Video Scripts: Maniac Cop 3, WarGames, Night of the Living Dead 1990
Sharing more videos Cody wrote for JoBlo Originals and JoBlo Horror Originals.
I have been writing news articles and film reviews for ArrowintheHead.com for several years, and for the last couple years I have also been writing scripts for videos that are released through the site's YouTube channel JoBlo Horror Originals. Recently I started writing video scripts for the JoBlo Originals YouTube channel as well. I have previously shared the videos I wrote that covered
Three more videos that I have written the scripts for can be seen below; two were for the JoBlo Horror Originals channel and the other was written for JoBlo Originals.
For the WTF Happened to This Horror Movie series, I dug into the troubled production of Maniac Cop 3, which lost both its writer and its director before the jobs were completely finished:
Maniac Cop 3 script:
In 1988, director William Lustig and screenwriter Larry Cohen joined forces to bring us the awesome slasher movie Maniac Cop. They made a follow-up two years later, and Maniac Cop 2 is one of the rare horror sequels that’s generally considered to be even better than its predecessor. Then it all came crashing down with Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence. A project Cohen abandoned at the script stage, and Lustig walked away from when reshoots were required. He even had his name taken off of it; the finished film is credited to Alan Smithee, the pseudonym that used to get put on movies that were disowned by their directors. Why did things go so wrong on Maniac Cop 3? We’re going to try to figure that out in this episode of WTF Happened to This Horror Movie.
Larry Cohen had already made several great horror movies before he wrote Maniac Cop. He had almost thirty years of experience in the industry at that point and had directed movies like the It’s Alive trilogy, God Told Me To, Q: The Winged Serpent, and The Stuff. Lustig was just getting his own career started, having made the blood-soaked 1980 slasher Maniac and the 1982 crime thriller Vigilante. When these two met up for lunch one day, Cohen asked Lustig why he hadn’t made a sequel to Maniac, since the movie had gotten a lot of attention and impressed many genre fans. As soon as that question was asked, the brainstorming began – not exactly for a Maniac sequel, but for a different movie that would have Maniac in the title. Cohen quickly came up with the concept of Maniac Cop and the tagline, “You have the right to remain silent… Forever.” Then he just had to write a script that would live up to them.
The Maniac Cop himself is Matt Cordell, a New York police officer who was known to be a bit trigger-happy, but became something of a celebrity – and a hero to other officers – due to the notable busts he made. Then he got too close to bringing down crime bosses with connections in important places. City Hall turned against him, had him convicted of rights violations, and sent him off to Sing Sing. Where he was locked up with the criminals he had busted. He was ambushed in the shower, cut up so badly he was believed to have been killed. But he wasn’t quite dead, kept alive by the need for vengeance. Now he stalks the streets of New York, killing criminals and innocent victims alike while also on a mission to wipe out the higher-ups and politicians that sacrificed him to save themselves.
Robert Z’Dar plays Cordell in all three of the films, and Lustig and Cohen put him up against some incredible actors along the way. Just in the first movie alone you get to see him go after the likes of Tom Atkins, Bruce Campbell, Laurene Landon, Richard Roundtree, and William Smith. Some of them even make it into part 2, where you also get Robert Davi as the hero. Plus Claudia Christian as the heroine and Leo Rossi as a serial killer who thinks Cordell is his best friend. By the end of Maniac Cop 2, everyone who was responsible for Cordell’s prison sentence and shower attack has been killed and his name has been cleared. But in the final shot of the movie, we see that’s still not enough to allow this unstoppable killer to rest in peace. His hand comes busting through the lid of his coffin.
Despite that ending jump scare, Lustig and Cohen didn’t have any immediate plans to make a Maniac Cop 3. They had wrapped things up pretty well and were ready to move on to other projects. But then a new company acquired the sequel rights and contacted them about making a third film, which they were contractually obligated to do. The previous movies had been described as “Frankenstein meets The French Connection”, so when Cohen was tasked with coming up with a continuation, he took the idea to the next logical step: Maniac Cop 3 would be inspired by The Bride of Frankenstein. And he came up with a story that gave Cordell not just a bride, but a child as well.
