Days of Future Passed

Days of Future Passed

Not very long ago, 2000 AD represented all that was futuristic and fantastic within our common view of life. That faroff era was held for fantasies of high technology or tales of The End of All That We Know or, at the very least, showing humanity in its final throes of violence and death. In the case of DEATH RACE 2000, there was a celebration of that violence and death, making it a national sport for all to enjoy. Have we really come that far into this future? DEATH RACE 2000 was directed by Paul Bartel for Roger Corman's New World Pictures, a glorious poverty row film factory that jostled about the entertainment spectrum by catering to the bloodandguts crowd with BIG BAD MAMA and PIRANHA, and to the T crowd with such male fantasy epics as CANDY STRIPE NURSES, and even touched the pulse of the art theater crowd by importing Ingmar Bergman's CRIES AND WHISPERS and Fellini's AMACORD. While these films gave respect, the bills were definitely paid by car crashes, bobbing beauties and guntoting antisocials. Within this helterskelter atmosphere, a few gems would turn up. One such surprise was DEATH RACE 2000, born in less than a month to a thoughtful fledgling director, an enigmatic producer and a cantankerous feature player. Out of such a union came a lowbudget inspiration for such future features as MAD MAX, THE ROAD WARRIOR and everything those films inspired. From a $300,000 investment, this car crash quickie went from drivein slambang potboiler to influential cult classic. In the early 1950s, Melchior had gotten in on the ground floor of the infant television industry as a director of liveaction dramas and sporting events. It was as a viewer of sports and its spectators that he found the inspiration for his dark vision of an amoral future. 'I had occasion to go to the Indianapolis Speedway and see a race there,' Melchior remembers. 'I sat in a box with some of the racer's wives, and there was an accident right below where we were sitting in which one of the drivers was killed. I was sitting right next to his wife. There was a powerful juxtaposition of this woman's horror and the absolute fascination from the fans rushing as fast as they could to get as close as possible. That's what they wanted to see: a real fiery, bloody crash. I suddenly had the idea that this is a terrible thing because this is what so much of our sport is like. Do we really like to see boxing simply because of the good footwork? Hell no! We watch because we want to see somebody get knocked silly. It got to me that so much of our spectator sports really have to do with violence. If you've ever heard a boxing announcer; 'Look, there's blood on his face! There's a big cut over his eye!'it's that fascination that is the key to the sport's enjoyment.' Another incident around the same time as the Indianapolis crash strengthened Melchior's view of people's interest in the violence and not the sport. He witnessed a boxing match in which one of the fighters was killed by a blow in the ring, and noticed how the announcer reacted to the situation. 'When it was discovered that the boxer was dead,' Melchior says, 'the excitement in the announcer's voice became almost obscene: 'Wow! You have just seen somebody killed in front of your very eyes!' It was as if that man's death was the greatest thing that could happen. My story was an objection to that kind of violence.' The story, called 'The Racer', concerned one driverWilliewho drives The Bull, a sleek death machine that racks up points by running over pedestrians in a cross country race. But unlike the film version, this race is grim, and Willie tries to come to grips with his conscience when young Muriel faces him in the street, calling him a 'butcher' for what he does, a concept that never occurred to a man who considered himself a modernday gladiator. Willie's navigator, Hank, begins to wonder if his star driver isn't losing his touch. He goads Willie into running down more pedestrians in front of a small town record store, but the Racer's mind and heart are no longer in the game. Willie steers the car away from the crowd and crashes when he and Hank fight for control of the steering wheel, killing the navigator. The story ends with Willie coming to in a hospital with Muriel at his side, helping him to come to grips with his rediscovered humanity. Originally published in ESCAPADE, which Melchior refers to as 'a poor man's Playboy,' in 1956, the story was reprinted a few times over the years and eventually made its way to the desk of New World Pictures' head Roger Corman. 'The Racer' offered the marketconscious Corman a couple of exploitable elements: a violent premise that could be milked for everything the Motion Picture Of America's Ratings Board would let him get away with, and the fact that a major studio, MGM, was putting its muscle behind a big budget SF film with a similar violent future premise, ROLLERBALL. Despite the strong exploitable elements inherent in the story, the project was repeatedly shelved as scripters came and went. van Vogt took whacks at it. Charles B. Griffith and Robert Thom are credited with the final screenplay. Thom, who penned the '60s cult hit WILD IN THE STREETS and BLOODY MAMA, wrote his own version that director Paul Bartel found to be 'very negative and unpleasant.' Bartel had come to Corman's New World Pictures in the early 1970s and eventually found himself directing second unit on violent crime dramas like BIG BAD MAMA, which convinced Corman that Bartel could handle the SF action of 'The Racer.' However, Bartel had problems with the script: 'All the characters were very cruel. Frankenstein was a transvestite. There was really no one to like, no one to root for or identify withno reason to stay interested in the narrative. I remember telling Roger that Robert's script was impossible and that we had to do it over. To his credit, he gave me no argument over that.' 