When it comes to genre films of classic cinema, not even science-fiction in its golden age could
compete with the classic Western. Directors like John Ford, Anthony Mann, and Howard Hawks
served up the Old West in easily digestable morality tales where the good guys were always
better gunslingers and the bad guys always wore black. These films had,
for the most part, universal appeal as family entertainment with virtuous messages,
and due to how inexpensive the typical Western could be,
it was perhaps the most prolific, popular, and profitable type of film well into the 1960's.
Later Westerns would embrace more morally ambiguous themes and ideas, and whether
this was a driving force of American cynicism or merely a reflection of it in tumultuous times,
the classic Western lost popularity and became all but extinct in the 1970's.
However, around the same time, the basic structure of the Western was co-opted by other genres,
most notably the action film. Dirty Harry, for example, follows the formula of a Western
quite closely, albeit replacing the Old West with the streets of modern San Francisco.
It was over a decade later when one writer, inspired by the Dirty Harry series, would
envision a new type of Western, one set in a near future with a hero that is more machine than man.
Officer Alex Murphy has been brutally gunned down by criminals in the crime-infested wastes of Old
Detroit, which is the perfect opportunity for Omni Consumer Products to sweep in
and use his brain to create the next big thing in law enforcement: a cybernetic lawman who doesn't
require sleep or a paycheck and who won't join a union. RoboCop becomes the new face of justice--
"Stay out of trouble."
--but memories of his past life as Alex Murphy begin to creep into his consciousness, and they
reveal a level of corruption and vice that will challenge his most fundamental programming.
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we could make the streets safer for everyone. If you really do like this video, please subscribe
as well. Thank you in advance. With that out of the way, let's get back to the subject at hand.
Aspiring film writer Edward Neumeier made a dangerous mistake:
he helped produce a successful movie that he hadn't written himself.
He was a production assistant and script reader at the time, and after he pushed
to give 1983's Risky Business the greenlight, Universal Pictures made him a junior executive.
He then spent a lot of time in corporate boardrooms instead of at a typewriter,
and lost in soul-sucking boredom, he would sometimes fantasize about the boardroom
doors swinging open to reveal a killer robot sent to gun down everyone there.
When Universal offered him the vice-presidency, he turned it down in order to work on a script
with Michael Miner about a robot police officer. This script, called RoboCop,
found its way into the hands of Jonathan Kaplan, director of White Line Fever and Over the Edge,
who brought it to the attention of producer Jonathan Davison--who had to his name several
B-pictures along with the ultra-successful Airplane!--over at Orion Pictures.
It was the satirical slant of the script that drew Davison in, but Kaplan bowed out of directing the
film to work on Project X. Thus, a long search for a new director began. Dozens of potential
American and Canadian directors refused, often at nothing more than a glance at the script's title.
With the search coming up empty, co-writer Michael Miner, who had directed a few short
films and music videos, petitioned for a chance to direct RoboCop, but Orion didn't want to put
the expensive film in the hands of somebody who'd never directed a feature film before. Instead,
after burning through all the North American directors on their list, Davison and the Orion
executives started looking overseas for talent, and they went alphabetically through their list.
It was six months before they got to the letter "V" and sent the script to Paul Verhoeven,
a Dutch filmmaker well-known at the time for 1973's erotic romance Turkish Delight,
which is still rated as the most successful film in the history of Dutch cinema.
Like so many directors before him, Verhoeven, a science-fiction fan who was eager to work
in the genre, immediately refused after reportedly only reading the first page.
However, Verhoeven's wife, Martine, read the whole thing and insisted that Verhoeven give
it another chance, to see the film as more than just its title and cheesy-sounding subject matter.
Tentatively--and with mounting problems in Holland casting doubt on his future as a
filmmaker there--Verhoeven agreed and met with Davison and Neumeier to better understand the
movie they wanted to make. They showed him comic books like 2000 AD as partial inspirations for
the style they were looking for, but Verhoeven wanted to make something a little more serious.
Neumeier and Miner wrote a more grounded version of the story for him,
but after reading it, Verhoeven realized that RoboCop needed a heavy dose of comedy and satire
to work as a film, so he agreed to go back to the previous draft.
Finding a known actor to play the lead proved nearly as difficult as finding a director.
Many actors outright refused to work on something that seemed so ridiculous on its face,
and others refused due to the need for full-body make-up and/or prosthetics. Arnold Schwarzenegger
was briefly considered, but they knew they would need somebody much thinner, as the RoboCop suit
would undoubtedly bulk up whoever was put into it, making somebody like Schwarzenegger
look downright absurd. Other actors who were considered but didn't sign on were Tom Berenger,
Armand Assante, Keith Carradine, Michael Ironside, Rutger Hauer, and James Remar.
