1984 SCI-FI-A-THON PROGRAMME NOTES
STARMAN
RELEASED: 4 December 1984
THE PLOT
Halloween director John Carpenter took a strange detour into romantic science fiction territory with Starman, starring Jeff Bridges in a truly oddball performance that earned him an Oscar nomination. When his spacecraft is shot down over Wisconsin, Starman (Bridges) arrives at the remote cabin of a distraught young widow, Jenny (Karen Allen; Marion from Raiders of the Lost Ark), and clones the form of her dead husband. The alien convinces an understandably freaked-out Jenny to drive him to Arizona, explaining that if his mothership doesn't pick him up in three days, he'll die.
CAST
Jeff Bridges as Scott Hayden / Star Man
Karen Allen as Jenny Hayden
Charles Martin Smith as Mark Shermin
FACTOIDS
What explains the director of Halloween veering into science fiction romance territory? In reality the project, which had been knocking around for five or so years, came at a time in his career when he was eager to take a break from his usual filmmaking diet of horror and exploitation, though he wasn’t the first director to be offered Starman (Adrian Lyne, Mark Rydell, John Badham, and Tony Scott were all associated with the project before Carpenter).
Screenwriter Dean Riesner , who worked on rewrites of the original screenplay by Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon, was instructed to strengthen the adult love story while reducing alien and supernatural elements. This fit well with what John Carpenter wanted. In a contemporary interview Carpenter expressed his desire to emphasise the “old-fashioned” road movie and romance over technology and special effects, and described the story as “It Happened One Night with a sci-fi premise.” Thus Starman remains both an outlier in Carpenter’s career but still very much ‘his’ film.
Screenwriter Dean Riesner is actually not credited as such; this was the result of the Writer’s Guild ruling his contribution was not sufficient to displace Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon’s work (they originated the story and wrote the initial two drafts), something which irked Carpenter; who intended to have a text card explain Riesner’s contribution in the credits.
The decision to release the film as John Carpenter’s Starman was determined after polling moviegoers, who indicated that the director’s name denoted a certain cachet. There is a certain irony to this given that Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi horror film The Thing is widely regarded to have been critically overshadowed on release by box office juggernaut E.T the same year. Now Carpenter was directing a film very similar to Spielberg’s, with a final form directly affected by that film’s success.
This is one of the few John Carpenter films which doesn’t feature a score written by himself. Jack Nitzsche’s evocative music nevertheless fits well with Carpenter’s synth-based style, and Carpenter often performs it live during his tours. The main theme featured on Carpenter’s 2017 compilation album Anthologies.
Starman’s transformation sequence is one of the more obvious clues that this is the director of The Thing at work, in a film that’s otherwise more family-friendly. This sequence is credited to Dick Smith, Rick Baker, and Stan Winston, three of the greats in their fields of makeup and animatronic effects.
Starman earned generally positive reviews but was not a box office smash. Still, star Jeff Bridges earned an Academy Award nomination for his performance, and the 1980s saw science fiction films increasingly gain notice by the Academy for their acting elements; a sign of the genre’s increasing respectability. Two years later Sigourney Weaver would earn an acting nomination for her role in Aliens.
BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION!
RELEASED: 10 August 1984
THE PLOT
Directed by the writer of the 70’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China, this description-defying genre mashup stars a pre-Robocop Peter Weller as physicist-neurosurgeon-martial arts master-secret agent-rock star Buckaroo Banzai, battling aliens from the 8th dimension. An ahead-of-its-time and of-its-time film which counts filmmakers like Wes Anderson among its fans.
CAST/CREW
Director: W.D. Richter
Writer: Earl Mac Rauch
Cast:
Peter Weller as Dr. Buckaroo Banzai
John Lithgow as Dr. Emilio Lizardo / Lord John Whorfin
Ellen Barkin as Penny Priddy / Peggy Banzai
Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Sidney Zweibel / "New Jersey"
Christopher Lloyd as John Bigbooté
Lewis Smith as Tommy "Perfect Tommy"
FACTOIDS
Apart from writing the 70’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China, director W.D Richter was notable for his Oscar nod for the script for the Robert Redford film Brubaker. Writer Earl Mac Rauch earned fame as the writer of Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York. Richter first discovered Rauch while he was still a student at USC. At the time, Richter was also a script analyst for Warner Brothers, and was gripped by Mac Rauch's second novel, Arkansas Adios.
