Director – Lisa Downs, Producers – Lisa Downs & Ashley Pugh, Music – Toby Dunham. Production Company – Spare Change Films/Strict Machine.
With
Sam J. Jones, The Alba Family, John Altman, Melody Anderson, Martin Ballantyne, Ian Beattie, Manu Bennett, Howard Blake, Brian Blessed, Trevor Butterfield, Stephen Calcutt, Joe Campling, Renato Casaro, Jason Clark, Brian W. Cook, Tom Cook, Teri Copley, Martha De Laurentiis, Victor Dandridge, Deep Roy, Richard Donner, Peter Duncan, Lou Ferrigno, Danny Fingeroth, Franchesco!, Rich Fulcher, George Gibbs, Chris Gore, Sean Gunn, Jon Heder, Gantry Hill, Garrett Hill, Rick Hill, Mike Hodges, Daina House, Jamie Jones, Joey Jones, Kristie Jones, Matthew Jones, Naomi Jones, Ramona Jones, Shane Jones, Jason Labowitz, Stan Lee, Jason Lenzi, Bob Lindenmayer, Derek Lyons, Ross Marquand, Brian May, Josh McDermitt, Christopher McDonald, Pastor Jerry McKinney, Pastor Tami McKinney, Jason Mewes, Mark Millar, Richard O’Brien, Paul Oakenfold, Phil Ortiz, Ray Park, Jonathan Polis, Kaylin Polis, Robert Rodriguez, Michael Rooker, Alex Ross, Rolf Skrinde, Patrick St. Esprit, Michael Stevenson, Topol, Carlos Uresti, Patrick Warburton, Mark ‘Alien’ Weitz, Claudia Wells, Brian Wheeler, Jerodie White, Mike Wray, Peter Wyngarde, David Yost
This is one of a series of documentaries produced by Australian director/producer Lisa Downs. After a decade directing music video, Downs switched to Documentary-making with Life After Flash. Since then, she has made a series of documentaries focused on the after careers of usually one-shot 1980s actors, having gone on to make Life After The Navigator (2020) about Joey Cramer and Life After The Neverending Story (2022) about Noah Hathaway Jr, along with upcoming titles such as Life After Goodfellas, Life After Grease and Life After The Goonies.
Life After Flash focuses on Sam J. Jones who was propelled from obscurity to stardom after appearing as the title character in Flash Gordon (1980). After clashing with produced Dino de Laurentiis during shooting, Jones effectively torpedoed his career and never went on to star in much of anything again. Here Jones reflects on his life since then.
In his performances, Sam Jones comes across a musclehead without too much going on between the ears. In Life After Flash, Jones cuts a very different figure and comes across with incredible assurance and charisma. When the film visits the convention hall where he is due to appear, Jones demonstrates he is also very much in charge and we see him issuing orders to the organisers with strict requirements about the way everything is set up. He has also converted to Christianity and is seen walking around invoking the Holy Spirit at one point, while we get interviews with his pastors and fellow church members. We also learn interesting oddities about how he carries his own bread around with him when he travels otherwise the flour causes him to put on too many pounds.
Sam Jones interviewed
Life After Flash is at its most fascinating during the first half where it charts the production of Flash Gordon. Quite a reasonable number of the cast and crew from the film have been brought back and talk about it. Of these, Peter Wyngarde opens up with entertaining regard but the most fun to be had is Brian Blessed, who proves to as garrulous and larger than life in reality as he is on screen – he tells an hilarious little anecdote over the end credits about how The Queen came up and said she was a fan of Flash Gordon. The film goes as far afield as to visit an aging Topol in Tel Aviv, who has only dim memories of the film. There is even Queen’s Brian May who gives a rendition of the famous title song on his piano.
What impresses during these behind-the-scenes sections is the elaborateness of the production for the 1980 film, which took up two soundstages and a nearby airplane hangar with the sets and had people hand-sewing elaborate costumes that sometimes weighed up to thirty pounds. The late Dino de Laurentiis gained a reputation as a crass producer after the campy remake of King Kong (1976), although this was something his subsequent output turned around. Life After Flash makes the interesting claim that Dino wanted Flash Gordon played seriously but it was everyone else who insisted on taking the campy approach.
Sam Jones goes into some of the issues that he had with Dino de Laurentiis. In Jones’s eyes, he was young and impressionable. It is mentioned that he had physical altercations, although no details of these are forthcoming. His agent pushed him to challenge de Laurentiis over pay, which resulted in Jones not being called back for audio redubbing and another actor being asked to step in and redo his dialogue.
Queen’s Brian May with the film’s director Lisa Downs
Some of the fan contingent interviewed claim that this is what torpedoed any further Flash Gordon films. I would dispute this – Flash Gordon ended up earning $27 million in the US, which was just what was expended on its budget, and was only the eighteenth top-grossing film of 1980, meaning that it was a moderate but not a huge financial success. The other thing that the fan contingent seem not to get is that Jones comes across as a wooden and one-dimensional actor – it was this more likely than anything that tanked his box-office prospects. I would, for instance, be hard-pressed to imagine Jones taking on some of the roles that Harrison Ford or Tom Cruise did throughout this era, although I could easily see him in the sort of career that Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren specialised in during the 1980s/90s. In truth, without a film that has a modest fan following, Jones would be an actor that is all but forgotten and everything he has done since has been cruising along on the momentum from that one hit. The film does cover the small revival of his name in the 2010s with the box-office hit of Seth MacFarlane’s Ted (2012). Such a persistently vulgar and crass work seems an odd film given Jones’s newfound Christian status and he talks about how he had to ask that some of his dialogue be toned down.
The rest of the interviewees include fans and memorabilia collectors to more professional names ranging from comic-book creator Mark Millar to director Robert Rodriguez. The fan contingent are full of airheaded blather for the most part and come out with completely fatuous comments like “there would be no superheroes without Flash” and that Flash is “the father of all superheroes.” (Lisa Downs even has to go and interview Stan Lee to ask whether Flash is a superhero where the answer is no he isn’t because he doesn’t have any powers). Despite these absurdly elevated claims, there is no mention whatsoever throughout of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon original comic-strip and only the briefest inclusion of a clip from the 1930s serials. It is as though the rest of Flash Gordon fandom does not exist outside of the 1980 film.
The latter half of Life After Flash deals with Sam Jones’s life and career after Flash Gordon. Jones is candid about giving into the lure of the party lifestyle and having affairs with multiple women. He then details how his life and career fell apart to the point he tried to end it all with an overdose. He found religion and turned his life around. To be honest, this is not as interesting a story – I can respect Jones’s changes but am highly critical of the religion he has leapt aboard. He now has a new career as a bodyguard accompanying VIPs crossing the Mexican border where he even takes Lisa Downs and her camera crew on a tour with him into Mexico.
