In 1973, Kent Smith wrote a poem about the kidnapping of
John Paul Getty III, which was loosely adapted as the initial script for
Taking Tiger Mountain. Smith also drew inspiration from the 1942 novel
The Stranger by
Albert Camus. Smith, who worked as an employee at
Encyclopædia Britannica Films with actor
Bill Paxton, journeyed with Paxton and
University of Texas at Austin student Tom Huckabee to Morocco in 1974 to begin shooting the film. However, they lost equipment at
Charles de Gaulle Airport in France, and by the time they reached Tangier, they were arrested and their remaining equipment impounded because they had not paid the Moroccan authorities'
baksheesh. After being
bailed out of jail by Smith, they were deported to
Gibraltar, and proceeded to drive to South Wales, where Paxton was once a foreign exchange student, and filmed there. Paxton's co-stars were residents of the towns in Wales where the film was shot, rather than professional actors. The film was shot in black-and-white and without sound, with the intention of having dialogue be
dubbed in later. In 1979, Huckabee leased the footage from Smith to turn it into a film. Huckabee and Paxton decided to abandon the initial idea based on the Getty kidnapping, and enlisted the help of Paul Cullum to change the script. According to Huckabee, author
William S. Burroughs was "giving away [his] stories to any film student or amateur that wrote him a letter" around that time, and so Huckabee paid Burroughs $100 for the rights to Burroughs' novella
Blade Runner (a movie). == Nudity and sex ==