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Fifty years ago, every studio told Joe Camp — who died Friday after a long illness — he was barking up the wrong tree with Benji.

While working in advertising, the Texas-based Camp dreamed of telling a Lassie-like story from the dog’s point of view, and so he penned a script about a beloved stray pooch attempting to rescue two kidnapped children. Naming the film after his own dog, Camp secured independent financing and helmed the project himself.

“He screened it for every single studio, and each one passed,” recalls Camp’s son, filmmaker Brandon Camp, to The Hollywood Reporter. “They all said, ‘No one is interested in this movie.’ ”

Without a distributor, Joe Camp formed Mulberry Square Productions with Ed Vanston to release the film, which starred Peter Breck, Patsy Garrett and mixed-breed canine Higgins. They managed to book Benji at a single Dallas theater in 1974, and more locations followed as word-of-mouth grew.

Ron Moody in Mel Brooks' 'The Twelve Chairs.' The 'Doctor Who' that never was. Ron Moody: 'Doctor Who' was biggest professional regret (See previous post: "Ron Moody: From Charles Dickens to Walt Disney – But No Harry Potter.") Ron Moody was featured in about 50 television productions, both in the U.K. and the U.S., from the late 1950s to 2012. These included guest roles in the series The Avengers, Gunsmoke, Starsky and Hutch, Hart to Hart, and Murder She Wrote, in addition to leads in the short-lived U.S. sitcom Nobody's Perfect (1980), starring Moody as a Scotland Yard detective transferred to the San Francisco Police Department, and in the British fantasy Into the Labyrinth (1981), with Moody as the noble sorcerer Rothgo. Throughout the decades, he could also be spotted in several TV movies, among them:[1] David Copperfield (1969). As Uriah Heep in this disappointing all-star showcase distributed theatrically in some countries.