Tammy And The T-Rex (1994) Actually Teaches Us a Valuable Indie Film Lesson

Folks, I’ve been feeling pretty bona fide as of late. That’s because I’ve been traveling (not very) far and wide giving presentations!

You see, my friend Michael Williams asked me to give a presentation a couple weeks ago at the Magnolia Film Festival in Starkville, Mississippi. And my friend Alex Gibson asked me to give a presentation this week for the Alabama Filmmakers Co-Op monthly meeting in Huntsville.* I’m not really a multiple presentations kinda guy, so I figured I’d do the same one for each audience. (The crowds at both events were very engaged and inspiring, and I am thankful for these opportunities.)

The presentation is called The Production Value of Collaborative Screenwriting, and it focuses on ways to avoid writing a screenplay that’ll just collect dust on your hard drive because it would be way too expensive to produce on a realistic independent budget. When I was putting the presentation together, I knew I wanted to cover my personal experience with these pitfalls, because I’ve certainly been there. But I needed some real world examples to lean on as well.

And I knew it had to be Tammy And The T-Rex. Not because it’s a great film; on the contrary, it’s quite poor by most craft standards. But because it’s a film that exists at all.

The main thesis statement from my presentation—which is the sort of wisdom that many, many filmmakers will also tell you—is to not just “write what you know” but write what you have. In the case of my own recent feature film production, the main resource that we shaped the story around was a location that we wouldn’t have to pay for.**

In the case of Tammy And The T-Rex, their main resource was…a giant animatronic dinosaur. As the story goes, a Dutchman named Etka Sarlui had come into temporary possession of this dinosaur that he had to ship to an amusement park in Texas. So he figures, hey, I’ve got this animatronic T-Rex sitting in a warehouse, why don’t I make a movie with it? This is, of course, the sort of creative inspiration that leads to greatness.

So he calls up Stewart Raffill, the director who made the notorious E.T. ripoff Mac and Me, and he says “Hey, I have this T-Rex and almost a million dollars, can we start shooting in three weeks?” Madman that he is, Raffill says yes. He writes a script in six days and spends the other two weeks tracking down the cast, crew, locations, permits, everything. And then he goes and shoots the damn film.

It should be noted that Raffill had a bit of dumb luck on his side in the casting department. Somehow, he roped in Denise Richards and Paul Walker when both young actors were doing little more than guest appearances on TV shows. He pulled in a pretty decent supporting cast too, including the guy who plays Isaac in Children Of The Corn, the guy who plays Bernie in Weekend At Bernie’s, the lady who plays Napoleon’s mom in Napoleon Dynamite, and legendary character actor George “Buck” Flower, who appears in six John Carpenter films.***

But Raffill had a built-in production advantage of his own: He spent many years as an animal trainer in Hollywood. He even ran his own business providing wild animals for films and TV shows.**** So if you watch the film and wonder how they had access to a lion and a jaguar with so little time and money, there’s your answer.

Did Raffill and Sarlui have a smash hit on their hands when all was said and done? Well…no. It was a box office bomb—but that was mainly Sarlui’s own fault. As Raffill said in a recent interview, he knew that the film was unlikely to be a masterpiece, so he leaned into the camp and the craziness. But Sarlui hated it. He’d wanted to make a family film all along, so he had the film recut to remove the violence and the crude humor. As a result, Raffill “walked away.” He never even watched the theatrical cut.

But wait! This story has a happy ending.

Just a few years ago, some savvy individual tracked down a reel of the film’s original cut in Italy, and Tammy And The T-Rex was restored in all its gory glory. It played at Fantastic Fest in 2019 and then received a fancy blu-ray release from Vinegar Syndrome, and now it lives on as a cult classic.

And to think, it all started with a weird prop and an insane idea. If that doesn’t inspire you to create something, reader, I don’t know what will.

*He actually asked me to do this three years ago, because we go back like that. But, you know, coronavirus.

**Don’t Die coming soon!

***Flower’s most memorable Carpenter moment, in my opinion, is one of the climactic scenes in They Live. “What’s the threat? We all sell out every day. Might as well be on the winning team!”

****As Joe Bob Briggs notes in The Last Drive-In’s presentation of this film on Shudder (which is where I got most of the information I shared today), Raffill worked with lions, tigers, bears, elephants, chimpanzees, snakes, leopards, panthers, crocodiles, wolves, and jaguars, among others. The man is fearless.

Tammy And The T-Rex is now streaming on Shudder, Peacock, AMC+, and Tubi, and it is available to rent elsewhere.