The following is my contribution to The Class of ‘84 Blogathon convening here at This Distracted Globe.

The Terminator (1984)
Screenplay by James Cameron & Gale Ann Hurd and William Wisher (uncredited), story by James Cameron
Directed by James Cameron
Produced by Pacific Western/ Hemdale Film Corporation
Running time: 108 minutes

Should I Care?
After three sequels and a Fox TV series each decreasing in quality and relevance, what’s most striking about The Terminator is its mood of unrelenting bleakness. Though exciting, its B-movie budget restraints keep this from escalating into the all-ages action spectacle its spin-offs would happily aspire to. Instead, this is one dark cup of coffee, a lurid, appropriately ultra-violent and nihilistic sci-fi horror flick. While I wouldn’t call this James Cameron’s masterpiece — his follow-up Aliens has my vote — it does feel like his most honest, sacrificing none of its ideas in a concession for broad commercial appeal.

The cast may seem unremarkable, but Arnold Schwarzenegger’s less than half an hour of screen time is a model of efficiency. In hindsight, there was no better performer on the planet to play the Terminator, the most iconic screen role of Schwarzenegger’s life. Linda Hamilton & Michael Biehn aren’t great actors, but fit within the economics the director was rather fortuitously stuck with here. Cameron — who doesn’t get enough credit for his strength as a writer — forges an unusually potent relationship between Sarah and Reese, while making a drive-in flick look and feel like something much bigger. Brad Fiedel’s electronic musical score remains one of my favorite of all time.

So, What’s This About?
In Los Angeles of the year 2029, machines have risen from the nuclear apocalypse they initiated against mankind to wage a losing war against the survivors. In desperation, a cybernetic organism known as a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) — part man, part machine — is sent back to Los Angeles of 1984. A soldier named Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) has followed the cyborg through time. Reese clothes and arms himself by breaking into a sporting goods store. The next day, the Terminator pays a visit to an unlucky gunsmith (Dick Miller) and begins assassinating the Sarah Connors in the L.A. phone book one at a time.

Waitress Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) realizes she may be in danger. She ducks into a nightclub and calls the cops, where Lt. Traxler (Paul Winfield) urges her to stay in public until they can get there. The Terminator reaches Sarah first. Reese manages to protect her and goes on to explain that the Terminator has targeted Sarah in order to eliminate her unborn son, who is destined to lead mankind to victory against the machines. Once captured by police, Traxler, his partner (Lance Henriksen) and a psychologist (Earl Boen) offer Sarah a far more rational explanation for her ordeal. This theory lasts as long as it takes for the Terminator to track Sarah to the police station and come after her.

Who Made It?
James Cameron grew up around Niagara Falls on the Canadian side of the border. He came to the United States when his family moved to Brea, California in 1971 and attended Fullerton College, scouring the USC library for information on film technology while putting himself through college as a machinist. Cameron would drop of school in 1978 and with $400,000 he raised from dentists in Tustin — looking to produce their own Star Wars — made a 12-minute special effects demo. This got the attention of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, whose head of visual effects hired Cameron to do front screen projection work on Battle Beyond the Stars (1980).

With battlefield speed, Cameron was promoted to production designer and to head of a visual effects camera unit at New World. He was named second unit director and got the chance to work with actors on Galaxy of Terror (1981). Dismissed by his executive producer after wrapping Piranha II, Cameron would write The Terminator, with a production manager named Gale Ann Hurd polishing his script and producing. William Wisher — a college buddy — pitched in additional dialogue and after years of rejection due to Cameron’s non-existent directing resume, Hurd finally secured $6.4 million in financing from Hemdale on what became one of the most profitable and iconic movies of all time.

How’d They Do It?
Arriving February 1981 in Rome to shoot his first film as a director — Piranha II — James Cameron realized that his Italian executive producer merely hired him as a contractual obligation to New World. As soon as filming wrapped, Cameron was sent home and the film was recut without him. He recalled, “When I got back from Piranha II, I knew that I was never going to get offered another movie unless I came up with something myself. I had to write a film. That made sense for me as a director. I thought it had to have effects, which justified my existence on the project, but I had to not price myself out of the kind of budget that they were likely to trust me with.”

“I thought, how can I introduce that otherness, that element of wonder, into a low budget environment that can be shot on the street, very conventionally, very guerilla filmmaking. So, I thought, fine. It’s present day. It’s present day Los Angeles. It’s the back streets of L.A. So, what happens next? Maybe it can come from outer space. It can come from the future. From a narrative standpoint, it starts to limit your options. It starts to lay out a certain way based on those givens. So I had a given: a contemporary environment that was determined by budget. No big movie stars, so maybe the main characters can be kind of young.”

Cameron backed into the idea of a robotic hitman sent through time, arrived on the title Terminator and wrote a treatment and most of a first draft screenplay. Gale Ann Hurd had been a production manager at New World and co-produced Smokey Bites the Dust. She helped polish Cameron’s script, which he sold to Hurd for the price of $1, striking a pact that he would keep her on as producer, if she agreed not to go with a more experienced director. Cameron recalled, “Our strength in doing the movie was pooling our resources and forming an impenetrable barrier to anyone who wanted to take it away from us or change to concept.”

Gale Ann Hurd spent the next two years trying to raise the financing for Terminator. “Some actors turned down the film because Jim was attached as the director. Buyers approached Jim as the director provided he got rid of me as producer. I trusted him and he trusted me. We held out and were able to do it essentially on our own terms. I thought if I just persevered I’d get the movie made. My idealism and my naiveté carried me through at least two years of trying to get it together and keep it together. If I’d known then what I know now — some 23 pictures later — I’m not sure I would have persevered.”

Hurd zeroed in on an executive at Hemdale Film Corporation named Barry Plumley. “Of course, he wouldn’t return my phone calls. Practically no one would.” Hurd found out that Plumley was selling a desk. She needed a desk and when they met to complete the transaction, Hurd handed him a 48-page treatment for Terminator. Plumley called the next day to tell her that he loved it. Hurd had also mentioned her project to a comrade from New World named Barbara Boyle, who was now senior vice president of Orion Pictures. “Barbara talked Mike Medavoy into reading the script, talked him into meeting with Jim and me.” Hemdale agreed to finance Terminator at $6.4 million, while Orion came on board as U.S. distributor.

To play the Terminator, Cameron wanted a survivor from Piranha II, Lance Henriksen. The actor pitched in on the drive for financing.”I went into Hemdale decked out like the Terminator. I put gold foil from a Vantage cigarette package in my teeth and waxed my hair back. Jim had put fake cuts on my head. I wore a ripped-up punk rock T-shirt, a leather jacket and boots up to my knees. It was a really exciting look. I was a scary person to be in a room with. I kicked the door open when I got there and the poor secretary just about swallowed her typewriter. I headed in to see the producer. I sat in the room with him and I wouldn’t talk to him. I just kept looking at him. After a few minutes of that he was ready to jump out the window!”

