June 14: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Free Space!

In August of 1979, Kit Williams published Masquerade, a book that had clues to the location of a jewelled golden hare that Williams had created and hidden somewhere in Britain. He had been challenged by publisher Tom Maschler to create an illustrated book that did something no one else had before. He made sixteen detailed paintings of the story of Jack Hare, who is taking a treasure from the Moon to the Sun. He loses the treasure, and the reader is asked to help him find it.

In a box that said, “I am the keeper of the jewel of Masquerade, which lies waiting safe inside me for you or eternity,” he buried a gold rabbit pendant with celebrity witness Bamber Gascoigne.

He said, “If I was to spend two years on the sixteen paintings for Masquerade I wanted them to mean something. I recalled how, as a child, I had come across “treasure hunts” in which the puzzles were not exciting nor the treasure worth finding. So I decided to make a real treasure, of gold, bury it in the ground and paint real puzzles to lead people to it. The key was to be Catherine of Aragon’s Cross at Ampthill, near Bedford, casting a shadow like the pointer of a sundial.”

Three years later, Williams received a letter containing a sketch with the solution from a man named Ken Thomas, whom the writer soon realized had made a lucky guess. After he was given the prize, physics teachers Mike Barker and John Rousseau wrote in with their answer, but had not found the prize. That’s because the rabbit’s box went unnoticed in the dirt they dug up; Thomas saw it and lucked into winning. According to Wikipedia, “It was later found that Thompson had not solved the puzzle and had guessed the hare’s location using insider knowledge obtained from a former acquaintance of Williams.”

Ken Thomas was really Dugald Thompson, and his business partner, John Guard, was the boyfriend of Veronica Robertson, who had previously been Williams’s girlfriend. Guard allegedly convinced Robertson to help him win the contest because he wanted the money donated to animal rights causes.

William wrote a sequel, The Bee on the Comb, and a video game, Hareraiser, with a jewel as a prize that was never found. Other books like this — this was a big success — included The Piper of Dreams, The Secret, The Golden Key, The Key to the Kingdom, On the Trail of the Golden Owl, The Merlin Mystery, Forest Fenn’s The Thrill of the Chase: A Memoir and the movie/book we are talking about today, Treasure: In Search of the Golden Horse.

Published by Intravision, there was a movie directed by the man who came up with the idea, Sheldon Renan, and a book illustrated by Jean-Francois Podevin and published by Warner Books. A gold horse was the prize in this contest designed by Paul “Dr. Crypton” Hoffman, who was the president and editor-in-chief of Discovery magazine, president and publisher of Encyclopedia Britannica and the man who made the treasure map for Romancing the Stone.

Renan wrote the first book about underground movies, An Introduction to the American Underground Film and “The Blue Mouse and The Movie Experience,” an influential Film Comment article about how the Blue Mouse Theater in Portland went from Hollywood movies to grindhouse films. Wildly, he also directed The Killing of America, wrote Lambada and has been a speechwriter for every CEO of Xerox since 1990.

While IMDB says that cinematographer Hilyard John Brown (also a cameraman on This Is Spinal Tap and Solomon King) came up with the idea of a film with treasure — but “opted out of working on the film because director Sheldon Renan wanted a lot of helicopter shooting, and Brown had had too many close calls in helicopters” — every other article I have found says that this was Renan’s project.

You know who did shoot this? Hanania Baer, who was also the cinematographer for American Ninja, Masters of the Universe, Ernest Scared Stupid, Night Patrol, Breakin’ 2, Ninja 3, UFOs Are Real and so many more, and Dennis Matsuda, a cameraman on Hotline, Poltergeist, Raising Arizona and Stand By Your Man.

The movie is about a girl (Dory Dean) trying to find her father and her lost horse, Treasure (Galahas). She’s helped by Mr. Maps (Elisha Cook Jr., Mr. Nicklas in Rosemary’s Baby), a blacksmith (John Melanson, who was an actual blacksmith and is also the Man with the Black Gloves), a sushi chef (Yasumasa Adachi), Mr. Night Music (Herman Sherman), Dream Dancers and the Ghost Party, all narrated by Richard Lynch. Yes, Richard Lynch, who says things like “The city. It was no place to find a horse. Not her horse. She knew that roads that started in the city led in all directions. How could she leave the city and find the right direction?”

This came out during the early console video game era, and there was also going to be a Colecovision game. A silver horse was buried and is still there, as the puzzle to find it never got made.

My dad was obsessed with this book, staring at it in B. Dalton and wondering how to solve it. We couldn’t afford it, so he would sit on the floor and draw sketches of it. No one won, and the prize money was given to Big Brothers and Big Sisters. Seven months after the contest was over, Nick Boone and Anthony Castaneda discovered where the horse was with the Captain Nemo solution.

You can watch this on YouTube.