Olympia, and the shy Lou Ferrigno, who was cast soon afterward in the title role of the television series “The Incredible Hulk.” The film paid particular attention to the intense rivalry between Mr. “Pumping Iron” (with some scripted sequences) focused on a group of bodybuilders as they worked out at Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach, Calif., and competed in 1975, some for the title of Mr.

Butler told The Daily News of New York in 1977 that there was a “myth” that bodybuilders were “uncoordinated, dumb, narcissistic muscleheads.” On the contrary, he said, they were actually “adept at other sports - some at a professional level.” It is credited with helping bodybuilders escape their niche as physical curiosities and win recognition as serious athletes. Butler’s best-known film is “Pumping Iron,” which he directed with Robert Fiore. “He said movies should take people to places they couldn’t imagine, not just places where they hadn’t been,” Caroline Alexander, his longtime companion and the writer or co-writer of five of his documentaries, said by phone. Butler on an eclectic journey as a documentarian: He went on to direct films about Ernest Shackleton’s expedition to Antarctica endangered Bengal tigers in the Sundarbans, a tidal mangrove forest in India and Bangladesh the exploration of Mars by robotic vehicle and his longtime friend, Senator John Kerry.

“Pumping Iron” (1977) started the British-born Mr.

The cause was pneumonia, his son Desmond said. George Butler, an adventurous filmmaker who deftly explored the subculture of bodybuilding in “Pumping Iron,” a documentary with the then little-known Arnold Schwarzenegger as its charismatic center, died on Oct.

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