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name soon came up. Cameron recalled, “Arnold was never really slated to be in the picture. Mike Medavoy at Orion suggested Arnold play Michael Biehn’s character, Reese. I don’t think there’s anybody that would think that was a great idea. At that point in his career, doing 25 pages of expository dialogue and talking really fast and painting the picture of a future world we didn’t have the budget to actually visually create was not going to be Arnold’s strong suit, you know.” To play the Terminator, Medavoy suggested O.J. Simpson. Cameron immediately put The Juice out of his mind, but was intrigued with meeting Schwarzenegger.

Cameron revealed, “Over lunch I started thinking, This guy has got the most amazing face. I almost wanted to say, ‘Arnold, just stop talking for a second and be real still,’ but I was petrified. I thought, This guy would make a great Terminator. But he doesn’t want to play the Terminator. I went back to John Daly and said, ‘Forget it, it’s not going to work. But, boy, he’d make a hell of a Terminator.’ Anyway, the upshot is that the deal was closed that afternoon and we were making the movie after a two-year hold.” Schwarzenegger was already booked to spend the fall of 1983 in Mexico shooting a sequel to Conan the Barbarian, pushing a potential start date for Terminator back 10 months.

With the Austrian Oak on board, Cameron recalled, “What changed was the original concept as written — and the script didn’t change at all, not a single line of dialogue was changed — but the visual concept was that the Terminator was this anonymous character who could walk out of a crowd, just one face in a crowd, could walk up and kill you, for no apparent reason, except for what your life would mean in some future time. And that concept changed, because Arnold doesn’t vanish into a crowd. It took on a slightly more hyperbolic visual style, a little larger than life. It still played sort of realistically, but it became more nightmarish.”

Linda Hamilton was initially only in the running to play Sarah Connor. Cameron revealed, “She was among a number of actresses I saw. I think it narrowed down to her, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rosanna Arquette. At the time, Jennifer Jason Leigh had only done a couple of TV movies. She is an awesome actress, but Linda was great in the part.” Despite auditioning with a Southern accent because he’d spent that morning reading for a production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Michael Biehn would be cast as Reese. After months spent storyboarding and designing the film — as well writing Alien II and First Blood Part II on assignment — Cameron finally called action on Terminator March 1984 in Los Angeles.

Cameron recalled, “The executive producer begged us to write more of the scenes as daytime, because of the perceived cost difference, but, you know, I plunged madly on. It seemed so important stylistically to keep the film in night, a night film, as much as possible. And so we kept it that way. And I don’t think it really impacted the cost all that much.” Terminator was shot mostly with a single camera by journeyman Adam Greenberg, while Stan Winston labored up to the hour to build a mechanical Terminator for the climax. Fantasy II Effects executed the special effects shots, including a stop-motion puppet animated by Peter Kleinow.

Barbara Boyle mused, “Now, everybody in town knew of that Terminator script because it had been all around. Everybody knew that it had a woman as producer who co-wrote the script with some guy with no credits called Jim Cameron and that he came with the package as the director, that’s why it hadn’t been picked up. That’s always dicey.” She added, “Hemdale was scared and why wouldn’t they be? The director didn’t talk much, he drew pictures. The producer’s only credit was as an associate on Smokey Bites the Dust. No one at Orion had confidence in the movie.” Seven months after shooting commenced and The was inserted in its title, Terminator opened October 26, 1984 in the United States at 1,005 theaters.

In its opening weekend, The Terminator was one of six new releases: the action comedy American Dreamer was from Warner Bros., Brian DePalma’s thriller Body Double from Columbia, the drama Firstborn from Paramount, the Paul McCartney starring Give My Regards To Broad Street from Fox and a horror compilation film titled Terror In the Aisles from Universal. To the surprise of most in the film industry, The Terminator debuted #1 at the box office. After adding 100 theaters the following weekend, instead of its attendance dropping, it actually went up. The low budget sci-fi flick would go on to earn $38.3 million in the United States and add $40 million overseas.

On At the Movies, Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert hadn’t even seen The Terminator before it opened. The critics bought a ticket just like everyone else and would split over whether the film was any good. Roger Ebert: “In fact, this is a surprising movie. It’s violent, it’s bloody, it’s sadistic, but it’s also well-acted and directed, it is R-rated — don’t go unless you like strong action pictures — but I must say, I did like it.” Gene Siskel: “Yeah, I was rooting for it, I mean, I thought, everyone’s talking about it and I saw it a little bit late and I was not impressed.” Siskel added, “As an action picture, I thought it was not particularly well made, but the love story, you’re right, is kind of nice.”

Emboldened by his success, James Cameron ran into trouble with outspoken science fiction writer Harlan Ellison. As Terminator was headed into production, friends had tipped Ellison off that its script bore a strong resemblance to two episodes Ellison had authored for the 1960s TV series The Outer Limits, “Soldier” and “Demon With A Glass Hand”. Ellison was later contacted by Starlog Magazine and notified that Cameron had boasted of “ripping off a few Outer Limits” to form the basis of Terminator. Hemdale would settle out of court, writing Ellison a check for $75,000 and amending the end credits of all future prints of The Terminator to acknowledge Ellison’s contributions.

Nonetheless, 15 years later Cameron was still proud of what he considered his first film as director. “So I think from the standpoint of the Hollywood mainstream, they got up one morning and opened the trades and went, ‘What the hell is this movie that’s number one this weekend?’ And, by the way, it was number one the next weekend and the weekend after that. It dominated the Thanksgiving weekend against a couple of big pictures, like Dune, for example, and 2010, which were big studio pictures. Actually, 2010 was a big studio picture and Dune was a high-end independent film. But these were megabuck movies and Terminator just steam rolled over them. And it had been done by these nonentities.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“James Cameron – How To Direct a Terminator” By Thomas McKelvey Cleaver. Starlog Magazine, December 1984

“James Cameron Interview” By Kenneth Turan. US Magazine, August 1991

“The Making of The Terminator: A Retrospective”. 1992

The Directors: Take One. By Robert J. Emery. TV Books (1999)

Women Who Run the Show: How a Brilliant and Creative New Generation of Women Stormed Hollywood, 1973-2000. By Mollie Gregory. St. Martin’s Press (2002)

“The Terminator: Past Perfect” By Ben Braddock. SFX, September 2003

What the *&#! Is This About?
In Los Angeles – overpopulated and choked in pollution – of the year 2019, the Tyrell Corporation leads the field of robot design with the “Replicant,” a being virtually identical to a human, but superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence. After a mutiny in an off-world colony, Replicants have been declared illegal on Earth, where they are tracked down and “retired” by special police known as blade runners. One of these blade runners administers an empathy test known as the Voight-Kampff to Tyrell employees in an attempt to screen out possible Replicants. One of his subjects – Leon (Brion James) – is pushed too far by the test and shoots the officer. Ex-blade runner Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is summoned by his old captain (M. Emmet Walsh) to hunt down four Replicants – two male and two female – who have arrived in L.A. for reasons unknown.

