Repo Man (1984). Written and directed by Alex Cox. Starring Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton.
During the filming of Repo Man, director Alex Cox didn’t have his own car. The film’s transportation captain, Dave Shaffer, suggested that Cox use the 1964 Chevy Malibu that is central to the film’s plot as his personal vehicle. This solved a couple of problems for the low-budget production: It gave the director a way of getting around Los Angeles, and it saved Schaffer the hassle and expense of having a Teamster look after the car.
It worked out pretty well—right up until the day Cox drove the car to the production company’s offices to have a discussion with the producers. Maybe it wasn’t so much a discussion as an argument; the topic was a disagreement over how cinematographer Robby Müller was filming the movie. Müller, who has worked as director of photography on films from the likes of Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, and Lars von Trier, had a very particular, deliberate way of filming scenes, one that the producers thought was perhaps a bit too artsy for a movie about repo men trying to find a car with a radioactive alien in its trunk. It was also taking too long and costing too much money, which producers never like. Cox was arguing in favor of Müller being able to film all the wide shots and dynamic two-shots that his heart desired.
While they were arguing, however, the ’64 Malibu was stolen off the street outside the office.
This was a bit of a problem, as that car features heavily in a large number of the movie’s scenes. The production had to reschedule a bunch of shots while they found a replacement car. In a surprise twist, the stolen Malibu was also eventually recovered, so they had two cars to finish filming the movie.
Back in the early ’80s, Alex Cox was fresh out of UCLA film school and trying to get some traction on his first feature film. He didn’t have much luck until he talked to some film school friends (producers Jonathan Wacks and Peter McCarthy), who at the time had a small production company that focused on making commercials. They thought Cox’s first idea (a film about the aftermath of nuclear war) would be too expensive, but his second idea was doable. That second idea was, in the words of Roger Ebert, “…the first movie I know about that combines (1) punk teenagers, (2) automobile repossessors, and (3) aliens from outer space.”
It doesn’t do much good to ask where that strange combination of elements came from, because the origin is as random as the premise. Cox had spent some time hanging out and sometimes working with a repo man in L.A., and he had a lot of stories about the crazy things that went down. He also had on hand a piece called “Leather Rubbernecks” written by Dick Rude (who plays punk criminal “Let’s go get sushi and not pay!” Duke in Repo Man), which Rude had hoped to have Cox make into a short film. I can’t find a good description of “Leather Rubbernecks” online; I can’t even find agreement as to whether it was a script, a treatment, or a short story. What sources do agree on is that it’s likely where the inspiration for the punk and sci fi elements came from.
Wacks and McCarthy—who, remember, were making commercials, not feature films—were skeptical of Cox’s idea to combine automobile repossession with punks and aliens in a brash Fuck You to mainstream America. Cox’s idea to win them over and get investors interested was to present a treatment for the film in comic form. You can see the comic here: in all its messy, angry, slur-filled ’80s style.
The comic worked, and somebody with the necessary money became interested in financing the film. That was Michael Nesmith, better known as a member of The Monkees, who was the one who brought the film to the attention of Universal Studios. (Nesmith also has a cameo in Repo Man as the rabbi who approaches the glowing Malibu at the film’s end.) Universal agreed to take the film on in what is called a negative pickup deal, which means that the studio (Universal) arranges to purchase the film (i.e., the negatives, hence the name) from the production company for a fixed sum, and the studio will then own the rights and handle distribution and promotion and such.
Note: Cox did try to find sponsors for the film, but very few brands wanted to attach themselves to the movie. There were two notable exceptions, which resulted in some of the most iconically ironic product placement in the history of cinema: Car-Freshner Corporation, makers of those ubiquitous pine tree car air fresheners; and the southern California supermarket chain Ralph’s, which provided all of the generic goods (FOOD and BEER, etc.) that appear in the film in that unmistakable blue and white packaging.
A negative pickup deal isn’t an unusual way for small production companies to get distribution beyond what they might be able to achieve independently, but in this case it turned out to be a mess in the long run. Not to get too deep into the weeds of studio business, but Repo Man was greenlit during the brief period when producer Bob Rehme was at Universal. Rehme was no stranger to weird, offbeat films; in his previous position at AVCO Embassy Pictures, he had overseen films like John Carpenter’s Escape From New York (1982) and had brought films like David Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981) and Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981) to the United States. But Rehme didn’t stay at Universal long, and when he left the new folks in charge were much more skeptical of the foul-mouthed, radioactive charms of Repo Man.
The timeline of the decision-making isn’t entirely clear, but what happened is that Universal wanted to abandon the film without a proper release or promotion; Cox and the film’s producers took out an ad in Variety to get attention on it anyway; the higher-ups at Universal responded by trying to get corporate types to badmouth the film while others at the studio were still supporting it; and the theatrical release ended up being very low-key and not terribly successful, even though critics loved the film.
