After the American New Wave and the explosion of independently-produced American films in the
1970's, it became much easier for nearly anyone to become a film producer. For example, in the
early 1980's, the Austrian-born George Linder, a successful entrepenuer who had made a fortune in
high-tech wheelchairs, read the Richard Bachman novel The Running Man, loved it, and got it into
his head to produce a film out of it, even though he had no prior experience in film production. He
bought the rights for $100,000, a hefty price for a novel in those days, before learning the truth
about Richard Bachman: that the name is actually a pseudonym for the ultra-successful Stephen King.
Linder then wrote the first draft of a screenplay himself and managed to
attract the Ohio-based media conglomerate Taft Broadcasting/Barish Productions,
in particular their brand-new vice-chair and chief of production, Rob Cohen.
Cohen pitched the film at Cannes using a pre-sale model, in which various investors would pay
up-front for the film's production in exchange for a percentage of the film's rights. Without getting
too much into the weeds of high finance, which I don't understand well enough to explain anyway,
this essentially allowed independent film producers to acquire a Hollywood-sized
budget for a film without the need for a studio or a gargantuan bank credit.
In effect, with corporations getting into the game at the exclusion of the major studios,
independent film became less about auteur directors and more about big business,
and many independent films became virtually indistinguishable from their studio counterparts.
At Cannes, Rob Cohen was able to accumulate eighteen million dollars for his film as well
as a distribution deal with the modestly-sized TriStar Pictures. With that, he was able to get
the ball rolling on what would eventually become one of the most prophetic films of the decade.
In 2017, the hottest game show in America is The Running Man. Violent criminals
are the contestants, sent into a decrepit, earthquake-ravaged area of Los Angeles called The
Zone, where they are hunted by the world-famous stalkers, peak athletes whose only purpose is
to defeat the criminals and entertain the masses. Tonight's contestant who will go up against these
brutal gladiators is Ben Richards, the infamous Butcher of Bakersfield. This episode of The
Running Man proves to be very different, however, as Richards not only stands his ground against the
stalkers but also begins to win over the crowd and prove his innocence before a live studio audience.
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Even though eighteen million dollars was a great deal of money, it was still a relatively
small budget for the kind of movie George Linder and Rob Cohen wanted to make. As such,
adapting the novel was a tricky task, given that it deals with a dystopian future and
an over-the-top game show. Cohen brought in the screenwriter Steven E. de Souza,
who had found recent success with his work on Commando, and over the course of pre-production,
de Souza wrote upwards of twenty-five different drafts of The Running Man.
Part of the reason for this was the multiple directors with multiple visions that were hired
for the film. The first such director was George P. Cosmatos, who Cohen wanted based on his work on
Rambo II. Cosmatos wanted to set the entire film inside a shopping center, but Cohen rejected this,
ultimately leading to Cosmatos leaving the project over creative differences.
Next came the German director Carl Schenkel, who became nervous about the scale of the production
and left after three weeks, and then Ferdinand Fairfax, who wanted to use a wildly different
treatment he had written himself that Cohen felt was too expensive and too blatantly anti-American,
so Fairfax also departed over creative differences.
Compounding these shake-ups was the lead of the film, Ben Richards. Don Johnson, Patrick Swayze,
and Dolph Lundgren were all involved to different extents, and Christopher Reeve had been signed
for an extensive period, but the role ultimately went to Arnold Schwarzenegger, the choice of lead
producer George Linder, who was enthusiastic about hiring a fellow Austrian native.
This casting forced significant changes to the script's direction,
which drifted further and further from the somber and serious source material and more towards the
bombastic, tongue-in-cheek action films that were making Schwarzenegger a household name.
Schwarzenegger was keen on the director Andrew Davis, based on his work with Chuck Norris on
Code of Silence, and so Cohen hired Davis, hoping he would stick around longer than the
three previous directors. Schwarzenegger and Davis quickly developed a good working relationship,
but as pre-production was wrapping up, the higher-ups were getting nervous about Davis'
apparent indecisiveness. Eight days into principle photography, Cohen, much to the disappointment
of the lead actor, fired Davis for being over-budget and already four days behind schedule.
He then quickly brought in Paul Michael Glaser, who he had worked with before on Miami Vice
but who was most well-known as an actor, as Starsky from Starsky and Hutch. Glaser had
turned down the job earlier in pre-production, but he came aboard now in the midst of the crisis with
enough experience from television to pick up where Davis had left off without losing too much time.
As such, though Glaser is the credited director and does deserve credit for lending his artistic
vision to the film, all of the pre-production work, location scouting, casting, and more
had been finished before he'd ever set foot behind the cameras. Schwarzenegger remained
a professional and agreed to work with Glaser, but he never quite got over the firing of Andy Davis,
and to this day, he believes the film suffered under the direction of a "television guy."
