(In one notorious scene, he describes the feeling he gets from each pump of his muscle as akin to orgasm.) Years before his Hollywood career, his celebrity seems predetermined: he radiates an almost terrifying confidence, and it’s clear that he experiences every aspect of his labor as unfettered joy. Olympia, seven times, through some combination of his immaculate physique and the spectacularly ruthless mind games he plays with the other contestants. But even the most intimidating among them become deferential in the presence of the film’s charismatic breakout star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who won the sport’s highest competition, Mr. Butler, who died in October, 2021, worked with Gaines to make the case for bodybuilding as an underappreciated art form-one that incorporates elements of classical sculpture and dance.īutler and Gaines’s journalistic coverage of the world of bodybuilding led to the 1974 photo book “ Pumping Iron” and a 1977 documentary of the same name, both of which document the sport’s strange and endearing main characters: among others, there is Mike Katz, a gentle teacher and father with an air of diffident sadness that bullies find irresistible Franco Columbu, a docile, but self-assured, former boxing champion from a tiny Italian village and the best bodybuilder under two hundred pounds and Lou Ferrigno, who would go on to play the Incredible Hulk on TV-a massive and slightly bewildered up-and-comer, shepherded through training and competitions by his overbearing father. At the time, the sport was widely denigrated, considered an extreme and unsavory activity for homosexuals and freaks.

In the seventies, the photographer George Butler and a collaborator, the journalist Charles Gaines, looking for as yet uncovered subcultures to document for the magazine-reading public, began hanging around with bodybuilders.

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