Though nobody will admit it on the record, it would appear that, like in the search
for a director, they went through their list of potentials in alphabetical order.
This time, they made it all the way to "W" before Peter Weller, who had done Buckaroo Banzai the
year before, signed on. Weller was an almost perfect choice due to his lower salary demands,
his martial arts training, and his lean physique as a marathon runner, and according to Davison,
he was the only actor they talked to who was actually interested in the material.
Reportedly, Weller took the role very seriously,
training with the prestigious Moni Yakim to learn how to move convincingly like a robot.
He knew the script was over-the-top and satirical, but he also knew he couldn't approach it that way,
choosing to instead treat it with a high degree of seriousness and professionalism.
The only time Weller ever openly admitted to questioning his decision to be in the film
was after his first nine-to-ten hour session of getting into the RoboCop suit,
when he discovered that most of the miming he'd practiced would have to
be relearned with the suit on. One of the first scenes he filmed is this relatively
simple one in which RoboCop catches a set of car keys out of midair, which proved
relentlessly difficult as they continually bounced off of his rubber-coated hands.
Tensions on set with the director did lead Weller to briefly quitting the project,
with Lance Henriksen then considered as a replacement,
but Weller and Verhoeven eventually mended their issues, largely because Verhoeven knew
it would be prohibitively expensive to make a new custom-made suit for another actor.
For the role of Murphy's partner, Anne Lewis, they initially cast Stephanie Zimbalist,
who had to bow out due to contractual obligations with Remington Steele.
She was replaced by Nancy Allen, who did some police academy training and cut her hair
short for the role. In an effort to bulk up and appear more masculine,
she quit smoking, which is probably why her character is often seen chewing bubble gum.
The villainous Boddicker is played by the then-relatively-obscure Kurtwood Smith.
It was Verhoeven's idea to give Smith a pair of wire-framed glasses and a suit to
make him look more like Heinrich Himmler, but despite his character's vile nature, Smith was
reportedly one of the nicest guys on set. This scene is more entertaining when you learn that
the secretary he is sleezing over is played by Smith's real-life future spouse, Joan Pirkle.
Other actors worth noting are Ronny Cox as Dick Jones,
Miguel Ferrer as Bob, Swamp Thing's Ray Wise and Fame's Paul McCrane as two of Boddicker's thugs--
"You a college boy or something?"
--Magnum Force's Felton Perry as Johnson, and The Last Starfighter and Halloween III's great Dan
O'Herlihy as The Old Man. There are also a couple of blink-and-you'll miss them cameos from John
Landis and director Paul Verhoeven, while producer Jon Davison provides the voice for ED-209.
"Would you please put down your weapon? You have twenty seconds to comply."
Filming began in August of 1986 in Dallas, Texas, on an eventual total budget of
thirteen point six million dollars. They chose not to film in Detroit because it "didn't look enough
like Detroit," and while most of the film was done in Dallas, including outside Dallas City Hall,
the critical steel mill scenes were filmed in the Wheeling-Pittsburgh mill on the
outskirts of Philadelphia. This gas station explosion was so large that it actually set
a neighboring building on fire, and this street explosion set Kurtwood Smith's jacket alight,
earning him and his fellow actors in the scene an extra four hundred dollars in stunt pay.
"I like it!"
The RoboCop suit and make-up effects were designed by The Thing's Rob Bottin, the stop-motion effects
were done by the incomparable Phil Tippett--made famous for his work on The Empire Strikes Back and
Return of the Jedi--and the rest of the visual effects were put together by Praxis Film Works.
When the MPAA was shown an early cut of the film, the screeners were horrified by its
gratuitous violence and initially gave the film an "X" rating. Verhoeven and Davison argued that
the violence was so extreme that it became comical, that cutting it down would make it
seem more realistic and therefore more disturbing. For a long time, though, they lost this argument,
leading to several scenes being trimmed to what the MPAA considered more tolerable levels.
However, when the MPAA demanded a cut to the climax of the melting man sequence, in which
Paul McCrane's character literally explodes all over Boddicker's windshield, Orion stepped in and
refused, noting that the grotesque sequence got by far the biggest reaction from test audiences.
The MPAA eventually relented, allowed the scene to stay, and then they gave the film an "R" rating.
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If all else fails, though, you can always check out my website at emagill.com,
where you'll find written reviews of plenty more sci-fi classics in both film and literature.