Paired with a cop (Edward James Olmos) who speaks an amalgam of French/German/Hungarian, Deckard goes to see Dr. Tyrell (Joe Turkel). He learns that a new model of Replicant – the Nexus 6 – has been implanted with memories so real that it may actually believe itself to be human. Designed to develop its own emotional responses, the Nexus 6 has been engineered with a 4-year life span. Tyrell has Deckard administer the Voight-Kampff Test to his secretary Rachael (Sean Young). Deckard realizes that she’s a Nexus 6. Rachael does not react well to news that she’s an artificial being and seeks Deckard out in an effort to cope with this. Meanwhile, the other escaped Replicants – combat model Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), assassin Zhora (Joanna Cassidy) and pleasure model Pris (Daryl Hannah) – befriend a lonely robotics designer (William Sanderson) in attempt to infiltrate the Tyrell Corporation, seeking reprieves on their lives and the meaning of their existence.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Philip K. Dick capped a prolific decade that included 19 novels, 27 short stories and a Hugo Award in 1963 with the publishing of his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?‘ in 1968. In a phone interview with Paul M. Sammon a little more than a year before his death in 1981, Dick discussed the novel’s genesis. “It stems from an interest on my part in the problem of differentiating the authentic human being from the reflux machine, which I call an android … Where for me, the word ‘android’ is a metaphor for people who are physiologically human but psychologically behaving in a non-human way. I got interested in this when I was doing research for Man In the High Castle and I was studying the Nazi mentality. And I discovered that although these people were highly intelligent, they were definitely deficient in some manner in appropriate affect, appropriate emotion that would accompany the intellectual process.”

After struggling as both a flamenco dancer and a screenwriter in the 1970s, Hampton Fancher thought he would take a shot at being a film producer. Fancher recalled, “I thought I would produce a movie. And this guy – Jim Maxwell – who’s a close friend, knows me well, said, ‘You might, I think science fiction’s gonna happen.’ And he said, ‘Do you know who Philip K. Dick is?’ I said, no. He said, ‘Well there’s a book called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?‘ And I said, okay, I’ll read that. I read it. I didn’t like it that much. But I thought, okay, that’s commercial. Here’s a thru-line: bureaucratic detective chasing androids. In ’78 or so, my friend Brian Kelly, he had $5,000. He said, ‘Maybe you could get an option and that might be a good commercial project that you could get behind, and, you know, make some money.’ That’s all we’re talking about, is making some money.”

Brian Kelly zeroed in on producer Michael Deeley with the project. Deeley recalled, “I’d been pursued for about two years by Brian Kelly – who’s a very close friend of mine – who had this idea in mind to make a movie, based on Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And I’d first read it and thought: this wasn’t very interesting.” Fancher’s take on the material was cerebral and dialogue driven, a cautionary tale of over population and ecological disaster that largely took place in rooms. Fancher pressed ahead anyway, first with a treatment, then several drafts of a screenplay. “The intellectual aspects of the screenplay were taken from my response to the death of animal life on this planet, and what that meant. That’s probably the thing that saw me through the first draft, was I had a passion about that, and so my affection for the project was consistent.”

On the strength of Hampton Fancher’s adaptation, Michael Deeley ultimately agreed to produce the film, opting for the title Dangerous Days. His first choice to direct was Ridley Scott, who was mixing Alien in England at the time. Scott recalled, “I said, ‘I don’t really want to do another science fiction, I’ve just finished one. So, but I’ll read it.’ I read the script, which was Hampton Fancher and it was called Dangerous Days. And I turned it down.” Scott’s friend and associate Ivor Powell had gotten a hold of the script and had a different reaction. Powell recalled, “And I said, ‘Listen, I think we should give this a second thought. I really think this is powerful and emotional and really interesting.” The idea stuck with Scott and when he was unable to crack an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune for producer Dino De Laurentiis agreed to direct Dangerous Days. Hampton Fancher had never cared for that title, and appropriated one from William S. Burroughs that he liked better: Blade Runner.

Filmways agreed to finance a budget, but Deeley recalled, “We’d spent about two and a half million by the time it became perfectly clear that the world we were building was much bigger than twelve and a half million dollars. Much, much bigger.” As sets were being constructed, Deeley brokered a three-way arrangement to secure alternate financing and keep the project alive. Producer Alan Ladd Jr. – who had a deal with Warner Bros. – put up $7.5 million for U.S. distribution rights. Singapore movie mogul Sir Run-Run Shaw also invested that sum, for the film’s foreign rights. Another $7 million came from producers Jerry Perenchio and Bud Yorkin, who received TV and home video rights and agreed to finance the completion budget, should Blade Runner go over schedule.

Meanwhille, Hampton Fancher was struggling to conceptualize what Ridley Scott wanted to see. Scott recalled, “The hunter falls in love with the hunted, except they never go outside the apartment. It’s very interior. I want to take them outside the door. Once we go outside the door, this world has to support the thesis that she’s android, humanoid, robot.” He added, “We got up to a point where Hampton was just getting exhausted. Go back to the anvil, back to the anvil, back to the anvil.” David Peoples was approached to deliver a shooting script. Scott added, “Peoples I think is more – and I mean this in the best possible way – is simpler? Hampton is more cerebral. And for the most part this was very cerebral. And I thought, actually, bringing in something like Peoples would maybe create some fresh air in the corridors to make it move. Because my danger as a director is I tend to get very cerebral and get engaged with darkness and detail.” One of Peoples’ contributions ended up being the idea that Roy Batty would save Deckard’s life.

After Dustin Hoffman spent several months attached to the role of Deckard – moving further away from the filmmakers’ vision as time progressed – actress Barbara Hershey mentioned to Hampton Fancher the name Harrison Ford. A visit that Michael Deeley and Ridley Scott made to England to watch dailies from Raiders of the Lost Ark – then shooting at Pinewood Studios – won them over. Ford recalled, “I remember that I read a script, which I thought was interesting. At the first version that I read of it, of the film, had some issues, I had some issues with. There was a voiceover narration attached to the original script, and I said to Ridley that I played a detective who does no detecting. How about we take some of this information that’s in the voice-overs and put it into scenes, and so that the audience could discover the information, discover the character through seeing him in the context of what he does, rather than being told about it. And some of that survived, and some of it didn’t.”

With conceptual designer Syd Mead creating the industrial look of the film – cars, streets, buildings and neon – Blade Runner commenced shooting March 1981 on the Warner Bros. backlot in Burbank. Working in the American film industry for the first time, Ridley Scott mused, “There’s nothing worse when you’ve done two and a half hours of commercials – and I know I’ve got a very good eye – in three seconds I can give you a set-up, having walked in the room without ever seeing it before. So I don’t like discussion. I know exactly what I want, and I want to walk in and say ‘Do it.’ That’s the director’s job. The director’s not meant to stand there and consult with half a dozen people in the room.” In addition to Scott’s brusque communication skills, filming nights under heavy rain and smoke effects wore down the crew – many of whom quit – as well as some of the cast, with Harrison Ford seething through most of the shoot.

A test screening of Blade Runner was held in Dallas in March 1982. Production illustrator Tom Southwell recalled, “Everybody was expecting a heroic follow-up to Raiders of the Lost Ark or Star Wars and the way it was advertised on television – with only the visual effects shots of a flying car going over a futuristic city and sort of a fight sequence – doesn’t prepare you for the traumatic, emotional side that there is in the film that kind of leaves you sort of broken.” Specific objections raised at the test screening were that the film was too confusing, too dark, too slow and ended too abruptly. Scott addressed these concerns by filming a brighter ending, with Ford and Sean Young escaping to the pristine countryside, and inserting voiceover narration by Ford to help audiences along with the plot.

