Sam J. Jones may not have saved every one of us. But he did portray an iconic character who saved every man, every woman, every child. He was the mighty Flash Gordon. As a novice actor, Jones was cast in the lead role of a major motion picture. Given a once in a lifetime opportunity, Jones admits he made mistakes that hindered his career.

What the hell happened?

See the Short Version

What the Hell Happened to Sam J. Jones Summary Sam J. Jones played football for the marines. After an attempt at going pro, he started modeling and acting in commercials. When he moved to LA, Jones was cast in a supporting role in the hit comedy “10“. His big break came when he was cast as Flash Gordon in the big-budget sci-fi adventure movie from 1980. Jones butted heads with Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis over money. The fighting resulted in another actor being brought in to dub Jones' dialogue. Planned sequels were cancelled. Jones spent the next several decades trying to make it as an actor. He starred in a few TV pilots that were never picked up to series. His most successful show, The Highwayman, lasted only 9 episodes. Eventually, he started a second career as a security guard for wealthy clients. In 2012, Jones enjoyed a bit of a resurgence after playing himself in Seth McFarlene's comedy, Ted. He's still taking acting work where he can find it, meeting fans at conventions and working in security to support his family.



A Marine, A Model and an Athlete

Sam J. Jones joined the Marine Corps right out of high school. While he was serving his country, he played football. When he left the Corps, he had ambitions to play professionally for the Seattle Seahawks. He played with the Seahawks’ practice team, the ‘Burien Flyers’, for a year which gave him second thoughts about his career choice.

Jones says he was inspired to try acting after reading an article about Clint Eastwood. “I said to myself, ‘I don’t know if I can accomplish what Clint had accomplished in those years…’ This was probably 1977. And I said, ‘…but I would like to give it a try.’ And so that’s what inspired me to go to Hollywood and give [a] shot at acting. And within a year I was working. It was great.”

Concurrent with his football career, Jones worked as a model. In 1975, he posed naked for a spread in Playgirl magazine under the alias Andrew Cooper III. Jones said the write-up that accompanied the pictorial falsely identified him as a billionaire. Once again, he says, he was inspired by a Hollywood tough guy. “Burt Reynolds posed naked for Cosmopolitan. I thought, wow, that’s kinda cool… I said ‘Yeah, if Burt Reynolds can do it, I’ll do it!'”

When Jones was still living in Seattle, he got his feet wet by starring in local TV commercials. He also appeared in an episode of the dating game. Jones didn’t get the girl, but he got a date with destiny.

Immediate Success

Within a year of moving to Los Angeles, Jones landed his first movie role. He played Bo Derek’s surfer husband in Blake Edwards’ midlife crisis comedy, “10“. I don’t think “10” has held up especially well, but it was a big deal in 1979. It was the seventh highest-grossing movie of the year and the top comedy edging out The Jerk. More importantly, it made Derek into a national obsession.

After “10”, Jones appeared in Stunts Unlimited!. This TV movie was directed by Hal Needham. Needham was a former stuntman himself. He was best-known for directing Burt Reynolds movies like Smokey and the Bandit and The Cannonball Run. Needham was very in demand in 1980, so it’s surprising to see him slumming it on TV.

The movie was about a team of stuntpeople who went on missions for US Intelligence in their spare time. Kind of like The Fall Guy crossed with Mission: Impossible. ABC didn’t pick up Stunts Unlimited! as a series. But they did pick up The Fall Guy the following year.

That’s okay because Sam J. Jones had bigger fish to fry.

Savior of the Universe

Every good Star Wars fan knows that George Lucas initially set out to make a Flash Gordon movie. When he couldn’t get the rights to his favorite sci-fi serial hero, Lucas set about making his own mythology. It worked out rather well for him.

The success of Star Wars in 1977 changed everything. Studios were scrambling to find the next space adventure. Paramount promoted its Star Trek revival from a TV series to a motion picture. Disney prioritized The Black Hole which had previously languished in development. Glen A Larson was inspired to create Battlestar Galactica and Lucas sued him.

Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis held the rights to make a Flash Gordon movie. Originally, he worked with legendary Italian director Federico Fellini to bring the hero to life on the big screen. Following the success of Star Wars, De Laurentiis could no longer afford to wait. So he turned to another esteemed director, Nicolas Roeg.

