“It was a terrible movie”: the 1983 George Clooney performance nobody saw for 37 years
When is an actor’s feature-length debut not really an actor’s feature-length debut? If you’re George Clooney, it’s when it takes 37 years to release, by which time you’re almost 60 and a superstar.
Like so many others, a young Clooney entered Hollywood under the most inauspicious circumstances: by nabbing a couple of early roles in bargain-basement horror flicks. His first picture to land in cinemas was the 1984 horror comedy Return to Horror High, and he kept that prefix for his next outing.
Staying in the same genre and staying with the comedic angle, his sophomore movie to see the big screen was 1987’s Return of the Killer Tomatoes, which isn’t something that he looks back on with any particular fondness, which is fair enough, when it’s shite, and he only did it because he needed a job.
However, he shot a picture before both of those Z-list capers, but by the time anyone had the chance to see it, he was an A-lister with two Academy Award wins from eight nominations split across six categories, who spent his free time shilling coffee machines and rubbing shoulders with Hollywood’s high and mighty.
In what should have been his debut, Clooney, 22 at the time, made quite the trek. The Kentucky-born actor relocated to Central Europe, which is where the shit hit the fan. After the first day of principal photography, an executive producer vanished into the night, taking the production’s funding with him.
Fortunately, a local investor stepped in, and the cast and crew managed to drag it over the finish line. To an extent, since Clooney remained under the impression that it hadn’t seen the light of day. Anyone who thought Jay Kelly was his first onscreen teaming with Laura Dern was wrong, as he helpfully explained.
“It was Grizzly II,” Clooney clarified. “And it never came out.” It did come out, but not for another 37 years. In January 2020, the infamous Grizzly II was finally completed, with the shoddy bear-centric slasher, which also starred Charlie Sheen, John Rhys-Davies, and Oscar winner Louise Fletcher, arriving on home video that August.
“It was shot by a Hungarian crew in communist Budapest in 1984, and it was a terrible movie,” the Ocean’s star elaborated. “We get killed by the bear, but they ran out of money, and we got stuck in Budapest for a couple of months.” Not his fondest memory, then, but it was still the first time he’d ever been on a movie set, albeit in something that took almost 40 years to escape from the vault it was locked in.
Delays are commonplace in Hollywood, but even at that, Grizzly II wrapping production in 1983 and screening in front of an audience until 2020 is taking the piss, even if Clooney remained oblivious that it had even gotten that far.