For the Bride character, he wanted to bring Laurene Landon back as Maniac Cop heroine Teresa Mallory – even though Teresa appeared to have been killed in the second movie. Cohen’s idea was that Teresa would now be braindead, kept alive by a life support system in a hospital in Harlem. This same hospital would have a high security wing in which a doctor named Susan Falconi treats criminals that have been wounded during apprehension. She gets them into good enough condition to stand trial. It would be Falconi who notices that Teresa occasionally has a visitor that causes her brainwaves to spike – a visitor no one else notices. A police officer that she sees vanish into the tunnels beneath the hospital. When hospital officials decide they should take Teresa off life support, the murders begin. And soon after, it’s discovered that Teresa is pregnant. She wasn’t pregnant when she arrived in the hospital. This happened while she was there. Cordell has impregnated his braindead victim during his visits to her room, and wants to make sure she lives long enough to give birth to his child.
Cohen introduced a new hero cop to work with Falconi to stop Cordell’s latest rampage. A detective named Moonjean, who was born in Haiti and had childhood experiences with voodoo and the undead. This was said to “add a sharp edge to his cop instincts”. The basic treatment Cohen wrote is available to read on the Blu-ray release, and it doesn’t really go into how Moonjean’s experience with voodoo would play into the story. He just has a voodoo shaman come in at the end of the film, after Cordell and Teresa – who rises from the dead and joins Cordell on his killing spree after she’s taken off life support – have already been defeated.
The financiers were able to secure international deals based on Cohen’s script… but they weren’t able to close a deal with Japan. It has been said that the Japanese investors weren’t interested in a Maniac Cop movie that would have a Black lead. So the fall-back plan was to have Davi return as his Maniac Cop 2 character, Detective Lieutenant Sean McKinney. This may be what happened, and it’s unfortunate that the project would run into issues due to the race of the lead character in Cohen’s script. However, it also doesn’t sound like the story was very good to begin with. Asking viewers to go along with the idea that Cordell has come back from the grave to impregnate a braindead woman? That’s not a good direction to take a franchise in, and might be the most disgusting story idea that has ever been suggested for a horror sequel. It would have even made the previous two movies uncomfortable to watch, thinking of where the Cordell and Teresa story was going. Cohen was a great writer, he made some classics during his career, but what he had come up with for Maniac Cop 3 was a bad idea.
So, to appease the Japanese investors, the script needed to be rewritten to replace Moonjean with McKinney. According to Cohen, Lustig didn’t want to bring Teresa Mallory back as the “Bride of Cordell” character, so that also needed to be reworked. Cohen was willing to do the rewrite, but only if he received extra compensation. He had written a script and fulfilled his contract. If they wanted him to do more work on the script, he wanted to be paid more for that. More money was not forthcoming, so he never did the rewrite he was asked to do. Yet the producers still held on to the hope, until the last possible minute, that he was going to come through for them and deliver that rewrite. When producer Michael Leahy called him to ask about it, Cohen answered his early ‘90s cellphone and acted like he was going to dictate the entire new script to Leahy while driving down the road.
That clearly wasn’t going to work out. So Leahy’s producing partner Joel Soisson spent a weekend knocking out a draft of the script that took the usable ideas from Cohen’s draft, mixed in McKinney, and replaced Teresa Mallory. Soisson was no stranger to writing horror, his previous credits included producing and co-writing the 1986 movie Trick or Treat, but everyone was disappointed not to have a complete Larry Cohen script to work from. It’s worth noting that the producers of this film had not seen Maniac Cop 1 or 2 before they decided to make the third movie. Thankfully, Soisson had caught up on the preceding movies by the time he wrote the script for part 3. He would continue revising the script throughout the shoot.
Script troubles weren’t the only issue keeping everyone in suspense while the production start date drew near. It also wasn’t a hundred percent certain they would be able to get Robert Davi to star in the movie. Davi didn’t officially sign on until two weeks before filming began.
By this point, Lustig was not in a good mindset, and a hectic pre-production was only one of the problems. He didn’t want to make Maniac Cop 3 at all, and having an incomplete script that wasn’t written by Cohen surely didn’t help matters. But the project he wanted to make had just fallen apart after he had spent a year getting it together. That project was True Romance. He had gotten his hands on this script written by an unknown named Quentin Tarantino and took it to a company called Cinetel. They bought the script, and Tarantino planned to use that money to go toward the budget of a movie he wanted to make called Reservoir Dogs. Lustig was going to make a three million dollar version of True Romance at Cinetel, he knew the actors he wanted to cast, he figured he was about a month away from shooting it… then it was taken away from him. An executive at Cinetel was the former assistant of director Tony Scott. She had introduced Tarantino to Scott, Scott had asked to see some of his screenplays, she showed him the script for True Romance. And Scott decided he wanted to make that movie. So Cinetel sold the script, Lustig was paid off, and Scott went on to make True Romance for around twelve million.