It had been agreed early-on to change the setting to Los Angeles, the game show capital of the
country, and to hire an ethnically diverse cast, hoping to highlight the socio-economic commentary
of the evolving script. Alongside Schwarzenegger, they hired Maria Conchita Alonso as Amber,
a character who may have gotten her name from Alonso's stage name as a singer, Ámbar. In
addition to her Grammy-nominated singing career, the Cuban-born Alonso had been in a handful of
films including Moscow on the Hudson and Fear City, and she was considered a rising star.
Other co-stars included Alien's Yaphet Kotto as Laughlin, Fleetwood Mac's Mick Fleetwood
as "Mic," who is none-too-subtly supposed to be himself under all that old man make-up, and
Frank Zappa's son Dweezil Zappa as Stevie, who is possibly named after Fleetwood Mac's Stevie Nicks.
"Don't touch that dial."
However, the biggest star aside from Schwarzenegger is unquestionably Richard Dawson,
the original host of Family Feud, who plays the slimy game show host Damon Killian. Dawson had
done acting work before, but for The Running Man, he plays a deeply exaggerated and nasty version
of himself that is not particularly flattering. According to a handful of people who have worked
under Dawson, though, the character wasn't as different from the actor as you'd probably hope.
Personally, I don't think this movie would work without him, and he is the only actor I can think
of who was able to deliver a satisfying comeback to Arnold Schwarzenegger's famous catch phrase.
"I'll be back."
"Only in a rerun."
For the so-called stalkers, the gladiator-style champions who are sent after Ben Richards,
they wanted ultra-flashy men with enormous bodies who could pose a credible threat to Schwarzenegger
while simultaneously being ridiculous. Naturally, they turned to an all-star running back,
Jim Brown, an opera singer and former member of the U.S. wrestling team, Erland Van Lidth,
a pair of strongmen bodybuilders, Gus Rethwisch and Sven-Ole Thorsen,
and the professional wrestlers Professor Toru Tanaka and Jesse Ventura. For the incredibly
eighties dance sequences interspersed throughout the fictional television show,
they hired as choreographer the not-yet-famous Paula Abdul, who brought with her several Laker
girls to act as the dancers themselves. Also worth a mention is the commentator for The Running Man,
Phil Hillton, who is played by none other than Squidward himself, Rodger Bumpass.
"I'm for any sort of event that enables young women to show cleavage."
Filming began in late September of 1986, with only a couple of days lost due to the
director shake-up eight days in. Though sets were used for the game show stage,
the apartment building, and a handful of other locations in the film,
the majority of The Running Man was filmed on location, in places like LAX airport, the Iceland
Skating Rink, and the Filmland Corporate Center, which was the headquarters of MGM at the time.
Most of the location shooting was done at the disused Kaiser Steel Mill in Fontana, California.
The steel mill was a perfect match for the ruined
buildings and almost post-apocalyptic look of the game zone and the prison,
though the location proved to be incredibly dangerous and toxic to cast and crew alike.
Over the course of eight six-day weeks of filming at the abandoned mill, there was
a plague of headaches, spontaneous nosebleeds, and dizziness, but production continued apace,
struggling to catch up to the schedule without facing the significant monetary hit of overruns.
With the budget continuing to inflate well beyond the eighteen million dollar mark--with the final
estimate coming to around twenty-eight and a half million dollars--there
wasn't a lot of money to spend on special and visual effects.
"This stuff is garbage!"
A lot of the heavy lifting was done by liberal use of mattes,
put together by the prolific Syd Dutton, who had previously worked on films like Mad Max:
Beyond Thunderdome and 1984's Dune. One of the biggest special effects was the rocket sled
tunnel, which was accomplished almost entirely with half-scale miniatures shot at six frames
a second. Honestly, I was surprised to learn this, because it doesn't look like a miniature to me.
Post-production saw an inordinate number of test screenings and recuts, with most
of the difficulty being finding a balance between Schwarzenegger's scenes and Dawson's,
as Dawson's performance was so good it threatened to overshadow the lead actor.
There was also a lot of controversy over the ending, with some wanting it to end with Killian's
death but test audiences favoring the more romantic scene between Schwarzenegger and Alonso.
In the late stages of post-production, Rob Cohen was squeezed out of Taft-Barish--which
started him on the path to becoming a successful director instead of a
producer--and the film was pushed back from its intended summer release to a holiday one,
so as not to compete with Arnold Schwarzenegger's other big film that year, Predator.
"I live to see you eat that contract, but I hope you leave enough room for my fist because
I'm going to ram it into your stomach and break your goddamn spine! AAAAGH!"