RCA Records joined the fight as a late and unexpected ringer when the soundtrack turned out to be extremely popular—for obvious reasons, because the soundtrack is amazing, with a theme by the Los Angeles Latino punk band The Plugz, a title track by Iggy Pop, and a heap of fantastic punk songs from groups such as Black Flag, Fear, Circle Jerks, and Suicidal Tendencies. The fact that the soundtrack was selling so well led RCA to pressure Universal to give the film proper promotion in its home video release, which contributed significantly to its lasting status as a cult favorite.
At this point, Universal also wanted to get the film on television to milk its surprise (to them) popularity, which led to a now-infamous television cut and dub that tried to remove everything potentially offensive in the movie. Which is, astute readers will note, basically the entire movie, but when Cox was making the TV version he added back in some deleted scenes to replace all the drugs, sex, and cussing he had to cut out.
Look, I know what you’re thinking. Yes, it is indeed ironic that the story of a film that is specifically about criticizing consumerism, corporatism, and power structures in 1980s America only came to be because of the way it navigated the very landscape it was so noisily skewering. It’s a mainstream movie with an unsubtle anti-establishment theme; it’s an indie film that had to fight with a major studio to see the light of day; the commercial success of the anti-commercial punk soundtrack helped cement the film’s place in cinematic history.
The process of making and selling art in America has always been a study in contradictions. It’s a wild quirk of Hollywood history that the film ever got made and released, and even more of one that it remains so well-known and beloved.
Behind the scenes, it was a typical messy indie production from a first-time feature director. The stolen Malibu was just one of the mishaps during production. Fox Harris, who plays the scientist who steals the Malibu and its radioactive cargo, didn’t know how to drive, so they had to figure out how to film a character who spends 99% of his time driving with camera trickery. The production didn’t have a location to use for the repo company office, so they quickly built a shoddy trailer in an empty lot. Harry Dean Stanton may be incredible as repo man Bud, but he was apparently such a nightmare to work with that Cox considered writing him out of the film. The glowing car at the end is literally just painted with reflective paint. The jankyness is part of the film’s charm.
A lot of the film’s truly iconic dialogue is improvised or was written off-the-cuff. It works because the people who surround Otto (Emilio Estevez) are such a vivid group of characters that their batshit conversations work no matter how wild they are, from Bud and Lite’s (Sy Richardson) lessons about life as a repo man to Miller’s (Tracey Walter) legendary monologue about the plate of shrimp. And, no, you aren’t imagining it: the characters are named after cheap beers.
I could say something about how the jokes about Los Angeles in the early ’80s write themselves, but even that feels like too much. Repo Man is one of those jokes about Los Angeles in the ’80s—and I mean that in the best possible way. People like to talk a lot about films in which the setting is a character—it’s basically a cliché at this point—but this movie belongs in that special group of ’80s sci fi films for which that is absolutely true. We’ve watched a couple such films already: John Sayles’ The Brother From Another Planet (1984) with its wonderful portrayal of an alien experiencing ’80s Harlem, and John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) in which the aliens are a critique of the cultural zeitgeist of times.
This film is a view of Los Angeles without any trace of the Hollywood sign or what it represents, without even a glimpse of beaches or palm trees or Beverly Hills. This is the Los Angeles of train tracks and convenience stores, dirty streets and empty lots, where teenagers work shitty jobs at supermarkets, and suburban parents give all their money away to televangelists, and everything revolves around cars.
Repo Man is a 92-minute riff on everything that is absurd and hysterical about that particular time and place, including all of the anger, frustration, and disillusionment that go along with it. It’s a foul-mouthed scream into the void that parodies everything from Reagan-era consumerism to Cold War nuclear paranoia to teenage aimlessness to working class misery.
It’s also very funny, endlessly entertaining, and shamelessly loud. It’s basically perfect, for everything that it chooses to be. It ends with a glowing, radioactive car flying away into the night, because why not? A character has a metal hand that is never explained, because why not? Jimmy Buffett has a cameo as a government agent. The real-life designer of the neutron bomb was apparently a big fan of this movie, which features a lobotomized fictional version of him dying of radiation poisoning. The film answers every question with an almost joyful “Fuck off!”
It shouldn’t work, this movie. But it does. Much like the plate of shrimp in the lattice of cosmic coincidence, some things just happen because they’re meant to, and we’re all the better for it.
Tell me what you think about Repo Man! I want to know if anybody has seen the TV cut; I’ve heard that it is hilarious in its own very special curse-words-replaced-with-nonsense kind of way.
Next week: It’s possible I’ve mentioned once or twice or a hundred and seventy-five times before that I am a fan of Ridley Scott’s Alien. Watch it on Amazon, Apple, Fandango, or Microsoft.
