Hollywood buffs love to repeat the legend about the young movie star Lana Turner: how she was discovered sitting at a drug-store counter on Sunset Boulevard.
Now there’s another discovery story to add to the books, about the four-legged star of “Benji: Off the Leash.”
This week, the fourth dog to play the part of Benji is flying first class from big city to big city to promote the family movie, which opens on Friday.
But just three years ago, this lucky mutt -who’s actually a girl -was a scraggly pup with no tags, no collar and no home, wandering down a deserted blacktop road in a small Mississippi Gulf Coast town called Pass Christian.
“She’s a real dog from the streets,” says Joe Camp, who has directed every Benji movie since the 1974 original.
Benji’s journey to stardom began in the summer of 2001, when she was picked up by animal control and taken to the Humane Society shelter in nearby Gulfport, where workers gave her the name Tiffany.
As it happened, Camp, who had gone to college in Mississippi, was in town that week as part of a nationwide search for a new Benji.
Camp wanted the dog to come from a shelter, he says, “because that would make the movie like an ad for adopting pets.”
So the director of the Humane Society knew to be on the lookout for a shaggy white mutt that looked like the original Benji.
“When I saw Tiffany, I scooped her right up,” says Eric Aschaffenburg, who was the interim executive director of the shelter at the time.
“I’ve got an eye for good-looking women and movie-star dogs, I guess -and this was a real cute dog.”
Aschaffenburg got Tiffany cleaned up -“I sent her to the pooch parlor to get some of the shags out,” as he puts it -then took her to the Petsmart store where Camp was meeting dogs.
It was love at first sight.
“I knew the moment I met her that my search was over,” Camp recalls.
First of all, Tiffany looked the part. She was the right size, and she had those big, brown expressive eyes that Benji fans know and love.
But she also had the right attitude. She was an adaptable dog, confident but also easygoing.
“Here was a dog who’d been on the streets, then got picked up and tossed in the back of a truck, taken into a shelter, and a few days later lugged over to a pet store to meet this strange man who got down on the floor and started taking pictures of her.
“She was great about it -and so smart. Within 10 minutes, I taught her to sit and to jump up on a chair. And her face was gorgeous.”
Camp immediately made arrangements to adopt Tiffany. He was so confident he’d found his dog that he even changed her name to Benji.
But officially she was only a finalist at the time. Camp had found two other contenders at shelters in Chicago and L.A., and he took all of them to his home outside San Diego for two weeks of “Benji Boot Camp.”
The idea was to see how they’d interact with each other, his wife and 12-year-old twin sons and their other animals -two dogs, two cats and three chickens.
The L.A. dog, who goes by the name Benji Boy, had the perfect Benji look, Camp recalls, but he was just too hard to handle.
“He was on the streets for a long time, I think,” Camp says. “Whenever he met someone new, he would growl. And he growled at Benji too, until she turned around one day and snapped at him -after that, everything was smooth between them.”
The Chicago pup, Shaggy, was the wild card of the bunch.
“He’s just a doofus,” Camp says. “He bounces into a room, and everybody loves him, but he was too hyper and high maintenance to be Benji.”
Shaggy was so charismatic, however, that Camp wrote him into the script. He gets almost as much screen time as Benji herself, playing a goofy sidekick, named Lizard Tongue after Shaggy’s tendency to run around with his tongue hanging out.
Once he had assembled his canine cast, Camp turned Shaggy and Benji over to professional trainers, who taught them complicated tricks, including to shake their heads and sneeze on command.
Filming happened last summer in Utah, telling the story of a young teenage boy who rescues Benji from his mean stepfather’s backyard puppy mill.
“Off the Leash” is the fifth Benji big-screen movie (along with 21 video titles), and the first since 1987’s “Benji the Hunted.”
Over the years, the Benji movies have taken more than $80 million at the box office, and the last one made $27 million.
Those numbers have attracted Hollywood studios in the past -Disney distributed the 1987 movie -but Camp decided to produce “Off the Leash” independently. He raised all the money himself, and is even distributing it outside of the studio system, which is highly unusual for a mass-market film.
“We used to do it ourselves because we had to, but this time we wanted to keep creative control, and the studios we talked to weren’t going to let us do that,” Camp says.
For Camp, a devout Christian, creative control means sticking to his unabashedly G-rated and wholesome principles.
“The studios wanted us to put in the poop jokes and the four-letter words, and we just weren’t going to do that,” he says.
Camp is just as principled when it comes to the cause of stray animals.
The first Benji -whose real name was Higgins -was already a TV star on the ’60s show “Petticoat Junction” by the time he made his film debut in 1974’s “Benji.”
But all the other Benjis since have been animals that Camp adopted from shelters and raised at home. The current Benji lives with Camp now, as does Shaggy. And Benji Boy was adopted by one of Camp’s producers.
While promoting “Off the Leash,” Camp has also been touring around the country, doing benefits for animal shelters.
Oddly, Camp isn’t doing any promotions with the Mississippi shelter where he found Benji, because he and the shelter’s board couldn’t agree about what sort of benefit to hold.
In another sad twist to the story, Benji had to undergo emergency eye surgery a few weeks ago for a detached retina and then had a bad allergic reaction to the post-surgery antibiotic.
Veterinarians were able to stop the reaction, so Benji is out of serious danger, but Camp is worried that she may lose sight in her eye.
It’s a tragic irony, because Benji’s eyes are as much a part of her appeal as they were for Bette Davis.
You can still see them in the movie, at least.
“When people look into Benji’s big, brown eyes,” Camp says, “I want them to remember that there are thousands more dogs just like her in their own local shelter.”