While its visual design won acclaim, many critics were left with a bad taste to the overall film. Janet Maslin, the New York Times: “Science-fiction devotees may find Blade Runner a wonderfully meticulous movie and marvel at the comprehensiveness of its vision. Even those without a taste for gadgetry cannot fail to appreciate the degree of effort that has gone into constructing a film so ambitious and idiosyncratic … But Blade Runner is a film that special effects could have easily run away with, and run away with it they have. And it’s also a mess, at least as far as its narrative is concerned.” Pauline Kael, the New Yorker: “Blade Runner doesn’t engage you directly; it forces passivity on you. It sets you down in this lopsided maze of a city, with its post-human feeling, and keeps you persuaded that something bad is about to happen. Some the scenes seem to have six subtexts but no text, and no context either.” Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun Times: “Blade Runner is a stunningly interesting visual achievement, but a failure as a story.”

In June 1982 during its first weekend of release in the U.S., Blade Runner opened big; only E.T. was drawing a bigger crowd. But as word of mouth spread – and audiences flocked to Rocky III or Star Trek II - the film’s commercial prospects sank. Grossing $32.6 million in the U.S., Blade Runner was not only deemed a commercial disappointment, but a creative disappointment by some of the people who’d worked on it. In 2007, associate producer Ivor Powell recalled, “For me, it’s still – emotionally – falls short of total satisfaction because I just think there is an emotional logic and a sort of a narrative logic that doesn’t run as true as I feel that it should do, and in a sense I felt that what we made was an incredibly beautiful looking – as one would expect with Rid – but it’s almost like an art movie.”

Accordingly, Blade Runner became a staple of midnight screenings on college campuses or at revival houses. Then in 1990, a work print seen only at test screenings in Denver and Dallas was briefly exhibited in Los Angeles. Popular demand for a definitive version of Blade Runner led to Ridley Scott being permitted to supervise a “Director’s Cut” in 1992. The much maligned voiceover narration and the upbeat ending were both removed and 12 cryptic seconds of Deckard dreaming of a unicorn was inserted. In addition to audiences who’d missed it, critics who’d seen Blade Runner and given it a lackluster appraisal started changing their assessment. By 2007, Roger Ebert had begrudgingly added Blade Runner to his list of Great Movies, amending his 1982 review by writing, “I have been assured that my problems in the past with Blade Runner represent a failure of my own taste and imagination, but if the film was perfect, why has Sir Ridley continued to tinker with it, and now released his fifth version? I guess he’s only human.”

Commenting in 2007 on the reception of Blade Runner, writer-director Frank Darabont mused, “’82 I think was owned by E.T. It’s a brilliant film, I’m taking absolutely nothing away from it, but it was definitely happy comfort food. It always will be. It’s one of the best examples of that kind of film ever. I’m not damning it with faint praise. It’s wonderful. But I think that everyone was so plugged into the happy comfort food at that time that they weren’t giving movies like Blade Runner a chance, or John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing.” Also in 2007, special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull summed up what he finds enduring about Blade Runner: “We’re in a movie business where most movies are disposable commodities. They’re the summer blockbuster. I’m not going to name what they are, but they come and go in weeks and, bye bye. Nobody wants to resurrect them. Nobody wants to see them again. So the ones that are really truly well made – the kind of Casablancas of science fiction – survive, and get seen over and over.”

Should I Care?
Instead of reassuring the audience with a hopeful vision of the future, Blade Runner is an emotional downpour. The atmosphere is choked with smoke and rain. Animal life is endangered. The background dialects are impenetrable. Citizens with the means have fled Earth. Those who’ve stayed behind struggle to relate to each other as humans because in the film’s vision of the future, we’ve replicated life beyond the point to retain what it means to be human. The strengths and weaknesses of Blade Runner come down to it being one of the grandest art films of all time, second only to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The story never adheres to a straightforward detective mystery. Where the Replicants are or how Deckard finds them is the least interesting business in the picture.

What Fancher and Peoples do so well in their script is pose questions about what it means to be human, and where we might be headed if we continue to lose sight of that. Rutger Hauer, Brion James, Daryl Hannah and Joanna Cassidy perform some of the finest work of their careers as the Replicants – the real heroes of the film – as does Harrison Ford, who brings the right amount of downbeaten sleaze to his role. Blade Runner is deliberate and comes close to paralyzing the viewer with stimulus overload, but Ridley Scott’s eye for detail and his design genius are never in question. The stunning cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth and haunting electronic score by Vangelis add immensely to the well-deserved re-evaluation of Blade Runner as a classic.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner. By Paul M. Sammon. HarperPrism (1996)

Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner. Blade Runner (Five-Disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition). Warner Home Video (2007)

What the *&#! Is This About?
In Antarctica, a Siberian Husky races across a field of ice. In the sky above, a helicopter appears, with a man on board shooting at the dog. The animal makes it to a United States research station manned by 12 men. These include a burnt out pilot named MacReady (Kurt Russell), who rather than let a computer beat him at chess, pours a bottle of Jim Beam into the wiring. The circling helicopter gets the attention of the men and when it lands, a man steps out babbling in Norwegian. He opens fire on the dog and when he hits one of the Americans, is shot and killed by the base commander (Donald Moffat). Fearing the Norwegian camp might be in serious trouble, physician Dr. Copper (Richard Dysart) has MacReady fly him there to investigate.

MacReady and Copper discover the camp gutted by fire and most of its inhabitants dead. They also uncover a block of ice that appears to have been thawed out, while outside in a burn pile, they find the remains of something that looks like it might have been human. The men take the specimen and stacks of videotape back for study. The men don’t know exactly what happened to the Norwegians, but are getting the drift that it was bad. After wandering the station all day, the Siberian Husky is placed in a kennel with the other dogs. There, it transforms into a hideous creature, part crab, part spider, part dog. By the time the men get there, the Thing has attacked and partially absorbed two of the dogs. The ill-tempered Childs (Keith David) blasts it with a flamethrower, but the Thing escapes into the ceiling.

The station biologist Blair (Wilford Brimley) theorizes what they’re dealing with is an organism that imitates other life forms, absorbing its prey and producing a perfect imitation. Studying the Norwegian tapes, MacReady flies to a dig site, where he finds a massive spacecraft buried in the ice. By the time the station realizes that the alien remains may not be dead, at least one of the men is partially absorbed by the Thing. Calculating that if it were to reach a populated area, the organism could infect all life on Earth within 27,000 hours, Blair smashes the radio. Isolated and unsure who they can trust, the men look to MacReady, who comes up with a test he believes will prove who’s who.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Who Goes There? was a short story by John W. Campbell Jr., published under the pen name “Don A. Stuart” in Astounding Science Fiction magazine in 1938. The story concerned scientists in Antarctica who discover a spacecraft buried in the ice. They thaw out an occupant, only to find the alien has the ability to assume the shape and memories of anything it devours. The men are unsure who among them has been taken over by an alien. Campbell’s story became the inspiration for a Howard Hawks production released in 1951 as The Thing From Another World. The film version presented the Thing as a lumbering monster played by James Arness. The picture was a great commercial success and along with The Day The Earth Stood Still, ushered in an era of science fiction – sometimes provocative, almost always cheaply produced – in Hollywood.

