## Noel Marshall and the Architecture of Ambition
The man who conceived the film project that put a lion in a Sherman Oaks living room had a biography that made the plan more plausible than it would otherwise have been. Noel Marshall was born Noel Bangert on April 18, 1931, in Chicago, and he grew up in the South Side neighborhood with enough early exposure to institutional animal care — he worked at the St. Louis Zoo at some point during his adolescence — to have formed a specific relationship with the category of animal before he was an adult.
He moved to California and built a career in the entertainment industry, first as an agent working with talent, then as a producer whose client relationships gave him access to the specific projects that agents saw before the general public did. One of his clients was William Peter Blatty, a screenwriter and novelist whose 1971 novel about demonic possession would become one of the most commercially successful literary properties of the decade. When Blatty adapted The Exorcist for the screen, Marshall was positioned to be involved at the production level, and the film that resulted in 1973 was one of the highest-grossing theatrical releases in the history of commercial cinema to that point. Its box office performance was unusual enough that it generated significant financial returns for the people involved in its production.
Marshall had also run what appears to have been a successful business in fiberglass car bodies — Bangert Enterprises — before his Hollywood career, which meant that his professional identity was that of a person who had operated in both industrial production and entertainment production, someone who knew how things were built and how projects were managed. This background, combined with the Exorcist earnings, gave him a position from which the Roar project looked fundable in ways that might not have been apparent to someone with a more straightforward Hollywood résumé.