Bigger: The Wild Life Of Joe Weider

A new film about larger-than-life bodybuilding icon Joe Weider comes to the big screen. Here’s your exclusive behind-the-scenes sneak preview of Bigger—this fall’s must-see movie.

- Jim Schmaltz

IF JOE WEIDER HAD NEVER lived, you wouldn’t be holding this magazine. This isn’t just because Weider, celebrated as the Father of Bodybuilding, founded Muscle & Fitness in 1980—itself a descendant of earlier publications that grew from Weider’s first-ever stapled handout, Your Physique (circa 1940). Without Weider and his visionary quest:

The IFBB, NPC, and Mr. Olympia would not exist.

Arnold Schwarzenegger would be a charismatic middle manager somewhere outside Graz, Austria.

Gyms and health-food stores would be less of a presence around the globe.

You—and billions of other people—might have never picked up a weight, drank a protein shake, and felt the transformative power of the bodybuilding lifestyle.

Weider, who passed away in 2013 at the age of 93, preached the life-affirming potential of weight training from his days as a teenager in a tough Jewish ghetto in Montreal. That he emerged from that hardscrabble youth to be one of the most successful fitness entrepreneurs of the 20th century is just part of his legend.

How do you film a biography of a near-mythic figure who changed the world yet remains a mysterious force of nature even to those who knew him?

HOW THE WORLD GOT BIGGER

That was the challenge enthusiastically embraced by Steve Jones. The Hollywood producer and writer had already displayed a brilliance in bringing a complex personality to life in the critically lauded You Don’t Know Jack. The film starred Al Pacino in a riveting portrayal of Jack Kevorkian, the self-appointed angel of mercy who administered euthanasia to terminally ill patients at their request, and carefully navigated the thorny terrain of end-of-life decisions.