In October, the city of McKinney observed the golden anniversary of its most famous movie star: Benji, the canine hero of the eponymous 1974 film by Joe Camp. The Oct. 19 celebration was as modestly effective as its inspiration, with pet rescue operations set up in the city’s downtown square and at a local animal shelter.
Benji screened in the 435-seat McKinney Performing Arts Center Courtroom Theater. Camp’s skill at manipulating audiences was audibly reaffirmed throughout the movie’s 87-minute running time. Adults who saw Benji during its original run joined viewers young enough to be their grandchildren. The crowd chuckled appreciatively at Benji’s resourcefulness. They exclaimed “Awwwwww!” as he won the heart of his terrier girlfriend Tiffany in a doggy-dating montage. They cheered as he outsmarted the kidnappers who abducted the adorable kids (Allen Fiuzat and Cynthia Smith) who wanted to adopt him. (Spoiler Alert: they adopt him.)
Benji was shot in McKinney with additional filming in Dallas and Denton. A bona fide sleeper hit, it earned more than 60 times its $500,000 budget to become the ninth biggest American box-office grosser of the year. The film launched North Texas down a path toward becoming a production hub, and helped Camp’s Mulberry Square Productions build a mini-empire of animal-themed films, TV specials, and series that briefly challenged the Walt Disney Company’s stranglehold on the “family entertainment” market.
Benji’s triumph was a vindication for Camp, a one-time advertising executive who wrote the original treatment for the script in longhand; the story came to him so fast that his hunt-and-peck typing couldn’t keep up. When Camp couldn’t convince any Hollywood studio to finance it, he raised the budget privately with his production partner, cinematographer James Nicodemus, co-founder of Mulberry Square.
There’s nothing edgy about Benji, nor was there meant to be. But there’s no denying the power of the filmmaking in Camp’s debut, a virtuoso POV flex that keeps the camera two feet off the ground to mimic the hero’s point-of-view. This was no easy feat in 1973, the year Benji was made. The movie was shot with bulky 35mm film cameras that had to appear to soar up and down steep stairs, float over rooftops, race through alleyways and grassy fields, and make humans tower like giants. Any film production teacher wanting to demonstrate how to tell a story with shots rather than dialogue would be advised to show Benji to students without context and watch them become mesmerized by the film’s opening half-hour, which follows Benji around town, establishing the local geography and introducing characters who’ll play key parts in the kidnapping story.
The power of editing has rarely been displayed more starkly. You quickly grasp the animal-movie grammar Camp deploys: slight head tilt? Benji is listening. Extreme head tilt? Benji notices something important. You believe humans can carry on full conversations with him. When actor Edgar Buchanan’s character, Bill, tells Benji he’s thinking of shutting down his diner, Benji barks once, and Bill says, “I don’t know when.”
Fifty years on, the movie has lost none of its power to engage audiences. There were audible sobs during the sentimental scenes, gasps when one of the kidnappers kicked Tiffany (another spoiler: Tiffany recovers fully and moves in with Benji) and applause as the end credits rolled over a reprise of the Oscar-nominated theme song “I Feel Love” (performed by Charlie Rich).
“Watching the movie again with an audience, I was touched by how much it means to so many other people,” said Visit McKinney Communications and Media Specialist Beth Shumate, a co-organizer of the event who first proposed it as a capstone project she’d submitted to earn her Certified Tourism Executive (CTE) certification.
Shumate, who has worked for the city’s convention bureau for 17 years, has seen many examples of how much Benji meant to McKinney. The “haunted house” last year was restored at 1104 S. Tennessee Street where the kidnappers hide out. A statue of Benji was unveiled in February 2023 at the intersection of Tennessee and Virginia streets following the annual Krewe of Barkus Mardi Gras parade of dogs in costume. Sculptor Susan Norris modeled the Benji statue from photos of the first Benji, whose real name was Higgins. Camp helped by offering feedback. The dog was an ace performer raised by legendary Hollywood trainer Frank Inn. (The Chaplinesque pooch did seven seasons on the sitcom Petticoat Junction before jumping to features, and shares multiple scenes with Junction’s Buchanan, as well as with actress Francis Bavier, aka Aunt Bea on The Andy Griffith Show.)
The emotional and familiar connections to Camp’s creation were deep, multigenerational, and national. They all converged during the last couple of years in the buildup to the golden anniversary. “We had families coming in from Florida and other places writing in the [city] guest book who had come to McKinney to see the Benji house,” Shumate says.
An assortment of memorabilia and merchandise was displayed on a long table at the back of the courthouse theater, including official merchandise, screenplays, production stills and notes, behind-the-scenes photos, and various correspondence. All the materials were supplied by a loose coalition of fans, some distant and others local, as well as by the estate of Joe Camp, who died of cancer in March in his hometown of Bell Buckle, Tennessee. He had been unable to attend recent Benji-themed events due to his illness.
When the 50th anniversary celebration was announced, “There were just so many people who were like, ‘I grew up here, I remember when we were extras’ or ‘We were in the background’ or ‘My aunt was in a car [shown in the film]’…One woman called me to say, ‘My husband was on the crew of [the sequel] Benji the Hunted and some others, and would you be interested in having his stuff for your festival?”
Shumate says she didn’t realize the depth of her own connection to the film until she was cleaning out a room in her house and found a journal entry she’d written at 11 about seeing the movie at a test-run screening in June, 1974. “Dear Diary,” it reads, “Tonight we went to a movie called Benji. It was about a dog. In a way it was sort of stupid. Afterwards we went to the across-the-street restaurant. I got a ‘400.’ That’s a chocolate milk over crushed ice. It was good!”
Shumate chalks up her negative initial reaction to being 11, and therefore too jaded for Benji. That the film stayed in her mind for five decades suggests it affected her more than she realized, or at least more than she would admit. “Even though I may have thought it was stupid when I was 11, I absolutely adore it now, and have for the last 17 years that I’ve been with the city, because it’s part of the history of our town, and it’s a sweet history.”
Correction: The statue was modeled after images of Benji, not after the artist’s dog.
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