Lustig was severely depressed about the True Romance situation while he was working on Maniac Cop 3. And very disinterested in having to direct another movie about a rampaging Matt Cordell. So disinterested, there was even a time when he was watching Ferngully on his monitor instead of paying attention to the scene he was supposed to be directing. Apparently Davi was fine with taking control of his scenes, so that wasn’t a problem.
Lustig’s lack of passion for the project is very clear in the set visit write-up that was published in the pages of Fangoria magazine. While a filmmaker would usually be hyping up the movie they’re working on, Lustig instead made it clear that he was only working on Maniac Cop 3 for the money. He tells readers not to expect the film to be as exciting as the previous one, as it had a lower budget than part 2. He and Davi both complain about the ending, with Lustig implying that the producers are out of touch with the horror audience. They don’t describe what the ending is, so we can’t be sure if it’s the same one that’s on the finished film. And when he’s asked if he would direct the Maniac Cop 4 that the producers were already discussing, Lustig replies, “I hope I’m in a financial position after this to walk away from it. For me, it’s not creatively stimulating at this point.” That’s how the article ends – not exactly a quote that leaves the reader pumped to see how the movie is going to turn out.
Given the circumstances, Soisson didn’t do a bad job of reworking the script. When you break it down, it sounds like Maniac Cop 3 tells a good story. It begins with the resurrection of Cordell, who doesn’t rise from the grave on his own – which makes sense, since his issues have been resolved. This time he has been bought back from the dead by a voodoo shaman played by Julius Harris. It’s not entirely clear why the shaman wants the hulking, undead police officer walking around. Something about him hating injustice. But at least we have some explanation for Cordell still being here. Catching up with McKinney, we find that he’s friends with fellow officer Kate Sullivan, played by Gretchen Becker. Her style of policing is basically making her come off like Cordell: The Next Generation; she has been accused of excessive force and earned the nickname Maniac Kate. When future Freddy Krueger Jackie Earle Haley, playing a very bad guy named Frank Jessup, busts into a pharmacy, Kate arrives on the scene. It looks like Jessup has taken a young pharmacy assistant hostage, but after Kate guns him down the girl reveals that she was in on this robbery with him. The girl and Kate shoot each other at the same time. While Doctor Susan Fowler, played by Caitlin Dulany, treats Jessup in a high security wing of a hospital, in another area of the hospital Kate is declared braindead and hooked up to life support machinery. Manipulated news footage makes it look like Kate was completely out of control when she shot Jessup and his supposedly innocent hostage. When Cordell hears a report about this, he knows that she’s getting framed just like he was. He becomes very protective of Kate and sets out to kill everyone who causes trouble for her, whether that’s the news people who set her up, Frank Jessup, an uncaring doctor – played by Doug Savant, who worked with Soisson on Trick or Treat – or just some random person on the street who talks negatively about her. Characters played by Paul Gleason and Robert Forster also fall along the way.
Lustig and Cohen complain about their vision being compromised and Maniac Cop 3 being a movie made by committee, but that’s a much better story than they had in place at the start of the process.
Although Kate is braindead, her brainwaves will occasionally spike as she has dreams about a wedding ceremony where she’s marrying Cordell. The best thing about the movie versus the initial treatment is that the relationship between Cordell and his bride is never consummated. As the body count rises, McKinney investigates and Fowler becomes aware that Cordell is lurking around, coming and going through the tunnels beneath the hospital. These tunnels connect to an old church where the voodoo shaman has set up shop. A church that horror fans may recognize from John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness. Eventually Cordell brings Kate’s body there so the shaman can perform a ritual that will make her just like him. She will be his undead bride.