'The short story was serious,' says Corman. 'I played around with several different versions of it, and then I thought of what Stanley Kubrick did with DR. STRANGELOVE. The original novel was serious, and he turned it into a comedy with a point. I thought, 'I'll do the same thing here. I would like to make a comedyaction film with a little bit of a point.' I think that's what Paul came up with.' Corman veteran Chuck Griffith, whose outrageous imagination brought forth such Bmovie classics as BUCKET OF BLOOD, LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, THE UNDEAD, ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS, and NOT OF THIS EARTH, was brought to the project to help find an underlying humanity in characters whose principle activity is running people over. Says Bartel with a chuckle, 'The answer was to devise victims that were immediately identifiable by the audience as despicable and worthy of being run over, such as the doctors and nurses who wheel the old people at the retirement home hospital out into the street to be run over, and then get run over themselves by Frankenstein.' In Griffith, THE RACER's dark concept found a giddy compatriot. The film's detailing of a government run by a pop messiah president with a cabinet composed of deacons was Griffith's creation. The creator of Audrey the maneating plant was also key to turning an uncompromisingly serious short story into a black comedy that revels in its bloody premise. To pull off such a sensitive transformation, Griffith and Bartel found the pulse of their film in the inherent black humor of a motorized society. To Griffith's chagrin, Bartel exercised his director's prerogative and did a final rewrite of the script to personalize the concept further, add some of his own humorsuch as jokes about the evil Frenchand to trim the script for the tight $300,000 budget and fourweek shooting schedule, to be followed by one more week of secondunit explosives and model work in the Fall of 1974 and Winter of 1975. 2000. The screen adaptation of Ib Melchior's story runs thus: By the year 2000, the population of the United Provinces of America remain emotionally dulled by the Great Depression of 1979 and succeeding wars with just about everybody. The only real thrill left is the violence of the Transcontinental Road Race, an annual event in which the public cheer, and sometimes sacrifice themselves to, their favorite drivers who race across the country not only to gain speed, but to garner points by running over as many pedestrians as they can. Five drivers compete in the 20th Annual race along with their navigators: Calamity Jane Kelly (Mary Woronov), driving the Stud Bull; Mathilda 'The Hun' Morris (Roberta Collins) in her Buzz Bomb; Nero 'The Hero' Lonigan (Martin Kove) in The Lion, and vicious Machine Gun Joe Viterbo (Sylvester Stallone) in the Peacemaker. Finally, there is Mr. President's and the world's favorite, the seemingly indestructible Frankenstein (David Carradine) in The Monster. This year, the event is complicated by the rise of antiracers, led by Thomasina Paine and her revolutionaries who are out to stop the raceand the racersat any cost. With this in mind, Paine has smuggled in her lovely niece Annie (Simone Griffeth) as Frankenstein's navigator to either win him over or keep him from crossing the finishing line. One by one, the racers are taken out by explosives, dirty tricks or sabotage. With only Joe and Frankenstein left, Frank reveals his plan to Annie. He, too, is a double agent sent to stop the race by shaking hands with Mr. President with his detachable 'hand grenade,' killing the world leader and bringing an end to the bloodshed. But Annie has to use the grenade to stop Joe from sending them off the road, and joins forces with her driver to kill the selfserving President of the United Provinces by making the leader the final score in the Transcontinental Road Race. More popular than ever now that Mr. President is gone, Frankenstein marries Annie, becomes president, names Thomasina Paine his advisor, and banishes the race. It is Frankenstein who gets the final score, however, by running down the irrepressible Junior Bruce, a vacuous newscaster who refuses to let the race die when the public loves the violence ohsomuch. 'We did get better reviews than ROLLERBALL,' comments Corman, 'and we were developing DEATH RACE before ROLLERBALL. The story had been written before ROLLERBALL, and I had bought it before that film was in development. I had a feeling that we might have to come out before ROLLERBALL, or around the same time, but our development started ahead of them.' In Corman's case, such a statement is a matter of picking nits. Whether or not DEATH RACE was already in development, ROLLERBALL was just the kind of market indicator that lowbudget indie producers search for in order to make a quickie knockoff that will grab some of the attention and profits that any larger film incurs. This procedure has remained a Corman staple for years: after LORDS OF THE DEEP (THE ABYSS) and CARNOSAUR (JURASSIC PARK), one begins to suspects that the producer has a variation on every possible story premise in development, waiting for a major studio film to be greenlit with a similar idea. 'The production of DEATH RACE 2000 was conceived as a lowbudget appropriation of, and cashing in on, the very expensive production of ROLLERBALL,' admits director Paul Bartel. 'We had the ROLLERBALL script, and we studied it in advance. But as our film developed, the premise of DEATH RACE was so dark that I felt we had to compensate with quite a lot of humor. The film I wanted to make was a comedy and a send up of the kind of violent film that ROLLERBALL was.'