The Running Man released in November of 1987 to decent if not glowing critical
success and a total worldwide gross of roughly eighty million dollars,
half of which was made domestically. While that did make it commercially successful,
audiences were put off a bit by the tone, which was something of a departure from the
typical Schwarzenegger action fare of the time. As such, it wasn't quite successful
enough on its own to make the case for corporate-run independent filmmaking,
though in the decades since, the pre-sale model has become all but standard for independent films.
What The Running Man truly excelled at, however, was its legacy. In inspired American Gladiators
and Smash TV, along with serving as an influence to things like The Hunger Games. As the years have
passed, it has been re-examined by critics and academics again and again, with each reappraisal
coming to the conclusion that the film was far more prescient than anyone had thought at the
time. While most of the credit for that should go to Steven King--who it should be noted is not a
fan of the film--some should also go to the vision championed by Rob Cohen and Steven de Souza.
This duo took the core concepts of King's novel and glitzed them up with inspirations from comic
books, pro wrestling, cyberpunk novels, and a Japanese game show called Trans America Ultra
Quiz, which put its contestants through pain and humiliation for entertainment, long before other
television shows like Fear Factor and Survivor did the same thing. They thus not only predicted
so-called reality television, but they also had a lot to say about the potential intermarriage of
media conglomerates and political authoritarians that sell narratives and bloodlust to keep
attention away from the existential threat that they represent. It predicted what would now be called
"fake news," of the way seemingly normal people will buy a simple story created by psychopathic
charlatans. Heck, the film even predicts the ability of computers to create effects real enough
to replace actors with digital recreations in order to fool people. In other words: deep fakes.
Now, it is easy to look at The Running Man as a coked up retread of Rollerball,
to see it as horribly contemptuous towards humanity as a whole, using exploitative violence
to show audiences how misplaced their desire for exploitative violence can be. From that angle,
though, I'd argue The Running Man is much more successful in getting its point across.
Yes, it is cynical. Yes, it is downright mean. But it is more coherent in its message,
helped along by its tongue-in-cheek tone and more gentle provocations. As a film, its low budget and
laundry list of production problems are readily apparent on screen, but they are forgivable
because, despite its heavy-handed themes, it still wants to entertain more than it wants to condemn.
It's got plenty of stupid Schwarzenegger one-liners and brilliantly colorful characters.
"Here is Sub-Zero, now plain zero!"
It has over-the-top action sequences, all of which are inventive and well-choreographed,
and it ends on a hopeful note--thanks to unusually wise test audiences--which
helps keep it from devolving into bitterness and self-defeatism the way Rollerball does.
However, while we're still comparing it to Rollerball, I will say that The Running
Man fails in one place where the older film shines: namely, the game itself. I have a lot
of logistical questions about The Running Man as a game show--things like how it's a live show with
a set schedule, but somehow, the stalkers who come out swinging have never once been killed;
how the audience members get overloaded with prizes just for picking their favorite stalker;
or how there appears to be cameras everywhere at all times,
usually in convenient angles that mimic the film we're watching--whereas Rollerball feels
like a believable sport with well-laid out rules and enough logic to be plausible.
I do think the incoherence of The Running Man, as a fictional game show, does detract
from the film's genius, but thankfully, that's not where the story really matters.
This is an exaggerated political parable with a lot to say, much of which is more relevant than
ever in the modern age. The story highlights extreme class division, judicial inequality,
insidious authoritarianism egged on by a compliant media, and the unsettling willingness of Americans
to turn a blind eye to these things as long as they're glued to their screens,
and it does it all in a balls-to-the-wall action satire that is as funny as it is terrifying.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that The Running Man is, in hindsight, Schwarzenegger's
most important film of the 1980's, even surpassing giants like The Terminator and Predator.
No, it's not better as a film, but given that we haven't yet been overcome with competitive
machismo, invisible alien hunters, and killer robots from the future,
The Running Man has proven itself to be more aware of where we are actually headed.
There is a remake in the works, with Edgar Wright attached as director, and though I don't think
this is as terrible an idea as most remakes of the sci-fi classics I cover, the telling of the
story of The Running Man is less necessary today, now that reality has all but caught up to it.
And that's all for today, my fellow Earthlings. What do you think is Schwarzenegger's most
important film? Let me know in the comments, and while you're there, don't forget to like and
subscribe if you haven't already. If you really do like my content, consider joining my Patreon to
get early access, vote on future topics, and more. You can also check out my website at emagill.com,
where you'll find written reviews of plenty more sci-fi classics in both film and literature. Until
next time, though, when we'll find blind terror among killer plants, this is The Unapologetic
Geek, telling you to never be ashamed of what you love, as long as you're not hurting anybody.
"I'm gonna throw up all over you."
"Go ahead. Won't show on this shirt."