The first two Maniac Cop movies feature some amazing action sequences. Lustig was determined to get some spectacular action into this one as well, despite having less money than part 2. It seemed to be his main focus; Soisson said he was concentrating on action to the detriment of story. The death scenes, multiple shootouts, and the climactic car chase. In that chase, McKinney and Fowler are in an ambulance, being pursued by Cordell in a police cruiser. And while Cordell drives his car, his body is fully engulfed in flames. This sequence was a jaw-dropping accomplishment, pulled off by stunt coordinator Spiro Razatos and his team. While a burning stuntman sat in the driver’s seat, Cordell’s vehicle was actually driven by a second stuntman who was sitting in a protective glass cage on the passenger side. Although they could only film for twenty seconds or so with the stuntman on fire, they captured enough footage of him that the chase takes up around six minutes of screen time.
The filming of the chase sequence almost ended in disaster, but not for the burning stuntman. The problem was the burning dummy stand-in that was used for wide shots. When they were setting up the dummy at one point, the thing’s foot shifted onto the gas pedal right after they set it on fire. The car went driving off through the streets of downtown Los Angeles with a flaming dummy at the wheel. Thankfully, it didn’t collide with any pedestrians or other vehicles. Its drive ended when it crashed into a propane tank, which luckily didn’t explode.
The producers realized they had a disaster of another sort on their hands after filming wrapped and Lustig assembled his rough cut. They had a feeling that the movie was going to come in shorter than the contractual minimum of ninety minutes, but they were shocked when they found out that Lustig had only delivered a fifty-one minute movie. They were going to have to go into reshoots to pad it out significantly. Soisson wrote new scenes to extend the running time – and as soon as they got on set to shoot those new scenes, Lustig decided he was done with this movie. Just like Cohen had walked away from the script and passed the rewrite over to Soisson, Lustig walked away from the production and left Soisson to direct the reshoots.
When you watch Maniac Cop 3, there are some scenes that feel like filler, and we know for sure that the scene where we see McKinney and Katie interact at the shooting range was added in reshoots… Which is shocking, because that’s the only scene they have together before her injury. Without that, there’s nothing to establish the friendship that causes McKinney to be involved through the rest of the story. If they didn’t realize that during principle photography, this really was a mess.
And of course, the finished film did come out as a bit of a mess. There’s no way the movie could have gone through all the script and production issues without seeming like it was cobbled together and not completely thought out. Even with the filler scenes, moments of stock footage, and a five minute recap and title sequence up front, it still couldn’t reach the ninety minute mark. The final running time is just under eighty-five minutes. Which is actually just fine for a horror movie. While Maniac Cop 3 is lacking compared to its predecessors, it’s okay as far as lesser sequels go. It’s a bland and disjointed movie, but it could have been a lot worse. It could have been about Cordell impregnating Teresa Mallory while she was on life support.
All the trouble paid off, because Maniac Cop 3 was a financial success when it was released straight-to-video in July of 1993.
Lustig and Soisson weren’t too happy with each other when they walked away from the making of this movie. The experience was so unpleasant for Soisson that whenever the rights holders brought up the idea of making a Maniac Cop 4 in his presence, he would just laugh and walk out of the meeting. There’s no way he would ever work on another Maniac Cop movie. But there is a happy ending here, aside from the investors making their money back. Years after the Maniac Cop 3 debacle, Lustig and Soisson crossed paths at a convention and buried the hatchet. They get along so well that they even recorded a commentary together for the recent 4K release of the film. The idea of them doing a Maniac Cop 3 commentary with each other would have been unthinkable for a long time after the film’s release. Now they can look back at it, admit mistakes and regrettable decisions were made, and leave their past issues behind them.
It’s just a shame Matt Cordell never got to come back and redeem himself in a Maniac Cop 4. It wouldn’t have been difficult for the next sequel to be better than this one.
For the non-horror Revisited series, I took a look back at the 1983 film WarGames, starring Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy.
WarGames script:
Anyone who has seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is well aware that Matthew Broderick can be a very cool guy. He’s actually so cool that he even had the internet in 1983. And if you think the internet is dangerous now, that’s nothing compared to how dangerous it was back then. Just by tapping some keys in his bedroom, Broderick nearly kicked off a global thermonuclear war. At least, that’s what happens in the 1983 release WarGames, which we’re looking at in this episode of Revisited.
