Edward Edmond Smith was a Welsh film director and activist born in the Vale of Glamorgan in 1936. Despite many film credits to his name, he is still primarily known as the director of The Realm, where he bore the blunt of the blame for its woes, strange behavior of its crew, and the ziggurat accident. The supposed curse’s rational explanation has, by many skeptics, also been laid at his feet. The thrust of this hypothesis, if I can be bold enough as to sum them up in one sentence, is that not only did the oddness of the production itself cause many of the disasters, but the repercussions and trauma of having worked on the set of his strange production led to cast and crew leading more self-destructive lives after the filming than they otherwise might have. Their blacklisting in the industry, PTSD, and lack of de-conditioning from what amounted to a cult in the Peruvian desert all then contributed to lives that trended toward tragic endings.
Certainly, this can be said of Smith himself. Not only bearing the internal guilt, but the brunt of blame from outside sources, as well as his own mental health issues that caused the event to begin with and led to a too-brief institutionalization, should be considered contributing factors to his suicide in 2017.
Two months after they asked him to join the project and after he finished work on directing After Falling (1979), Smith read the shorter, rejiggered draft of The Realm. Producers and Alan had by then whittled Orenda’s opus into a simple children's tale whose plot was a painfully unoriginal rip-off of the Conan book series and The Hobbit. He was "intrigued" with what he read and accepted the position of directing the film as a "challenge". He reasoned in a 1980 interview that Dreamenders would be one of those rare films that "can take full advantage of today's special effects techniques" and would differ from his more realistic previous works in that, instead of having to research, he would have to make the movie entirely based on his imagination.
In later talks Smith would admit that the story itself had left him uninspired, but he was intrigued by the possibilities and challenge of working outside his normal wheelhouse. He saw it as an opportunity to apply his literary and classical cinema sensibilities to elevate a lower genre piece. He reworked the script into something intended as both a critique of and homage to Edwardian portal fantasy, the passing of Classic Hollywood, the avant-garde filmmakers of Europe and New Hollywood in the 1970s, and a not-so-subtle takedown of capitalism and institutional religion. Having never stooped to reading the original 300-page draft himself, he would have had no way of knowing that he was instinctively returning much of the original spirit to the “low” genre tale.
The footage itself was shot in an unconventional style featuring two different cinematographic approaches—an expressionistic, 70s horror-meets-neonoir for the technicolor Night, and an arthouse, almost monotone (a washed out gray that conveniently aged with yellow tones due to the use of 70s film stock) neorealism for the the Orion Empire, both on Kodak 16mm anamorphic.
The production process was a very expensive, harsh, and dangerous production process, that by the end would go down as "probably the most disastrous production in Hollywood history."1 Under Smith's direction, effects combined live-action, animation, performers in costumes, prosthetics, puppets, and animatronics.
The production was initially arranged to be shot entirely in a soundstage due to the original intention of making a children's movie full of felt puppets. However, as it went through multiple drafts and Smith’s cart blanche, the screenplay transformed into an avant-garde opus and a descent into human psychology. Smith became obsessed with "verisimilitude" and portraying the "powerlessness of being a child." Actors performed dangerous stunts during filming, due to Smith despising the idea of doubles as “disingenuous." The puppets, however, remained. Smith called them “the realest[sic] actors in the film."
It is said that during this time he began to come up with ideas for new scenes in his dreams, where he was visited by the creatures of the fantasy world and instructed deep truths. After a few weeks of this, Smith reported that his dreams had slowly taken on a sinister note, as in desperation, his dream-self had enslaved the fantasy world in order to better serve him and help him finish the film.
Smith described making Realm as "complicated" and "just so enormous". Special effects artist Steven Jackson stated in a 2009 interview that Smith hated working on the original film so much that in the middle of shooting, he took a vacation to the Caribbean which led to the special effects artists taking a three-week break from the project.2 When he returned, he had the idea to shoot “a scene” on location in Peru, once again ironically undoing budgetary restraints. He knew enough to make his request with Ambrose, not Goldman, and soon the crew was on their way—and when they arrived, intent on shooting the entirety of the film on location.
The crew in turns followed Smith's lead, went on brief strike because of his unreasonable demands, and finally sank in and enabled his rapid psychological decline. In some of the extant documentary footage, Smith has, after going a month over-schedule, what could be called a moment of clarity wherein he refers to the film as "an insane mess." His wife and script supervisor, Patricia Chambers, insists that he is mistaking his genius for messiness and begs him to continue "the quest." Whether this can be considered enabling, supportive, denial, or part of the collective hysteria of the entire crew by this point is a matter of debate.
Roger Ebert, "The Dreamender's Curse," on his blog, 2002
Cinemascope, 2009; "E.E. Smith: the Director Who Went Mad"