Principal photography for Bert I. Gordon’s Empire of the Ants took place in the remote Florida Everglades and in St. Lucie and Martin Counties in the autumn of 1976 — and the shoot reads like a catalogue of low‑budget hazards. The location was so isolated that female cast members’ restrooms were roughly a half hour away by speedboat; Pamela Susan Shoop later recalled the absurd logistics — and the consequent waits for bathroom breaks — as emblematic of an uncomfortable shoot. More alarming were safety compromises: actor Robert Pine has recounted a sequence that required performers to fall from a rowboat into the river where live alligators were present. Gordon had allegedly promised a protective cage for the stunt that, for reasons never fully explained, never arrived, leaving the sequence a genuine near‑miss with wild animals.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1970s
Near-disaster in the Everglades: missing alligator cage and a dislocated jaw on the 1976 shoot of Empire of the Ants
Empire of the Ants (film) / 1970s
Principal photography for Bert I. Gordon’s Empire of the Ants took place in the remote Florida Everglades and in St. Lucie and Martin Counties in the autumn of 1976 — and the shoot reads like a catalogue of low‑budget hazards. The location was so isolated that female cast members’ restrooms were roughly a half hour away by speedboat; Pamela Susan Shoop later recalled the absurd logistics — and the consequent waits for bathroom breaks — as emblematic of an uncomfortable shoot. More alarming were safety compromises: actor Robert Pine has recounted a sequence that required performers to fall from a rowboat into the river where live alligators were present. Gordon had allegedly promised a protective cage for the stunt that, for reasons never fully explained, never arrived, leaving the sequence a genuine near‑miss with wild animals.
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