SET-UP: The story of WarGames begins four years before the movie’s release, 1979. That’s when college friends and aspiring screenwriters Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes discovered that they were each writing separate scripts about genius. They were both taking a different approach to the concept; inspired by the story of physicist Stephen Hawking and his battle with ALS, Lasker was writing about a terminally ill genius who wanted to pass on his legacy. Parkes was working on a script about a teenager whose genius wasn’t understood by those around him, leading him to get into trouble. Lasker and Parkes decided to combine their ideas and write a script titled The Genius, in which the dying older genius would reach out to a juvenile delinquent genius and pass his legacy on to him. This could have been a great character drama – but over the course of months of research, the writers became aware of modern computer technologies. They heard about computers being able to connect to each other over phone lines, and tech-minded young people who were the first wave of hackers. They learned about advances being made in video games, and that the Stanford Research Institute was running computerized war games for the military. Now they could see how a young man’s genius could get him into trouble: he could hack into the wrong computer system. Once they latched onto that idea, The Genius went into a different, more thrilling direction. WarGames was born.
After meeting with hackers and visiting NORAD headquarters in Colorado, Lasker and Parkes had the full story in place. They wrote about a teenager named David Lightman, who has cobbled together a computer system he can use to hack other computers. We first see him hack into his high school’s computer to change his grades and the grades of a friend. Then he jokingly makes an international flight reservation on his computer, something unthinkable at the time. The trouble starts when he goes searching for a video game company’s system because he’s too impatient to wait for them to officially announce their new games, he wants to play them now. Instead of finding the video game company, he accidentally hacks into a U.S. military system – but there are games listed in there, too. Checkers, Chess, Black Jack, Global Thermonuclear War. Of course, David chooses to play that last option, and decides to play as Russia, launching nukes at the United States. David is completely unaware that the game he is playing shows up on the screens in the NORAD war room, convincing the people working there that the U.S. is really under attack. They’re baffled when the nightmare scenario disappears from their screens as soon as it showed up. That’s because David had to cut the game short when his mom called him away from the computer.
When the news reports what happened in the NORAD war room, David realizes he’s in serious trouble. But he’s not just going to be arrested for hacking the military and making them believe the country was being attacked. It’s worse than that: the computer system liked playing Global Thermonuclear War with David. It wants to continue playing the game to completion – including actually launching nukes. The military considers David to be a terrorist, not listening to him when he tells them their computer has gone haywire. So he has to solve this problem himself, going on the run to find the man who created the computer system. The character who was inspired by Stephen Hawking, and you can tell by his name: Stephen Falken. So the idea of a young genius and an older genius interacting is still there in WarGames, just in a very different way than Lasker and Parkes originally imagined.
The writers tried to make their script as close to reality as possible, and worried that the audience wouldn’t be able to buy the idea of a teenager making NORAD think nukes had been launched. Then their idea was legitimized by actual news reports. In November of ’79, NORAD mistakenly believed the Soviet Union had launched over a thousand ICBMs at targets in the U.S…. then they realized they were just watching a simulation. NORAD computers then malfunctioned three times in June of 1980, due to a faulty microchip. Now it would be very easy for the public to believe WarGames could actually happen – despite denials from the military.
With executive producer Leonard Goldberg attached to the project, search for a studio began… But most of them were not ready at that time to tell a story that dealt so heavily with computers and hacking. This was a baffling science fiction to them. WarGames was set up at Universal for a while, but ran into budgetary issues there, as Universal wasn’t willing to put more than eight million dollars into it. So Goldberg took WarGames over to United Artists, which would end up giving the film a budget of twelve million.
The director chosen to bring WarGames to the screen was Martin Brest,, whose career was on the rise due to his 1979 film Going in Style. Unfortunately for Lasker and Parkes, Brest wanted significant rewrites done, and he didn’t want the original writers to do them. Since Goldberg had given Lasker and Parkes co-producer status, they were able to sit in on the script meetings, but any attempt they made to handle revisions themselves got rejected. They could only observe as Brest considered aging up the lead character, making him a college student, and possibly having an ending where nuclear war really would break out. They were eventually banned from the script meetings and had their co-producer status revoked. They were off the project while Brest reworked the script with Walon Green, Oscar-nominated co-writer of The Wild Bunch.