25 years later, producer Stuart Cohen optioned the screen rights to Campbell’s original story. He brought in producers Lawrence Turman and David Foster, securing a development deal with Universal Pictures. Kim Henkel & Tobe Hooper worked on the project, but Cohen wasn’t impressed with the script they delivered. A classmate of Cohen’s from USC Film School named John Carpenter had been a fan of The Thing most of his life, particularly after reading the short story that inspired the movie while he was in high school. Having directed one low budget hit after another – Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, The Fog, Escape From New York – Carpenter was offered the job of updating The Thing for Universal. The director recalled, “The John W. Campbell story Who Goes There? was basically an Agatha Christie, kind of Ten Little Indians: This creature is in your midst and he’s imitating either one or all of us. Who’s human and who isn’t? And that kind of an idea really fascinated me. So we went in that sense back to that idea, with Bill Lancaster and his screenplay.”

Bill Lancaster recalled, “Well the short story itself was, I wouldn’t say it’s a really great, although it’s a very admired one in the science fiction realm. Back in the late ‘30s and I think it was the first story to deal with this shape shifting, body snatcher type element and all that stuff. Seriously, that’s not what 100% attracted me to the piece, it was more the ambiance and this, all the characters involved and the mood of it, and the enclosure, and elements of the paranoia. And the short story was a stepping stone to take advantage of all those elements. From the story and the film, I loved the idea of being trapped in Antarctica, these people working up there for whatever reasons, horrible winter, freezing conditions, cold, and there’s a monster lurking.”

With Kurt Russell heading the ensemble cast and a $13.7 million budget, second unit shooting for The Thing commenced June 1981 on a glacier above Juneau, Alaska. Interiors began filming August 1981 on the Universal lot in Los Angeles before the production moved to Stewart, British Columbia in December for two weeks of shooting the ice camp exteriors. Carpenter felt his challenge was making the Thing seem as real as possible. “See, I grew up as a kid watching science fiction and monster movies and it was always a guy in a suit. Or sometimes it was kind of a bad puppet, like It Conquered The World comes to mind right now, Roger Corman’s movie, this kind of vegetable monster, kind of going like this woodenly, and my fear was, they’ll laugh at us, you know, they’ll laugh at it, it’ll be a joke. I mean, even as great as the movie was – and Alien was a terrific movie – it’s still in the very end, up stood this big guy in a suit. I don’t want a suit, I want something that’s alive.”

John Carpenter turned to makeup effects artist Rob Bottin, whose pioneering transformations for The Howling had been devised the year previous when Bottin was only 20 years old. The director remembered, “He came in with a wild concept, which is that the Thing can look like anything. It doesn’t look like one monster, it looks like anything, and out of this changing shape, this imitation, comes all the creatures throughout the universe that the Thing has ever imitated and it uses these various forms. And Rob was very daring in his approach. Let’s say even sometimes I was doubtful as to whether he’d pull it off.” Rob Bottin recalled, “The interesting thing about The Thing, right, and the fact that it was actually done a long time ago, you know, people actually think that the imaging and special effects and creature work or whatever hold up to this day. Even in light of the fact that there are computer graphics and things now. And I think part of the reason for that is you just can’t beat wild imagination, you know?”

Director of photography Dean Cundey recalled, “One of the tricks of working with rubber – whether it’s a mask or a makeup appliance, or whether it’s a completely fabricated creature – is lighting it carefully so that it looks real, so that there’s a, so you don’t give away the tricks, the little seams and paint and wires and all the things that are necessary to make it work. And Rob was always very sensitive about his creatures, whether there was too much light on them. We always sort of joked that if it was up to Rob, he would build the creatures, you know, to be incredibly interesting and imaginative, and then not put any light on them, because he was afraid of showing them. So it was always a case of Rob wanting less light, less light. So we developed techniques of little tiny spots of light and shadows, and also that you never really looked blatantly at a rubber creature.”

When The Thing went before audiences for two test screenings, it became apparent that the film might have done its job too well. It was so unsettling, John Carpenter remembered a man running out of a screening to throw up. Kurt Russell stated, “A lot of the things though that bothered the audience – more than the monster – were the poking around the monster, you know, and poking around human beings that had been burnt.” Speaking in 1999, Carpenter put the film’s reception in historical perspective. “Two weeks before our movie comes out, they release this other movie called E.T. And there’s this burst of love all around this movie. I guess the country was going through a recession and there were tough times. Audiences wanted an up/cry and E.T. gave it to them. Two weeks later, out comes my movie. And my movie is exactly just the opposite of E.T. It is not an up/cry. It is a downer. It is the grimmest thing you have ever seen. Here I thought I had made this really great movie, right? “

Arriving in theaters June 1982, the picture was reviled by critics. Vincent Canby, the New York Times: “John Carpenter’s The Thing is a foolish, depressing, overproduced movie that mixes horror with science fiction to make something that is fun as neither one thing or the other … There may be a metaphor in all this, but I doubt it.” Pauline Kael, the New Yorker: “In its own putting-the-squeeze-on-the-audience terms, Alien was effective. This picture isn’t (except for an early episode with a husky trying to escape the hunters shooting at it from a plane). It appears to be a film of limited imagination with unlimited horror effects.” Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun Times: “The Thing is a great barf-bag movie, all right, but is it any good? I found it disappointing, for two reasons: the superficial characterizations and the implausible behavior of the scientists on that icy outpost.”

John Carpenter added, “But even during the preview stage I knew something was wrong because I had this sixteen year old ask me what happened at the end – which one of them was the Thing? I told her she had to use her imagination. She told me she hated that. So I realized I was in deep trouble with that film. And I was right. The industry turned against me because they thought I had gone too far with the gore. I think it probably changed my career. I had made a deal during the filming of The Thing to make another film for Universal called Firestarter, a Stephen King novel. A friend of mine, Bill Phillips, had written a great screenplay and we already were scouting locations. Universal was so upset and so shocked by the reviews and the fact that The Thing had not made the kind of money they expected. I lost the directing job on Firestarter, even though they had to pay me my salary. I was in shock. I didn’t work for eight or nine months. I didn’t have anything. I thought my career was going to end.”

Hit by the hostile reaction and the film’s dismal $13 million take at the box office in the U.S., Carpenter’s career never made a full recovery. Looking back 17 years later, the director recalled, “My reaction, I was pretty stunned by it at the time because I made a really grueling, dark film and I just don’t think audiences in 1982 wanted to see that. They wanted to see E.T. And The Thing was the opposite of that. The thing that disturbed me about it was that the fans turned out hating it so much. There was a famous magazine back then called Cinemafantastique which was loved and hated by various directors and they had a cover with a story that said ‘Is this the most hated film of all time?’ which didn’t do a lot to assuage my ego, but I’m very proud of the movie. I’ve always loved it.”