Yeah, Nicolas Roeg, the guy who directed Don’t Look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth nearly took the reigns of Flash Gordon. That would have been a very, very different movie from the one that got made. Roeg worked on his version of Flash Gordon for roughly a year before splitting with De Laurentiis over creative differences.

During pre-production, Danilo Donati was hard at work designing the movie’s out-of-this-world costumes and sets. According to screenwriter Lorenzo Semple, Jr., Donati’s did his own thing. “The stuff he designed was fantastic, but it had nothing to do with the story, and would actually be un-shootable. For instance, he spent $1 million on the Arboria set, which was used in one shot.”

King of the Impossible

With Nicolas Roeg out, De Laurentiis went shopping for a new director. He courted Sergio Leone, but they couldn’t agree on the tone of the movie. Like Roeg, Leone was interested in adapting the original comic strips drawn by Alex Raymond in the 1930’s. But De Laurentiis saw comic strips as inherently frivolous and wanted to go in the direction of camp.

Semple, who wrote for the Adam West Batman show, struggled with the tone of the script. “Dino wanted to make Flash Gordon humorous. At the time, I thought that was a possible way to go, but, in hindsight, I realize it was a terrible mistake. We kept fiddling around with the script, trying to decide whether to be funny or realistic. That was a catastrophic thing to do, with so much money involved.”

Eventually, De Laurentiis settled on Mike Hodges to direct Flash Gordon. Hodges was a huge step down from Fellini. Roeg or Leone but he was available and he would do what De Laurentiis asked of him. Hodges had recently been fired from The Omen II when the producers on that movie that he was too slow.

Flash Gordon Approaching

De Laurentiis auditioned hundreds of actors in search of his leading man. Supposedly he met with Kurt Russell and Arnold Schwarzenegger before settling on Jones. What put Jones over-the-top was something he did before he began acting. No, not the Playgirl pictorial…

I found out later his mother-in-law was watching a TV game show called The Dating Game which I went on. I lost the date, but Dino’s mother-in-law saw that episode and said “Dino, I think that’s your Flash Gordon right there!

It took roughly a year of meeting with De Laurentiis for Jones to get the part. When he did, the Italian producer made him dye his hair blonde and wear blue contacts to change his eye color. Screenwriter Semple was unimpressed. “Sam Jones was absolutely abominable as Flash. He was so awful in everything he did, that it didn’t encourage one to make improvements.”

By all accounts, Flash Gordon was a difficult shoot. To a large degree, Mike Hodges was forced to improvise as no one could agree on the tone of the movie. The actors were shuffled from rehearsal for once scene to filming another. In between, they learned how to use various weapons and props.

Nothing But a Man

Flash Gordon was undoubtedly a huge opportunity for an unknown like Jones. Decades later, he admits, he didn’t handle it well. De Laurentiis scolded Jones for his rowdy behavior off the set. After Jones got into a fight that could have delayed filming, De Laurentiis told him to knock it off. But the young actor didn’t listen.

Instead, he followed the advice of his agents and lawyers. They encouraged Jones to hold out for more money. “If I was to do it all over again I would have taken a meeting one on one with him, and told all my attorneys and representatives to back off.”

That came back to bite Jones in a big way. The production broke for the holidays and Jones returned home. After Christmas, the rest of the cast resumed work to loop their dialog, but De Laurentiis didn’t fly Jones back to England. Instead, he hired someone else to dub all of Jones’ lines. He was devastated.

According to Hodges, the dubbing escalated tensions between the producer and his leading man. “Sam found out and I think that was one factor that led to him being upset. And Dino and he just did not see eye to eye for a while. So when you lose your main star there can’t really be a sequel.”

Life After Flash Gordon

Following Flash Gordon, Jones found work on television. From 1981-1982 he was a regular on the series Code Red. Lorne Greene starred as an LA fire chief and Jones played one of the firefighters under his command. The show only lasted one season.

Jones admits, he didn’t take his career as seriously as he should have. ” I was invited to go to lunch by some big decision-makers in Hollywood, and I decided to go out and party and not make the lunch. I decided not to go out of arrogance, rebellion, foolishness.

“And that’s one example out of a thousand. Any hindrances, any obstacles, was my own doing. As far as the movie industry, the opportunities were always there. It was always up to me and how I took advantages of those opportunities. “

Despite plentiful opportunities, Jones struggled to find regular work for much of the decade. He showed up in guest spots on TV shows like The A-Team, Hunter, and Riptide.