Brest went on to assemble a cast led by two actors who were just starting out. Matthew Broderick was cast as David Lightman. Ally Sheedy was chosen to play Jennifer, a classmate David befriends and offers to change her grades for her. Beyond them, we get some great character actors, with Maury Chaykin and Eddie Deezen appearing as computer experts David associates with. Dabney Coleman plays McKittrick, head of the NORAD computer system, who is the most intense about punishing David for his offenses. Barry Corbin plays General Beringer, who’s based at NORAD and doesn’t trust the computer as much as McKittrick does. Lasker and Parkes wrote the role of Stephen Falken with John Lennon in mind and wanted him to play the role… but sadly, the legendary musician was killed when the film was still in development. So instead of John Lennon, Falken was played by John Wood. The writers had also imagined Falken as having ALS and being in a wheelchair like Hawking, but Brest vetoed that idea. Falken ends up in the NORAD war room, helping David try to end the dangerous war game, and Brest felt that having a character in a wheelchair inside the war room would be distracting, too reminiscent of Dr. Strangelove.
WarGames began filming, and when United Artists saw the footage that was coming in, they weren’t impressed. Brest was taking a much darker approach to the material than they wanted. Two weeks into production, he was removed from the project. For a replacement, the studio turned to John Badham, the director of Saturday Night Fever and Blue Thunder. As he prepared to take the helm, Badham saw what the issues were with the production: there were script problems, and Brest had the actors playing the scenes too seriously. Even when David and Jennifer are hacking into the school computer and changing grades, he had Broderick and Sheedy acting like they were on a life or death mission. Badham would allow the actors to lighten up a bit – and he also had Lasker and Parkes brought back to fix the script.
The final shooting script ended up being a mixture of the original script, fresh revisions, and some Walon Green contributions. Tom Mankiewicz, who had written Superman and multiple James Bond films, was brought in to add one scene along the way. And Lasker and Parkes continued doing rewrites throughout filming, including expanding Sheedy’s role as they went. Jennifer had been meant to be a small part, but the chemistry between Broderick and Sheedy was so strong they had to keep her around. Jennifer was added into scenes she had been missing from before, and more attention was paid to the developing relationship between her and David.
REVIEW: While the finished film isn’t as dark as what Martin Brest was going for, that isn’t to say that it doesn’t take the material seriously. The stakes are clear in the opening sequence, in which two missile commanders – one of them Michael Madsen in a very early role – are led to believe that they’ve been ordered to launch the nuclear missile under their control. When one starts questioning the order, the other pulls a gun on him in an effort to force him to do his job and launch. It’s very intense and a great way to get things started. These men don’t know this is just a test, and that the one who fails to launch is part of the twenty-two percent of missile commanders who prove to be psychologically incapable of letting their nukes fly. Then we’re introduced to McKittrick and Beringer at NORAD. There’s an extended debate over whether or not the human element should be removed from the equation; McKittrick wants the computer system to be in charge of launching the nuclear missiles, since a human’s conscience can get in the way. This is an important scene, because it sets up the fact that the computer system will be able to start a nuclear war on its own if it wants to, but decades later you can imagine this scene being trimmed. Studio execs these days would probably want this information to be condensed and delivered faster so the film can get to its young lead.
We’re about fifteen minutes into WarGames by the time David appears on screen, but it’s his movie from that point on. Broderick did a terrific job of playing the character, and while David knows some of the same tricks as Ferris Bueller, there is no hint of Ferris in this performance. David is an awkward troublemaker, but it’s easy to care about him and root for him when he gets in way over his head. With a lesser or less likeable actor the movie wouldn’t have worked, because Broderick carries most of the film on his shoulders. He has a great supporting cast, sure, but they couldn’t have saved the film if the actor playing David was lacking.
Broderick and Sheedy are really good together, so it makes sense that Sheedy was given more screen time than expected. McKittrick is a well-written antagonist who is also well played by Coleman. The writers were smart not to make his character too villainous or over-the-top; he thinks he’s making the right choices, he just happens to be wrong most of the time. Corbin is fun in the moments he has as Beringer, and one of his best lines – one about pissing on a sparkplug – was an ad lib.
The most popular line in the film doesn’t come from any of the human characters, it’s delivered by the military computer system – which is also known as the WOPR, or the War Operations Planned Response. Badham came up with that acronym and the writers weren’t sure about it, but it beat out the alternative – and the one that was used in real life – SIOP. Single Integrated Operational Plan. Badham thought SIOP sounded boring. When David hacks into the WOPR, he turns on a speaker that’s hooked to his computer so we can hear the voice of the system he’s interacting with. The computerized delivery of the line “Shall we play a game?” may be one of the most iconic lines of the 1980s. The voice of the WOPR was provided by the actor who plays its creator, John Wood. To give an unusual tone to his lines even before it was computerized, Badham had Wood read the words of sentences in reverse order. So when he read that famous line, he would have actually said “game a play we shall”.