Joining Carpenter in 1995 to record an audio commentary for the film’s release on laserdisc, Kurt Russell remarked, “There are some movies that you do – I’ve done more I guess than my fair share of them – and I do think that, you know, maybe that I sort of have to look at that and realize something; that I have a tendency to like movies that perhaps aren’t going to be accepted at the time and – if they’re done well though – they will be accepted later on. And I think that with the advent of video, that’s a great, I’m very happy about that because ultimately you’re making movies for the enjoyment of as many people as possible. And I like that there’s video and that people can take it and make their judgment later on and perhaps without the politics of the time or without whatever’s in the air at the time to set a tone to get in the way of just the project and just the story itself.”

Should I Care?
With Conan the Barbarian and Poltergeist both selling popcorn the same month The Thing was unleashed in theaters, only someone with selective memory would suggest that gore or visceral intensity were somehow responsible for its box office failure. But just as The Thing From Another World would still be a terrific movie without the monster, you could cut the violence out of John Carpenter’s remake and still find – with its unremittingly stark chords and pulsating doomsday pace – one dark fucking movie audiences just weren’t in the mood for at the time. It refuses to trump good over evil, clarity over ambiguity, and that becomes what is most troubling about it, as well as special. Now regarded as a masterpiece by many of the fans who rejected this dose of strong medicine on its original release, The Thing remains a masterwork of technical acuity, pioneering makeup effects and most of all story, which probes what it means to be human, and whether or not you’d even realize you were an imitation if the Thing took you over.

The apocalyptic vision of The Thing has grabbed hold of me and as the years pass, refuses to let go. The gothic lighting by cinematographer Dean Cundey, rich production design by John Lloyd and the ominous musical score by Ennio Morricone are all just perfect. The fact that the makeup effects still hold up as some of the most amazing ever captured on camera is a testament to Rob Bottin; without his imagination, the movie would not be nearly as nightmarish as it turned out to be. As for John Carpenter, this represents the director at the peak of his creative energy. While his career may have taken a different turn had the movie gone over well, The Thing has inspired directors Robert Rodriguez, Frank Darabont, Neil Marshall and others with its unmistakable tenor of doom and relentlessness. It’s still schooling the horror moviemakers of today.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
The Thing – Collector’s Edition. Universal Home Video (1998)

The Directors: Take One. By Robert J. Emery. TV Books (1999)

Synopsis
“How long do we have to keep watching this crap?” whines a pampered beauty (Anitra Ford) while her boy toy Paul Crewe (Burt Reynolds) lays next to her in bed. Crewe finally has enough of her harangue, throws on the clothes she bought for him and snatches the keys to her Maserati on his way out. When she tries to stop him, Crewe pushes her onto the floor. Whipping through the streets like a speed demon, Crewe outfoxes the law and parks his ex’s sports car in a bay. He then finds his way to a bar to wait for the Highway Patrol.

Dealt a minimum eighteen month sentence at “Citrus State Prison,” Crewe is brought before the dapper but sadistic Warden Hazen (Eddie Albert). Hazen hopes the former All Pro quarterback will coach the warden’s pride and joy: a semi-pro football team consisting of the guardsmen. Captain Knauer (Ed Lauter) and his baton convince Crewe that his input is definitely not needed, while his fellow prisoners shun him. The joint’s best smuggler, Caretaker (James Hampton) explains why: “You could have robbed banks, sold dope or stole your grandmother’s pension checks, and none of us would have minded. But shaving points off a football game, man, that’s un-American.”

The warden threatens to deny Crewe’s parole unless he leads a team of convicts in a tune-up game against the guardsmen before the start of their season. A hulk named Samson (Richard Keil) and “the baddest cat in the joint” – a black belt named Shokner (Bob Tessier) – recognize the once-in-a-lifetime chance to have a free crack at the guards. Crewe confides to their coach – former pro baller Nate Scarboro (Michael Conrad) – that this is just a game to him. All he wants to do is survive it. Scarboro contends that this isn’t a game to the warden. “He’s givin’ us this chance to be free for a few hours, try and be men again, so he can destroy us.”

Production history
The Longest Yard began with a character producer Al Ruddy knew, an All American football star who was drafted number one by the Rams. He married a woman of great wealth that Ruddy had gone to USC with, but the All American blew out his knee. Ruddy ran into the couple at a mens store in Westwood, where the star was trying on tweed jackets. “And he says to her, ‘Well, should I take the blue or the green or the brown?’ She says, ‘Take all three because when I kick you out you’ll need them.’ So I started hypothesizing taking that character with a rich woman, beats her up, ends up in jail and gets one last chance, one last chance to find dignity for himself.”

Ruddy ultimately went to Utah to visit Burt Reynolds on the set of The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing. He didn’t have a script, just a story, which he pitched to the rising star. Reynolds – who’d played halfback for Florida State University – loved the concept and suggested Ruddy direct it. The producer knew someone better. With a screenplay commissioned by Tracy Keenan Wynn, Ruddy landed Robert Aldrich. Even though the most recent film Ruddy had produced – The Godfather – was playing to record box office around the world, Paramount remained so dubious about the commercial prospects of The Longest Yard that the studio shuttered the movie three weeks before filming was set to begin.

Shooting finally commenced in October 1973 at Georgia State Prison in Reidsville. Without the budget to hire the actors he’d worked with in movies like The Dirty Dozen, Aldrich substituted Ernest Borgnine with Michael Conrad in the role of Nate Scarboro, and instead of Richard Jaeckel, cast Ed Lauter as Captain Knauer. Equally unknown to movie audiences were the pro football players who made their acting debuts in the picture: Dino Washington, Ernie Wheelwright, Ray Ogden, Pervis Atkins and Sonny Sixkiller were cast in the Mean Machine, while Ray Nitschke, Joe Kapp and Mike Henry played guardsmen.

The script was so hard-edged that Crewe was shot at the end, but Aldrich – having never directed a comedy – dumped that idea and used Reynolds’ charm to lighten the mood. Released August 1974, audiences embraced the movie, while critics dismissed it. Over time, The Longest Yard topped lists of the best sports movies of all time. For its reissue on DVD in 2005, Ruddy recalled, “The interesting thing about the movie is this was the first sports movie that had ever become a big commercial success at the time. This kicked off a whole genre of movies. Paul Newman did Slap Shot, there was suddenly twenty sports movies. Nobody wanted to do this movie … Nobody wanted to touch sports.”

Opinion
The Longest Yard may seem chock full of juvenile mayhem with little substance, but it’s endured as a classic because of how short tempered, surly and gloriously mean it is under the surface. Paul Crewe throws his girlfriend to the floor, endangers the city of Savannah by tearing around in a Maserati and shows nothing but contempt for both authority and the men he’s serving time with, playing one against the other for his own personal benefit. Somewhere in there, he discovers his dignity and gets one play to turn his life around. Rarely will you see a movie combine raucous humor, gritty drama and slick entertainment as beautifully as this one does.

Instead of looking for the joke, the writers, directors and actors seem fully committed to playing football here. The 47-minute grudge match which concludes the film works both as a piece of technical virtuosity – with Aldrich and editor Michael Luciano utilizing split screens and slo-mo – as well as brass tacks filmmaking that shows the game unfold as if we were in the bleachers. As for the players, they seem like they’re trying to stomp each other as opposed to play acting. The final scene – where Ed Lauter has a second to use between humanity and brutality – puts the film in the caliber of a Sam Peckinpah western as opposed to a mass entertainment cranked out by Hollywood.

