Hugh Hudson and Robert Towne’s innovation with the Tarzan story was to treat it with absolute seriousness and assiduously avoid any of the pulp adventure aspect of the Edgar Rice Burroughs stories and especially the Johnny Weissmuller films. The child John Clayton adopted by the apes – an example of Rick Baker’s superb ape suits Vazak (only for the script for Greystoke to be nominated for an Oscar). Robert Towne was not happy with Hugh Hudson’s approach and had his name taken off the script, instead substituting the name of his dog P.H. Greystoke remained an on/off project for several years, before being inherited by Hugh Hudson, flush from the runaway success of Chariots of Fire (1981), which won the 1981 Academy Award for Best Picture and had Hudson nominated as Best Director. For a time, Towne touted Greystoke as his own directorial debut but had the project taken away from him after the flop of his first directorial effort Personal Best (1981). The project was originally conceived in 1975 by screenwriter Robert Towne, who was riding on the success of his award-winning screenplays for The Last Detail (1973), Chinatown (1974) and Shampoo (1975). Of all these reconstructions of the Tarzan myth, the most fascinating was Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes here. Tarzan did undergo a makeover in the 1980s and beyond – with various new directions sought such as the softcore Tarzan the Ape Man (1981) in resurrecting Tarzan as a long-haired eco-warrior in the tv series’ Tarzan (1991-2) and Tarzan (2003) in much more fantastical adventures – Tarzan: The Epic Adventures (1995-6) and as a Disney cartoon with Tarzan amid talking animals in Tarzan (1999). The classic Tarzan film wound its way to an end in the mid-1960s, the period after which the films’ mythic version of colonial Africa started to become outmoded and the public wearied of such black-and-white heroes. Edgar Rice Burroughs published twenty-three further Tarzan books but the wider public fascination with Tarzan began in the movies, starting with Elmo Lincoln’s silent essayal in Tarzan of the Apes (1918) and reaching its height with Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) starring Johnny Weissmuller, the first of a long-running series where the role passed through the hands of various athletes. With it, Burroughs created one of the great pulp characters of the 20th Century. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novel Tarzan of the Apes (1912) was first published in All-Star magazine and then in book form in 1914.
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