Richter contacted Rauch through his publisher for permission to adapt his works into a screenplay, which years later resulted in them settling on trying to make a film of Rauch’s Buckaroo Banzai character. Richter’s new production company got the script into the hands of MGM/United Artists head David Begleman, who went on to form Sherwood; a small but powerful production company. Begleman exercised a buy-out option with United Artists for the property and offered it to rival Twentieth Century Fox.
Though released in the decade where the sci-fi franchise blockbuster reached its mature form, Buckaroo Banzai looks, moves and sounds quite different; which is no doubt a key reason why it became a cult classic, helped by the growing home video market. Banzai sports deadpan delivery, an arch tone, a low-fi set and prop aesthetic, genre-defying plotting, and a non-sequitur heavy script.
Writer Earl Mac Rauch’s long-gestating screenplay, welded to W.D Richter’s enthusiastic direction, creates a knowing but non-parodic romp laced with the eras proto-new age psychology and countercultural texts, inhaling everything from Star Wars, Close Encounters, NASA, pulp 30s shlock, Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds broadcast, and post-WWII atomic-paranoia and ‘Red’ fifth column scares. The final film represents just one Banzai story Rauch had written in a sprawling universe (the trailed sequel at the end of the film is not entirely a joke).
The cast is a murderer’s row of future sci-fi icons; including the future Robocop, the future Doctor Emmett Brown, the future Dr. Ian Malcolm/David Levinson, and the future Sergeant Zim/Kurgan. Peter Weller, a stage performer/musician -turned-screen actor who later would set up a sextet with fellow jazz lover Jeff Goldblum, was not the first choice of the studio but notably played Buckaroo totally straight-faced. Weller still claims today to not have a clue what the film is about.
The pivotal role of Dr. Emilio Lizardo was given to the established John Lithgow. Initially, the studio had suggested an unknown for the part. But Earl Mac Rauch, who had written the Strangelove-like character with Lithgow in mind, was determined to see him play the role, with deranged results thanks in no small part to Italian dialect coaching from the set’s tailor.
Banzai was in an unlikely home at major studio Twentieth Century Fox, which offered a $12m budget. Like many left-field films of the era (including this marathon’s own Repo Man), Banzai had a tortured rollout due to studio meddling. Fox’s supportive executives left mid-production leaving producer David Begelman to clash with Richter and attempt to cut scenes in post-production, there were demands for the cinematographer to be fired, and the studio ultimately had no idea how to market the final product (Peter Weller has described being asked himself by studio marketing staff “how do we market this thing?”). The film was pulled from theatres quickly.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Banzai was not a critical or commercial hit (grossing a mere $6 million on release). Time has been kinder: today it enjoys special edition releases on blu-ray, anniversary Q&A screenings, affectionate features in film magazines, and established filmmakers openly reference it. Directors who admire the film include Wes Anderson, who modelled a key scene in his 2004 film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou on Banzai’s music-video style group-walk end credits. Star Trek has a long history of referencing Banzai, from mentions of overthruster oscillators to an SS Buckaroo Banzai captained by John Whorfin.
REPO MAN
RELEASED: 2 March 1984
THE PLOT
British writer-director Alex Cox somehow got this grotty, hardcore punk-infused Reagan-era satire into the lap of major distributor Universal Studios as his debut film. The legendary Harry Dean Stanton stars as a weathered car repossessor in a weirded-out Los Angeles alongside Emilio Estevez as the nihilistic middle-class punk under his wing. The job becomes more than they bargained for when they get involved in repossessing a mysterious Chevy Malibu with a hefty reward attached to it and something freaky in the trunk. Featuring the ultimate early-eighties LA punk soundtrack with an earworm Iggy Pop title song.
CAST/CREW
Director: Alex Cox
Writer:Alex Cox
Cast:
Harry Dean Stanton as Bud
Emilio Estevez as Otto Maddox
Tracey Walter as Miller
Olivia Barash as Leila
Sy Richardson as Lite
Vonetta McGee as Marlene
Richard Foronjy as Otto Plettschner
Fox Harris as J. Frank Parnell
FACTOIDS
Repo Man originated in part from short films UCLA graduate and British native Alex Cox had been toying with, and from the experiences of real-life “repo man” Mark Lewis, who Cox spent three months driving around with in Los Angeles repossessing cars from defaulters. Cox had earlier reconnected with two former film school colleagues - producers Jonathan Wacks and Peter McCarthy - who agreed to produce Repo Man in their new Edge City production outfit after reading the first draft.