Vince Leo at QWipster’s Movie Reviews writes, “Clearly, The Longest Yard is a bit of a mixed bag, alternately silly and somber from scene to scene in a way that doesn’t always mesh.  The direction by Robert Aldrich is perhaps the biggest reason why film scholars have occasionally praised the film, although one could presumably argue that Aldrich simply didn’t know how to make a sports movie and instead made a political movie instead.  There is an existential quality to the film that makes it transcend being a mere ‘pros vs. cons’ football flick.  There is a moral center to it that is sometimes difficult to grasp, yet always present, showing that you can take a man’s freedom but you should never take a man’s dignity along with it.”

Mike Sutton at DVD Times writes, “On the surface, The Longest Yard is simply a vehicle for Burt Reynolds and, as such, it is a triumph. Reynolds was one of the first actors to enjoy being a celebrity to such a degree that his public persona gradually became tangled up with his characters. Though always capable, when the spirit moved him, of genuinely interesting performances – Deliverance, Hustle, Starting Over, Boogie Nights – Reynolds has always seemed most at home when playing something not too far from himself. Indeed, Paul Crewe could be Reynolds’ own comment on his fame as half-beefcake, half-clown.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
“Somewhere in the 20th century” a bomb – apparently planted by terrorists – explodes in a department store window. A clerical error at the Ministry of Information dispatches a team of stormtroopers to the wrong address, resulting in an innocent family man named Buttle being thrown into a sack. A bureaucrat presents Buttle’s wife with a receipt covering “certain financial obligations” for the arrest. When Department of Records manager Mr. Kurtzmann (Ian Holm) realizes the goof, it falls on his most trusted employee, Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) to smooth the paperwork over.

Despite his boring job, Lowry rejects efforts by his well-connected mother (Katherine Helmond) – whose face undergoes perpetual plastic surgery – to accept a promotion. Lowry daydreams of flying through the clouds and rescuing a damsel in distress. He crosses paths with Buttle’s feisty neighbor, Jill Layton (Kim Greist) who’s being given the bureaucratic runaround trying to free Buttle. A splitting image of his fantasy woman, Lowry becomes obsessed with her.

A broken heating duct in Lowry’s apartment brings him face to face with a “freelance subversive” named Harry Tuttle (Robert DeNiro) who circumvents government contractors (Bob Hoskins and Derrick O’Connor) to conduct outlaw home maintenance in the night. Lowry discovers that Jill’s security file has been restricted and accepts a promotion to the Ministry of Information to find her. This draws the suspicion of his best friend, Jack Lint (Michael Palin), who interrogates suspected radicals. Lowry’s involvement with Jill quickly puts both his credit rating and his life in jeopardy.

Production history
With the year 1984 approaching, Terry Gilliam – director, animator and collaborator in Monty Python – had George Orwell and Federico Fellini and a project he was calling 1984 ½ on his mind. Sitting on a beach in the Welsh steel town of Port Talbot, “The sun was setting, and it was really quite beautiful. The contrast was extraordinary. I had this image of a guy sitting there on this dingy beach with a portable radio, tuning in these strange Latin escapist songs like ‘Brazil.’ The music transported him somehow and made his world less grey.”

Gilliam wrote a screenplay about that guy toiling at the “Ministry of Information,” dreaming on the job and falling in love, but the director was having trouble getting his ideas on paper. Someone suggested he turn to Tom Stoppard for help. Intrigued with the prospect of putting his images to the playwright’s words, Stoppard was commissioned to write three drafts. Along with “making certain sense out of some of the things,” Stoppard introduced the idea of a clerical error changing “Tuttle” to “Buttle” and the government torturing an innocent man to death.

Gilliam then brought in Charles McKeown – a writer who had played multiple roles in Monty Python’s Life of Brian – to muddy Stoppard’s streamlined script. At the Cannes Film Festival, producer Arnon Milchan brokered a deal between two studios; Fox put up $6 million in financing for European distribution rights, and Universal pledged $9 million for rights in the U.S. Shooting commenced in November 1983 at Lee International Studios in Wembley, but what had been scheduled as a twenty-week schedule ultimately stretched into nine months. Gilliam brought the film in $1 million under budget by scrapping pages from his massive script.

Brazil opened in the U.K. and France in February 1985. Its running time was 142 minutes, but Fox permitted Gilliam’s vision to play without interference to audiences in Western Europe throughout the spring. When Universal got a look at the film in lieu of its release in the States, the studio voiced major concerns. Sid Sheinberg – president of Universal’s parent company, MCA – felt that Brazil had “brilliance in many portions of it,” but considered the box office potential of Gilliam’s vision “something close to zero.”

Sheinberg wanted the film’s commercial elements – its love story, its elaborate sets, the offbeat comedy – to be emphasized, and the areas of the film which were not conducive to mass entertainment – its virulent anti-authoritarian streak, Michael Kamen’s brooding score, a dark ending – to be excised. The studio held Gilliam to a contractual clause mandating a running time no longer than 125 minutes, but working with editor Julian Doyle, the director delivered a cut of 132 minutes, with its dark ending still intact.

Universal responded by yanking Brazil from its release calendar. Arnon Milchan and Gilliam initiated a guerilla marketing campaign, with the producer offering to pay travel expenses for U.S. critics to come to Canada to see the film. Gilliam took out a full page ad in Variety which plainly read, “Dear Sid Sheinberg, When are you going to release my film Brazil? Terry Gilliam.” Word of mouth spread and in late November, Milchan screened the still unreleased film to members of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. It was later voted Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay of the year.

Universal blinked, opening Gilliam’s 132-minute cut in two Los Angeles theaters on Christmas Day. Devoting limited advertising dollars and scant publicity, the film was never a box office hit, but received some of the most enthusiastic critical notices of the decade. Promoting Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas in 1998, Gilliam was asked what he’d learned from the experience. “If your name is going to go on something, then you’ve got to take responsibility for it. That’s why I fight for control. If my name is not going to be on it, screw it.”

Opinion
Part of the stature of Brazil can be attributed to the behind-the-scenes intrigue – which Gilliam painted as the ultimate battle between the individual and the machine – but the film itself endures as a classic by being continually funny, occasionally unsettling, and ultimately profound. Gilliam accomplishes this and more, creating a world we’ve never seen in a movie before, cramming what seems like all the worst elements of the 20th century into one place and time. There’s no other film quite like it and one of the very best of the 1980s.

Certain scenes and characters tower over others – Jonathan Pryce tormented by Hoskins & O’Connor as they gradually gut his apartment is hilarious, while the plastic surgery bits come on broad – but this is the greatest movie ever made about the dehumanizing effects of office work. Both Michael Kamen’s manic musical score and the versions of “Brazil” used over the opening and closing credits – one romantic, the other haunting – are nothing short of magical. The same can be said of Gilliam’s droll wit and imaginative whimsy. This is his masterpiece.

