This gets pretty convoluted, so follow closely.
Taking Tiger Mountain was originally conceived as an experimental art film inspired by Albert Camus’ 1942 novel The Stranger and a poem by Kent Smith about the 1973 kidnapping of J. Paul Getty III. (How those two sources might be connected is a question you’ll have to answer yourself.)
At the time, Smith was working at Encyclopedia Britannica Films with actor Bill Paxton, who had made a few film and TV appearances but not yet in a starring role. Along with a University of Texas student, Tom Huckabee, they traveled first to Morocco in 1974 to begin shooting, using leftover film stock from the movie Lenny (1974). After losing some equipment at Charles DeGaulle airport in Paris and having the rest confiscated in Tangier for failure to pay the proper bribes to authorities, they decided to travel to Wales, where Paxton had once been a foreign exchange student, and shoot the film there using local residents in the cast. It was shot in black-and-white without sound; Smith intended to dub the dialogue in post-production.
With no other developments happening for a few years after that, Huckabee paid Smith for the footage in 1979 to complete it. He and Paxton decided to abandon Smith’s kidnapping-inspired tale and enlisted another writer, Paul Cullum, to adapt a new story from William S Burroughs’ recently published sci-fi novella Blade Runner (a movie), the title being an indication that the story was Burroughs’ intended treatment for a film adaptation of a 1974 novel, The Bladerunner. (None of this bears any relationship to Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner, 1982.) Huckabee paid Burroughs $100 for the rights.
The story that resulted from all these permutations is set in a dystopian, post-nuclear future ruled by a patriarchal government. A group of feminist terrorists brainwashes and experiments on Paxton’s character to turn him into an assassin bent on destroying the Welsh Ministry of Prostitution. As the story “progresses,” it veers from the terrorist plot to feature increasingly hallucinatory experiences reflecting the research and mind-manipulation forced on Paxton’s character.
Vinegar Syndrome, a film restoration and distribution company, approached Huckabee about digitally remastering and releasing the film on DVD. He agreed, and in 2018 shot some additional footage in Los Angeles and Texas, some of it in color and on an iPhone, and re-edited it to create a revised version called Taking Tiger Mountain Revisited (2019).
What all this has to do with the 1974 Brian Eno album “Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)” may be a subject for further speculation.
