Before They Were Stars: Ron Perlman in “Quest for Fire”

I’m very pleased that it’s Ron Perlman’s birthday today because I can do a “Before They Were Stars” feature on him and share a personal anecdote at the same time. Perlman’s film debut took place in 1981 when he starred in a movie called Quest for Fire, a caveman story set 80,000 years in the past about rival tribes engaging in a war over the discovery of fire. Anyway, I always used to see a VHS copy of this film sitting in a drawer in my grandparents’ house and after many years, I finally decided to ask them why they owned it since it didn’t exactly seem like a movie which was their cup of tea. Imagine my surprise when they told me that parts of the movie were actually filmed on our family’s land! My grandparents lived in a small Ontario town named Lion’s Head on the Bruce Peninsula and used to own a great deal of land up there. Even though Quest for Fire was  a mammoth production which was filmed over the course of an entire year on three different continents, they somehow wound up selecting my family’s land as a filming location for some of their scenes. So, yes, now I can look back with the knowledge that Ron Perlman actually set foot on my family’s property at one point and I was just too goddamn young to appreciate it!