My Chauffeur and The Highwayman

In 1986, Jones returned to the big screen in the comedy, My Chauffeur. Deborah Foreman starred as a, get this, woman who drives a car for a living! What could be funnier than that?

If the movie is remembered at all, it’s for the scandal that resulted when Crown International Pictures misreported its opening weekend grosses to claim the top spot at the box office. My Chauffeur actually opened somewhere between third and sixth place.

The Spirit – 1987

The Highwayman – 1987-1988

Jones played a football players in a half dozen episodes of the HBO comedy series, 1st & Ten.

In 1987, he portrayed another pulp hero pulled from the pages of comic strips. Jones starred opposite Nana Visitor (pre-Star Trek) in a TV movie based on Will Eisner’s masked crime-fighter. The movie was intended as a pilot for a TV series that never materialized.

That same year, Jones starred in the short-lived science fiction series, The Highwayman. The show was described as a mash-up of Mad Max and Knight Rider. Unfortunately, The Highwayman was cancelled after only nine episodes.

Maximum Schlock

Stargate SG-1 – 1999

Flash Gordon (TV Series) – 2007

After The Highwayman shut down, Jones hustled to find work. He got divorced from his first wife in 1987 and for the better part of the next two decades Jones appeared in a steady stream of cheesy direct-to-video movies with guest spots on TV shows mixed in.

With titles like Fist of Honor, Expert Weapon, Hard Vice and Maximum Force, Jones’ movies sat on the shelves of your local Blockbuster waiting for an unwary viewer to stumble along.

At a personal low point when he couldn’t find work, Jones overdosed. Battling depression and fame withdrawal, he attempted to take his own life.

Every now and again, Jones would pop up on a TV show like Baywatch, Thunder in Paradise or Walker, Texas Ranger. His credits include an episode of Stargate SG-1 and an Animal Planet series called Hollywood Safari.

In 2007, Jones appeared in an episode of the short-lived Flash Gordon TV series. It would be his last acting gig for five years.

Working Man

Jones remarried in 1992. His second wife supported his acting career up to a point. Eventually, she gave him an ultimatum. “My wife looked at me and said, ‘You’ve been waiting for the phone to ring. The phone isn’t ringing. We have kids. There’s the door. Don’t come back until you’re providing.’ That’s why I walked away from labels years ago. Actor? I’m a working man. Whatever it takes to provide, I’m a working man.”

When his income from acting wasn’t sufficient to support his five children, Jones took up a side business. In 2002, he started working in high-end security. Based out of San Diego, Jones protects executives at they travel to Mexico. He says his military training made him well suited to his second career.

Renewed Relevance

In 2012, Jones returned to movie theaters for the first time since My Chauffeur in 1986. He was more or less retired from acting when writer-director Seth McFarlene called hi about a part in his raunchy talking teddy bear movie, Ted. Jones played a fictional version of himself. But Jones put limits on how he was portrayed.

There are a few of the things he asked me to do and I said, ‘Well wait a minute now, I’m playing pieces of myself, part of me, but it’s not really all of me nor is it accurate on even the smaller pieces but I’ll give you pieces of me’. But certain things I can’t do because I always will have a following, especially with the younger crowd now and I gotta be careful what I do.

Ted was a box office hit. Three years later, Jones returned for the sequel but Ted 2 bombed at the box office ending any hopes of a teddy bear trilogy.

Following Ted, Jones enjoyed a bit of a resurgence. He was the subject of the documentary Life After Flash in 2017. The movie splits its attention between Flash Gordon and its leading man without fully delving into either one.

So, what the hell happened?

Jones was a Hollywood nobody when a powerful producer plucked him from obscurity. As a young man, he responded with arrogance rather than gratitude. Jones learned the hard way that it’s a bad idea to bite the hand that feeds you.

Eventually, Jones buried the proverbial hatchet with the man who made him famous. “After the making of the movie, years later, I called him. I said ‘Please forgive me if there’s any rift between us because of what happened,’ and he said ‘Sam I appreciate that… He understood and forgave me, and it was a clean slate.”

Jones still acts from time to time. He supports his family working as security for wealthy clients and he travels the world meeting Flash Gordon fans at science fiction conventions. Sam J. Jones may not have saved the universe, but he appears to have settled into a happy, well-adjusted family man. And that’s pretty heroic too.

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