MATTHEW HAYS

"I have had the audience throw up, had them run out screaming, had 'em rip out seats, had 'em curse at me, even jump on me," L.Q. Jones tells me from his Los Angeles home. The seasoned character actor is describing audience response to his one-time feature as a director, A Boy and His Dog, the '75 film that has fermented into a cult sensation. But, he concludes, these audience reactions weren't so surprising: after all, he laughs, "this is not a quiet picture."

Jones, perhaps most famous for his iconic stint in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, is clearly savouring the chance to revisit the film 28 years after it first slipped into cinemas. And he has reason to celebrate: the New York-based arthouse movie distribution company First Run Pictures is releasing A Boy and His Dog in an excellent DVD edition, complete with commentary from the director and experts on the film.

And as a fan, it's as much fun to look back on the film. Based on sci-fi institution Harlan Ellison's novella of the same name, A Boy and His Dog features a baby faced, pre-Miami Vice Don Johnson, struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic world shortly after WWIV. Nuclear war has left the planet ravaged, a massive desert where not-so-merry bands of scavengers fight over food, water and women. (Yes, director George Miller has conceded that his Mad Max trilogy owes huge creative nods to A Boy and His Dog.)

From Brady to Blood

The film's central conceit - and it's a brilliant one - has Johnson's older, wiser buddy played by a dog. Blood, the character, was voiced by Tim McIntire, and played by Tiger (incidentally, the canine who also played the family pet on The Brady Bunch). Their relationship is loving but also born of necessity and survival: Johnson gets food for Tiger while Tiger sniffs out women for Johnson to have sex with.

Jones says he first became aware of Ellison's novella when a camera man dropped it off at Jones' office. "I got home late one night at about 2 a.m. I had to be up for another picture the next morning. But I started to read it. I read the first third and I thought, ‘What a shame. There's no way that he's going to be able to keep this up for the rest of the book. It's bound to fall on its face.' But then I read the whole thing through and I just sat there for ten minutes in hysterical laughter - he had pulled it off! I decided that was the picture I was going to do next."

Ellison had already been approached by two major studios, but they wanted to make Blood a talking dog (i.e. use animation to make his mouth move) and Ellison didn't like that one bit. The dog was meant to be communicating with the boy telepathically, and so when Jones approached him with every intention of leaving this key character point intact, Ellison was very pleased. The production did suffer as a result of Ellison's various tics, however. Though the writer agreed to pen the screenplay adaptation, he soon had a year-long fit of writer's block, leaving the adaptation process up to Jones.

"Do you know anything about Harlan?" Jones asks. "He's a nut. He's totally insane. But so are a whole buncha the rest of us. He once tried to throw a producer out of a window because the producer had changed one line of his script. Well it was a hideous line and the whole script should have been burned, but that didn't make any difference. So I decided, when A Boy and His Dog was done, that I would show it to him on my own, so when the fight broke out I'd be the only one who might get hurt. With that in mind, we set it up. After the credits rolled he ran back to me, and I thought, ‘Now the fight's gonna start!' But he simply said, ‘Now that was the book that I wrote!' He was very happy with it."

Canine chemistry

A big part of the success of A Boy and His Dog is undoubtedly Tiger, the talented mutt who plays the titular dog. "If you look at the picture," says Jones, "you'll see it's the only film in which the character played by a dog is the only human in it. The rest of the characters are animals. I used to talk to that dog on the set and I swear he understood the direction. I would talk to him and his trainer would be off having a read of the newspaper, but Tiger understood about 100 words. That dog was the most fantastic animal I'd ever run into, and I've worked with cats, dogs, elephants, llamas, all sorts of animals on sets. I tried to buy Tiger, so he could just retire, but he was very much in demand because of his talent, so even though I was offering tons of money, they wouldn't sell.

"When Jason Robards came on the set, he asked ‘What do you want me to do?' And I said, ‘Just say your lines and hit your marks like Tiger, and we'll make a star out of you!'" Not surprisingly, Tiger won the Patsy Award for best animal performance that year. (Jones claims there was even a campaign to get Tiger nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, one that ultimately proved unsuccessful.)

Jones says he was a bit puzzled by feminist critics who took the film to task for being misogynist. "I don't endorse what's happening in the story," he says. "But that's the way the story is. It's an ugly world we were depicting." And Jones has specific media memories of Montreal, where he visited for the release of a new cut of the cult oddity in '82. He recalls one woman TV talk-show host who berated him for an entire half-hour interview for what she saw as a lurid and filthy movie.

"After the show ended and the cameras were off, I thanked her. She couldn't have helped us sell the film better! Because she'd said how dirty the film was, people couldn't wait to see it in Montreal - we did very well there."

As for Jones, he's continued to act in various projects since Dog, but sadly, hasn't directed another film (though he has certainly considered, and is still considering, creating a sequel). "I've been offered 25 films since then. I haven't directed another picture. Once you've done A Boy and His Dog, everything else kinda pales."

A Boy and His Dog is now out on DVD

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