Now then, with all that shameless self-promotion out of the way, let's move on.
RoboCop released in July of 1987. Despite a relatively low marketing budget and a lot of
summer competition, it managed to earn a total domestic gross of fifty three point four million
dollars. Critics were also remarkably kind to it, praising its social satire and dark humor,
and RoboCop himself became a pop culture icon practically overnight. RoboCop merchandise was
rampant, and the VHS release earned the film an additional twenty four million dollars.
There were also video games and comic books galore, in addition to two movie sequels,
two television shows, and of course the 2014 remake. Rumors abound of a reboot-slash-sequel
to the original movie called RoboCop Returns, as well as a prequel series about a young Dick Jones.
However, nothing has ever truly recaptured the unexpected magic of the original film.
It's a seemingly simplistic, ultra-violent action flick that is unabashedly adolescent
while simultaneously being a deeply cynical satire of Reagan-era corporatism, commericalization--
"I'd buy that for a dollar!"
--police brutality, political corruption, and gun culture.
"Ooh, Guns, guns, guns!"
The writer, Ed Neumeier, wanted to say something about America in decline,
which is the main reason he set the story in Detroit, which he saw as a crumbling example
of lost American industrial might. He put in a handful of references to Vietnam--
"209 is currently programmed for urban pacification. Doctor McNamara."
--which he says reflect his idea of how the wrong-headed politics of then-modern
warfare were bleeding into the coked-out world of Wall Street. His characters are deliberately
one-dimensional archetypes, and he wanted it to come across almost like a twisted fairy tale about
"fascism for liberals." On top of that, he saw potential in films like the Dirty Harry sequels
to use violence in a comic fashion, and he wanted to push that envelope as far as he possibly could,
remembering his daydream about a killer robot in the boardroom.
In this respect, it's hard to imagine a better director for RoboCop than Paul Verhoeven. A
survivor of Nazi-occupied Holland and open critic of anything even resembling fascism, Verhoeven
also had a deep fascination with violence, which he attributes to growing up in a place where
bombings and death were common, where he couldn't walk down the street without tripping over debris
and mutilated bodies. His obsession with violence extends to how society reacts to it in art, how
consumers of art have always been inexorably drawn to violent, salacious content, himself included.
Thus, when Neumeier and Davison explained their vision for a film that explores modern fascism
and a growing culture of excessive violence, there was no way for Verhoeven to resist.
Of course, there are other ways of looking at the film.
As I mentioned at the start, I like to think of RoboCop as an urban Western for the mid-eighties.
"Dead or alive, you are coming with me."
The stereotypical hero of a classic Western is loosely akin to a knight or a ronin,
a loner figure who stands for a code of justice in an untamed wilderness, saving damsels in distress,
escorting pioneers through savage lands, hunting down outlaws, and trying to bring civilization to
places where it doesn't yet exist. RoboCop snugly fits into that mold so well I can't imagine it was
anything other than deliberate. Murphy's spinning gun trick practically gives the game away.
However, when asked about allegory, Verhoeven describes RoboCop as a Christ metaphor,
which is why he shows him literally walking on water during the climax. Unlike Jesus, though,
Murphy is corrupted by the world, finally choosing in that scene to disobey his moral programming
and murder the helpless Boddicker. There are subtle hints leading up to this corruption,
such as scenes that show RoboCop running a Stop sign or ignoring direct orders from his superiors.
Still, in the end, he only kills Boddicker in self-defense, sticking true to his own moral code,
one that partially rewrites the code of his corporate programming.
Uninterested in falling into the trap of promoting a fear of technology, Neumeier
didn't want Murphy to fully regain his humanity in the end, because he wanted to say something
about learning to adapt to a technological world. He wasn't interested in showing a human struggling
with discovering he is a robot; he wanted to show a robot struggling with his humanity.
So yes, despite being a barmy and ridiculous film that relishes in
showing a robotic policeman shoot a potential rapist in the balls--
"Your move, creep."
--this is also a movie that resonates with audiences on a more intellectual
level, proving that RoboCop is incontestibly a sci-fi classic.
And that's all for today, my fellow Earthlings. What do you think of the original RoboCop? Let
me know in the comments, and while you're there, don't forget to like and subscribe
if you haven't already. Thank you for watching, and until next time, when a scientist will use
small steps to reduce our environmental footprint, this is The Unapologetic Geek,
telling you to never be ashamed of what you love, as long as you're not hurting anybody.
"It's a free society, except there ain't nothin' free, because there's no guarantees,
you know? You're on your own. It's the law of the jungle, ho ho!"