Tim Dirks at Greatest Films summarizes, “This popular and compelling film with a large cult following is one of the most visually imaginative, breath-taking, eccentric films ever created, with incredible sets, dazzling inventiveness and production design (by Norman Garwood). The film is so visually dense that it takes several viewings to fully comprehend (i.e., the billboard slogans, the user-unfriendly technical gadgets, the unforgettable images, etc.).”

“At a certain point, perceptions change and something that once seemed radical and revelatory can become solemn and sentimental. This is what has happened here. Brazil is a nice little movie with a keen visual style and some interesting performances. But the surrounding harangue, the tempest in a British teacup is no longer warranted and frankly, holds a more enduring and important place in history than the film itself,” writes Bill Gibron at DVD Verdict.

Brian Webster at Apollo Movie Guide writes, “Brazil is spectacular in its visual fantasy. Some people find its complete lack of restraint to be a problem, and there’s no question that it’s long and, at times, hard to follow. For some, the endless series of outlandish scenes and constant special effects might be simply too much … Could Gilliam have done this without all the excesses? Perhaps, but it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
In an electronic world that exists within our own, a power hungry Master Control Program dominates other programs by kidnapping and matching them on a game grid against his sadistic emissary Sark (David Warner). The enslaved programs debate the existence of the Users, higher beings they believe are responsible for creating them. Back in our world, one of these users, hacker Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) dispatches his program Clu (also Bridges) to retrieve a stolen file from the MCP. Manning a tank, Clu is unable to evade security.

The MCP reports the incursion to Sark’s user, Ed Dillinger (also Warner), head of Encom Corporation. In response, Dillinger strips security access from his employees, including Alan (Bruce Boxleitner), who was close to finishing a security program called Tron that would have allowed users to exchange information freely, beyond the control of the MCP. Alan’s colleague and girlfriend Lora (Cindy Morgan) convinces him that her ex-boyfriend Flynn might be able to reinstate his access to the system.

Flynn operates a video arcade, but was once a programmer for Encom. Dillinger stole Flynn’s video game designs, fired him and rose to power. Flynn has been trying to hack into the system to find evidence of this. Alan reveals that his Tron program might be able to help, but when they sneak Flynn into Encom to break into the system, the MCP responds by using an experimental laser to blast Flynn into digital bits and reconstitute him in the electronic world.

Sark is wary of facing off against one of the users, but the MCP instructs him to put Flynn on the game grid and destroy him. While manning a light cycle, Flynn escapes with the aid of Tron (also Boxleitner) and an actuarial program named Ram (Dan Shor). They head for an I/O tower that will enable Tron to communicate with Alan and receive instruction on how to destroy the MCP. With Sark and his agents in pursuit, Tron seeks help from Yori (also Morgan), who feels something familiar about Flynn.

Production history
Steven Lisberger had started from scratch and by 1978, built his own computer animation studio in Boston. He became interested in backlight compositing, a technique producing intense colors by using mattes with light shining directly into the camera. The process was used to make logos on TV glow, but Lisberger was interested in using backlighting to create animated characters. A figure his company designed for an FM rock station commercial was dubbed “Tron,” due to the fact that he was electronic.

Searching for a setting where electronic characters would exist, Lisberger came across the video game Pong, which reminded him of gladiatorial contests. He met computer programmers like Alan Kay, who was trying to develop a “personal computer” that would fit inside a briefcase. To Lisberger, Kay and his contemporaries were like warriors, seeking converts in their crusade to create a new reality. Lisberger wrote a screenplay with Bonnie MacBird (later polished by Charlie Haas) and spent a year storyboarding the film and developing production drawings.

A theatrical producer Lisberger met in Boston named Donald Kushner made a presentation to Tom Wilhite, the young president of production for Walt Disney Studios. Wilhite felt Tron was in the spirit of Fantasia and the grand experiments Disney had mounted in the past. He brought in Harrison Ellenshaw, a matte painter who had worked on Star Wars, who reported back to the studio that Lisberger was capable of doing what he promised: using computers to produce special effects in a movie.

Conceptual artist Syd Mead was put on the payroll – designing the electronic tanks and light cycles – as was famed comics artist Moebius, who designed the costumes and the Solar Sailor. Casting proved more difficult. Few actors expressed interest in playing a video game character in a Disney movie. Lisberger had conceived Flynn as more of a geek, but Jeff Bridges became intrigued by the innovation of Tron and he accepted the part.

Scrambling to complete four minutes of footage Disney could screen for the North American Theater Owners in November 1981, the filmmakers realized that at their current pace, it might take them another 60 months to complete the film. Employing animators in Taiwan, as well as four pioneering computer animation firms in the U.S., Tron met its July 1982 release date. The film performed moderately well at the box office, but cost overruns earned it a reputation as a commercial failure at the time.

Opinion
1982 proved to be a bellwether year in genre film. Blade Runner, The Thing and The Dark Crystal suffered harsh reviews and dismal box office, only to prove later how far ahead of the curve they were. Tron wasn’t just ahead of the curve, it was a vehicle nobody had seen before. Utilizing computers to create movie special effects was only one revolution. Tron foresaw a time when people would use personal computers in their homes, and asked who would control the flow of information, corporations or users.

While the film’s visual palette has faded into time, Tron remains as entertaining as ever. Never has the world inside a computer been utilized for the setting of a movie this creatively. The light cycle chases and tank battles are cool, but where the movie features exorbitant imagination is in its characters, intelligently drafted to represent various computer programs. The idea that a program would develop its own quasi-religious mythology around its user gives the movie a depth lost on most video game inspired movies.

The casting of Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, Cindy Morgan, David Warner (who also voices the Master Control Program) and Barnard Hughes brings a real verve and cunning to the film, which rarely functions purely on a technical level. Lisberger remains as committed to exploring the metaphysical possibilities of his world as he is in its visual design. Wendy Carlos – the innovative electronic composer who wrote the music for The Shining – provided a score of tremendous energy and whimsy.

Mike Pinsky at DVD Verdict writes, “When Tron first came out, it was cool (or at least, it was for a small audience). For most of the intervening years, it seemed clunky and silly, more of an embarrassment to cyberpunks who thought they knew better. And now, it is cool again, offering a glorious and utopian vision of virtual agency that many of its successors can only hope to achieve, as a sort of Wizard of Oz for the information age.”

“Already a quaint, outdated narrative at the time of its release in spite of its ground-breaking use of computer-generated effects, this costly, somewhat embarassing box office failure soon developed a growing fan base of nostalgically-minded computer geeks who ended up bestowing a reputation upon it that it hardly deserves,” says Dan Hassler-Forest at DVD Breakdown.

Raphael Pour-Hashemi at DVD Times writes, “Twenty years later, the plot is still slightly incomprehensible in places (imagine what it was like in 1982!) and the acting is slightly stilted, but Tron is essentially a journey into the realms of computer machinations. Obviously, CGI effects have become the norm in Hollywood nowadays … but rarely has a film looked so fresh and innovative as Tron. You could argue that no film has blended animation and real-life together so expertly since Mary Poppins.”

“Greetings, Programs!” View the light cycle chase from Tron (to be played at highest possible volume.)

© Joe Valdez