THE FLINTSTONES

With a spot-on cast, a smart script and eye-watering attention to detail, 1994’s The Flintstones might be the most painstakingly assembled live-action animation adap ever made. As the cave-family comedy turns 30, director Brian Levant tells Buff how he yabba dabba did it.

I was terrified, but at the same time, tremendously confident,’ says Hanna-Barbera megafan Brian Levant on getting the dream opportunity to direct 1994’s live-action The Flintstones. Released a year after Steven Spielrock’s – erm, we mean Spielberg’s – Jurassic Park, this long-indevelopment adaptation of animation’s modern Stone Age family caught audiences at the height of their dino obsessions. At the helm was Beethoven filmmaker Levant, a die-hard Flintstones obsessive who knew exactly how to bring Bedrock to life. ‘I wasn’t trying to reinvent the Stone Age,’ he tells Buff. ‘I wanted to be true to that original vision.’

True he was. In retrospect, Levant’s film is a marvel of practical effects, smart sitcom-y gags and a clear love of the source material, but getting to that point wasn’t easy.

Hollywood had been trying to bring The Flintstones to cinemas for years, first with Die Hard producer Joel Silver and ending with Spielberg’s production company Amblin. However, finding the right creative partnership was tricky, with Ron Howard and Ivan Reitman snubbing offers to direct and multiple writers taking failed cracks at a story.

The project finally found a new lease of life when producer Spielberg spotted his ideal Fred Flintstone in his Always star John Goodman, and, under the guidance of former Happy Days writer Levant, a group of sitcom scribes were invited to retool Amblin’s existing screenplays. The end result was a workplace mix-up that saw Fred and wife Wilma (Elizabeth Perkins) have their friendship with neighbours Barney (Rick Moranis) and Betty Rubble (Rosie O’Donnell) put to the test when a promotion gets them embroiled in a shady plot from quarry boss Cliff Vandercave (Kyle MacLachlan) and his sexy secretary, Miss Sharon Stone (Halle Berry).

‘We were kind of hamstrung because we had to use a lot of the storyline of the failed script,’ says Levant of the narrative retooling challenges that ultimately earned his movie its biggest criticisms. ‘If I was starting from scratch, I wouldn’t have done a story about what is, in essence, corporate malfeasance,’ he laughs, ‘but we could hang the characters on that story and it would’ve taken us longer if we’d started from scratch.’

While his TV writer team gave The Flintstones strong comedy chops, it was the production design where things really excelled. Shot in just 55 days, Levant’s crew, led by production designer William Sandell, built a sprawling, real-life Bedrock at California’s Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park that featured actual foam-stone houses, workable rock-based props, a fleet of drivable foot-powered cars and even its own fast-food joint, Rock Donalds.

‘To take virtually everything you’ve ever learned about everything and translate that into Flintstones terms was a tremendous creative undertaking and what I’m most proud of,’ smiles Levant. ‘I put my stamp on every one of those 6,000 props and wardrobe [items]. We got really good at figuring out how to translate things into bone, stone and skin.’

The production’s hard work was put to the ultimate test when The Flintstones creators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera visited Levant’s set. As he picked them up in Barney’s Loggin Continental pencil-tip car, Levant was fully expecting them to be disappointed with what they found. ‘They were very dour,’ he recalls, ‘but when they saw the scale of the project and their vision brought to life in 3D and constructed out of foam and paint, they soon started to have these old-married-couple looks and their delight grew. Finally, Joe turned to me and said, “Never in my life did I expect to see anything like that,”’ smiles Levant. ‘I told him we were just getting started – and we were.’

Despite critics attacking its story, audience familiarity helped make The Flintstones a huge financial success with a global box-office haul of over $340 million. As a result, Amblin quickly wanted more. ‘They wanted to do the same thing with The Flintstones that they did with Back to the Future and shoot [two sequels] back-toback,’ reveals the director. However, Goodman, who already had conflicted feelings about being forever linked to such an iconic character, had other ideas. ‘He made an appointment with Spielberg and said, “Please don’t make me do any more of these,”’ says the director.

While Levant returned for 2000 prequel The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas with a brand-new cast, recapturing the magic of the original was hard. ‘The box-office [numbers] almost became a negative for me,’ he says candidly. ‘It was kind of overwhelming personally and kind of hurt me because I thought, “How do you ever top this?” And I didn’t.’

Still, audience fondness for his original has endured: ‘It still has a place in people’s hearts and tickles their imagination,’ smiles Levant. ‘Hanna and Barbera created this amazing world where man and beast lived in harmony and your biggest problem was trying to knock down all the bowling pins – and we knocked down all the bowling pins in this movie.’

THE FLINTSTONES IS AVAILABLE ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DIGITAL HD, AND IS CURRENTLY STREAMING ON SKY AND NOW.