Griffith’s early childhood had been unusual in several respects before the lion arrived. She had been briefly a child model but stopped, citing shyness. She grew up in the specific environment of celebrity culture in Southern California — the awareness of cameras and performances as features of ordinary life, the presence of famous people in domestic contexts, the blurred boundary between professional identity and personal identity that characterizes entertainment households. She enrolled in the Hollywood Professional School, a secondary school designed for students whose professional commitments required scheduling flexibility, and she graduated at sixteen.
By the time the LIFE photographs were taken in 1971, she had lived with this unusual arrangement for some period, and she was old enough to have formed her own relationship with the animals without necessarily having had the specific professional and financial motivations that had brought them into the house in the first place. What her experience of the arrangement was — what she understood about the risk, what she felt about it — is not fully recoverable from the available record. What is recoverable is what happened to her later, during the film production, when the animals were no longer a domestic arrangement but a professional set.
## The Development of the Film Project
The ambition that Noel Marshall brought to the Roar project was genuine and, in the specific way that genuine ambition that exceeds its object can be, somewhat catastrophic. He believed the film could be made. He believed it was worth making. He believed that a film in which wild animals performed in direct proximity to human actors, without the conventional safety infrastructure of Hollywood animal productions, would create something that conventional Hollywood productions could not create.