George Butler/Pumping Iron

Off Topic
1

I just wanted to share my awesome experience from last night:

The University organization which handles the Conference on World Affairs had a guest speaker and dinner last night with a guest speaker who was none other than George Butler, the man who filmed Pumping Iron. Some friends and I arrived early and got a table right up in the front, and since there was ONE seat left at our table, Mr. Butler had dinner with us as well before he spoke to the 120 people in attendance. During his presentation, he talked about numerous things, mostly Arnold as the two of them are very good friends. It was truly an entertaining and VERY inspiring evening hearing all of the awesome things that they were able to accomplish, and to hear him talk about how passionate Arnold was with his training and in his ‘life plan’ which I must admit was rediculously far fetched, and which he has carried out to a T thus far. Mr. Butler also spoke about his documentary on John Kerry from last year, and his newest endeavor which involved Disney and NASA, sending IMAX cameras to Mars to get pictures and movies of what happens to be the only mountain in the galaxy which is probably even close in size to that of Arnold’s ego, Olympus Mans.

I left the presentation truly enriched with inspiration.

2

Wish i was there to hear him. Any specific stories you could tell here?

3

Cool. I have the Pumping Iron DVD and book. They’re great fun.

4

nothing really specific I can say without totally botching what he said, although he did have a funny little story about a museum in California:

he was saying how they tried to do an exhibition at the Getty (spelling?) museum in California during the filming of pumping iron to help raise funds and how he (Butler) had all these contacts and everyone he approached to get into it had turned him and Arnold down. Well, the exhibition bodybuilding show never happened there.

Apparently Butler had recently met some bigwig dude from the Museum’s board of directors and he was saying how honored that the museum would be if Butler and Arnold showed up at one of the museum’s events, because even though they have tried to contact Arnold over 30 seperate times, he’s never once accepted an invite. (gee, I wonder why?)