HOW DID REPO MAN OCCUR?

After I left UCLA I ran into two old chums - Jonathan Wacks and Peter McCarthy.   Now they had a company, and an office in Venice, California, where they were making commercials ("Gene Kelly assures the public the MGM Grand is safe again!").    I suggested to them that they should also be feature film producers, and hire me as a director.   They agreed to consider this.

The first script I wrote for them was called THE HOT CLUB (a comedy about nuclear blast veterans and nerve gas thieves set in the early years of the 21st century).   It turned out to be rather expensive.    So I wrote another screenplay: REPO MAN. This was based on my own experience of the punk scene, and working for Mark Lewis, a Los Angeles car repossessor and my neighbour in Venice, CA.

To make the package more interesting to investors, I drew four pages of a comic book based on the script and we included them with the screenplay.   I had planned at one stage to do an entire comic book, but it is too much work:  a page a day at the very most, and hard on the eyes.    Michael Nesmith, the former Monkee, saw the script/comic package, became interested, and took it to Universal.

WHAT WAS THE RESPONSE TO REPO MAN?

REPO MAN was made as a "negative pickup" by Universal at the time when Bob Rehme was head of the studio.    At the time, the big deal over there was STREETS OF FIRE, and nobody really noticed our film at all.   Which was lucky for us, since Bob Rehme had "green-lighted" a film which was quite unusual by studio standards.   Unfortunately, just before we were completely done, Rehme was ousted from his post, and a new boss came in.   It is, we quickly discovered, the primary task of a new boss  to make an old boss look bad, and so as much of Rehme's product as possible was quickly junked.   That which was already made, or almost complete - REPO MAN and RUMBLEFISH, for instance - was swiftly bin-bagged.

Peter, Jonathan and I - Edge City Productions- took out an ad in Variety, reprinting a good review we got there (we also got a very bad one - in the weekly edition - but we didn't reprint that) as a challenge to Universal to get the picture out into the theatres.

The studio's response was to lean on the head of public relations at Pan American World AIrlines, Dick Barkle, to condemn the film.   Mr Barkle declared himself shocked by REPO MAN, adding, "I hope they don't show this film in Russia."

The theatrical life of the film was prolonged by Kelly Neal at Universal, who went out of his way to support both REPO MAN and RUMBLEFISH.   And, even more, the record was a major element in promoting the film;  it was popular with the punk rock community and that got the word around.  And rightly so.  I was an enthusiast, and the film has a major punk influence - in addition to the protagonists Otto, Duke, Debbi, Archie and Kevin, there's a tailor-made hardcore score by Los Plugz, Circle Jerks, Fear, Suicidal Tendencies, Black Flag, and Juicy Bananas, and a title song by Iggy Pop.

DID YOU HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE TV VERSION?

Yes.    Because the film REPO MAN had so much swearing and a scene of speed-snorting, the studio made their own re-edited video version.   It was very  odd.   In an effort to "explain" the film, someone had gone and shot an insert of the license plate of the Chevy Malibu, and made the Hopi symbol dissolve into the HEAD OF THE DEVIL!

YOU'RE JOKING.

No, this is really true.    It made me wonder, could it be that the Christian Fundamentalists are right, and that the multinationals and Hollywood are controlled by Satanists?   I cannot say.  It seems so, sometimes. 

WEREN'T YOU HORRIFIED THAT THEY WERE BUTCHERING YOUR FILM?

A bit.   They'd intercut static shots of this license plate with shots of the car moving, and it looked completely cheesy, worse than an Ed Wood film.     But I was able to remove the insertions, and to add length we included two funny scenes which hadn'd made it into the theatrical version:    the one with Jac MacInally shaving (where Harry Dean says his name is "I.G.Farben") and the the one where Harry Dean smashes the phone booth with his baseball bat.

BUT WHAT ABOUT CUTTING OUT ALL THE SWEARING?

By then I'd made SID & NANCY and I was sick of swearing.   It was fun coming up with synonyms for the swear words - "Melon Farmers" was a particular favourite. 

Sometimes, for television and aeroplane screening, or for a film to play in prisons or at children's tea-parties, changes need to be made.    It is always better for the filmmaker to be invited to participate than to be excluded.  

WHAT WAS REPO MAN ABOUT - REALLY?

Nuclear War.  What else could it be about?  And the demented society that contemplated the possibility thereof.  I'd written a script for Adrian Lyne about the effects of nuclear war in an American city, Seattle. It was called THE HAPPY HOUR, and was never made.

Repoing people's cars and punk rock were just the tip of the iceberg. The real mad centre of the film is J. Frank Parnell - the fictitious inventor of the Neutron Bomb. He sets the film in motion, on the road from Los Alamos, and, as portrayed by the late great actor, Fox Harris, is the centrepoint of the film. 

Fourteen years later, I had a call from one Sam Cohen, who announced himself the father of the Neutron Bomb.  I imagined  a cross between Jack D. Ripper and Edward Teller in a dark Brentwood apartment, raging because there hadn't been an intercontinental thermonuclear war... But we had lunch, and he proved to be a charming chap.

He told me that REPO MAN and DR STRANGELOVE were his favourite films. He didn't view either of them as a comedy. From the nuclear strategist's standpoint, he thought they were both very accurate.

"It was the quintessential neutron bomb in the trunk... what we call a SADM - a Strategic Area Denial Munition."  He and the Russian politician General Lebed gave press conferences a couple of years ago to draw attention to the number of ex-Soviet SADMs which had gone missing -- hundreds of them, Sam said, sold on the black market to whoever was buying.  He thought a SADM may have destroyed the Federal Building  in Oklahoma. 

"The Neutron Bomb was the most moral weapon ever devised... " Sam would insist. It turned out the Pope agreed with Sam, and sent him a Peace Medal, for the invention of the Neutron Bomb, in 1979.

WILL THERE BE A REPO MAN SEQUEL?

I 'd be delighted.   But it would be very difficult to visualize.  REPO MAN was a work of considerable freedom and creativity.  We had autonomy in the casting; I was able to work on the script with no undue pressure, there were great producers, and a brilliant cinematographer. 

DIDN'T YOU ALMOST SHOOT A SEQUAL?

For some time Peter, Jonathan and I pursued a quasi-sequal, WALDO'S HAWAIIAN HOLIDAY. It'll be released as a comic book in Australia and Japan later this year.

WHAT IS WALDO'S HAWAIIAN HOLIDAY ABOUT?

It's the story of a young man, recently returned from Mars, who is forced to choose where his allegiance lies -- his boss, Duke Mantee, or the sex goddess, Velma; money or knowledge; the past or the future; paper or plastic; cash or charge; Earth - or Mars?