Repo Man became Edge City’s first theatrically-released feature film after they got the script into major studio Universal. How a major studio allowed such a defiantly odd movie to join its slate in 1983 is something of a mystery, but deserving of credit is executive producer Michael Nesmith, who was best known at that time for his role in the television show-rock band The Monkees and supported the film through to greenlight.
Director Cox found his debut a challenging shoot, including clashes with star Harry Dean Stanton (who famously declared: "I've worked with the greatest directors of all time. Francis Ford Coppola. Monte Hellman. You know why they're great? Because they let me do whatever the fuck I wanted!”), and the theft of the Chevy Malibu which Cox had actually been using to drive himself around LA when it wasn’t being used in the shoot. Nevertheless, he had a great degree of freedom, including in casting choices and music, and DP Robbie Mueller was already something of a legendary figure and highly respected by all on set.
According to Cox, most of the dialogue was lifted from his adventures with Mark Lewis and his colleagues, including the reference to pine tree air fresheners and “tense” situations. Miller's rambling tale about John Wayne being gay were based on stories told to Cox by a Venice eccentric named Swatty. He had worked for a glass company and insisted that he'd installed two-way mirrors in Wayne's home, and that the star had answered the door in a dress. As for the “repo code”, actor Harry Dean Stanton is credited with bringing disparate elements of dialogue together to form it.
A lot of the special effects were quick fixes. The aliens seen briefly in the picture were made out of condoms filled with water and dressed up in grass shirts. The hail scene at the end was accomplished by two crew members standing on a plank, dropping ice into the frame from buckets. The glowing car scene involved actually painting a whole vehicle with a reflective substance used for traffic signs, at a costly 600 dollars a bucket. The now-iconic car fresheners and generic food packaging props came about accidentally due to the film’s only sponsorship deals being struck with The Car-Freshener Corporation and Ralph’s Supermarkets; who are thanked in the end credits.
The film is known for its superb contemporary soundtrack, featuring American punk bands like Fear, the Circle Jerks, Plugz and Black Flag, as well as a specially commissioned "Repo Man" theme by Iggy Pop (performed by Sex Pistols and Blondie band members). Cox visited Iggy personally at his apartment, to explain the movie to him and request that he do a song for the soundtrack. Drawn by the carte blanche nature of the commission, Iggy apparently wrote the catchy title song in just minutes before performing it.
Like another film in this marathon - Buckaroo Banzai - Repo Man suffered from studio jitters during production and release. Universal pulled the film from distribution due to poor earnings after just a few weeks; Cox attributed the withdrawal to a change in command at Universal. The studio tried a variety of bizarre marketing approaches to reposition the film, aiming to attract a mainstream, teen audience by repackaging the arthouse film as a sentimental, romantic comedy with less provocative, crucifix earring-free poster art.
The studio came under pressure from parent company, MCA, to keep the film in circulation because the Repo Man punk-infused soundtrack was proving such a success. The soundtrack not only resurrected the theatrical run, it also stoked interest in the video release; Repo Man had the serendipity to enter the VHS market during the golden age of video stores.
Despite the marketing and release debacle, Repo Man actually was received with critical acclaim. The New York Times congratulated the first-time filmmakers for providing “a most engaging reprieve from Hollywood’s general run of laid-back comedies of simulated nastiness and half-baked nonchalance” whilst noted Chicago critic Roger Ebert claimed that it gave him "one of the biggest laughs I'd had at the movies in a long time."
If you didn’t catch Repo Man at the cinema or on VHS, there was the infamously edited television version of Repo Man; with “flip you” and “melon farmer” dubbed over saltier insults.
Repo Man was followed by two spinoffs; Waldo’s Hawaiian Holiday was published as a graphic novel in 2008, and Repo Chick was released in 2011. In February this year it was announced Cox was working on a theatrical sequel: Repo Man 2: The Wages of Beer.
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Starman © 1984 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Repo Man Images courtesy of Park Circus/Universal
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension © 1984 Orion Pictures Corporation. All Rights Reserved.