Throughout these years, Marshall was developing the Roar project, and the development was consuming increasing amounts of the household’s attention, physical space, and resources. The animals at the Sherman Oaks house had been there by 1971 — when the LIFE photographs were taken — and removed by 1972. The development of the Acton property was underway. The script was being written and rewritten. The financing was being assembled and, as it eventually turned out, spent and then assembled again and spent again.
The professional life and the Roar project existed in parallel for years before the production formally began. Hedren was still an actress during this period, still working, still recognizable. The lion project was something happening in the background — in the Acton desert, in the legal and financial machinery of film production, in the expanding animal population that had outgrown the Sherman Oaks living room and was now being managed across eighty acres of scrub land in the Antelope Valley.
When principal photography began in October 1976, Hedren was forty-six years old. She had been working in the entertainment industry since her early twenties. She had been married twice. Her daughter Melanie, who would appear in the film, was nineteen. The seven years since the Africa trip had been spent accumulating the animals, the property, the scripts, the financing, and the knowledge that was supposed to make the project possible.
Whether any amount of preparation could have made the project possible on the terms Marshall had conceived it is the question that the production’s trajectory answers. The preparation was genuine and extensive. The knowledge they had accumulated about lion behavior was real. The animals they had lived with were animals they knew. And none of this was sufficient protection against the fundamental reality that they were proposing to film dramatic scenes with humans and wild animals in direct physical contact over five years of production.