Badham shows David turning on his own computer speaker, but when he interacts with the WOPR on other computers later in the film, we still hear that voice without a speaker being established. Some movie trickery that we’re not supposed to think about.
Given that the older genius was very important to Lasker and Parkes’ original idea, it’s kind of surprising that there’s so little of Falken in WarGames. For most of the running time, we’re told he’s dead. He actually faked his death and went into seclusion, and when David and Jennifer locate him Wood is really only given one scene to let us get to know who this man is. With the character’s health issues removed, Falken is just disenchanted in the movie. He lost his wife and young son Joshua, who he named the WOPR operating system after, and he’s broken down by humanity’s insistence on destroying itself. Wood brought a lot of depth to the character, and it would have been nice to get more dramatic scenes with him. But by the time he enters the picture, nuclear war appears to be imminent, so the characters are kind of busy.
Viewers will probably never believe that Badham is going to actually let the WOPR-slash-Joshua computer bomb the world, but that doesn’t make it any less exciting to watch David struggle to prevent that outcome. WarGames is a thrilling, fun movie, and given the behind-the-scenes issues, the script-writing mess and the replacement of a director, it’s stunning that it turned out as well as it did.
LEGACY/NOW: All the tinkering with the script really worked out in the end, because Lasker and Parkes ended up receiving an Academy Award nomination. Best Screenplay was one of three Oscars WarGames was up for; William A. Fraker was also nominated for his cinematography, and the film was nominated in the Best Sound category.
In addition to being well-received by critics and being honored by the Academy, WarGames was also a financial success when it was released on June 3, 1983. United Artists was rewarded for the twelve million dollars they put into the production when it earned eighty million at the domestic box office, becoming the fifth highest grossing movie of the year in North America. International box office added another forty-five million into the mix. Audience members were reportedly so into the film that they would applaud at the final lines.
One of the film’s fans was then-President Ronald Reagan, who took in a special screening at Camp David. Reagan sidetracked a meeting with members of Congress by giving them a rave review of WarGames, but also had the Joint Chiefs of Staff look into how realistic the story was. When it was found that this movie served as an early warning about cybersecurity issues, he signed a directive focused on the security of Telecommunications and Automated Information Systems.
That wasn’t the only impact WarGames made on the world; it was also an important film to the real people out there who were as interested in computer systems as David was. When a hacker convention was founded in the ‘90s, it was named DEFCON, in reference to David’s antics causing the military’s DEFCON threat levels to increase. Google hosted a twenty-fifth anniversary screening of the film, with the company’s co-founder calling it “a key movie of a generation, especially for those of us who got into computing.”
But whether you’re into computing or not, this is a movie that will stick with you. Once you watch it, you’ll never forget the computer’s voice asking, “Shall we play a game?”
And for the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series, I discussed the merits of Tom Savini's 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead:
Night of the Living Dead 1990 script:
INTRO: In 1968, director George A. Romero shocked the world with his feature debut Night of the Living Dead. The horror film that introduced the concept of flesh-eating ghouls; the walking dead, driven by an urge to consume the living. A new kind of monster that captured imaginations and scared the hell out of people. Although the word “zombie” is never spoken in the film, that’s what the audience would decide these things should be called. And zombies remain incredibly popular to this day. A couple decades after making Night of the Living Dead, Romero and his collaborators decided to produce a remake. Night of the Living Dead 1990 didn’t go over as well as its predecessor did, to put it lightly. But it is one of the best remakes of a horror classic we’ve ever gotten. And if you haven’t seen it yet, it’s the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw.
CREATORS / CAST: Romero directed the original Night of the Living Dead from a screenplay he wrote with John A. Russo. When it came time for the remake, Romero handled the writing duties himself. He stuck to the concept of seven people seeking shelter in an isolated farmhouse as the unburied dead return to life. The characters are even the same, they interact with each other in the same ways – for the most part. Some of them even meet the same fate in 1990 as they met in 1968. Romero did tweak the dialogue and add in the occasional twist. He also scripted the remake to be faster and more eventful. But he decided not to direct the movie.
Online trivia claims that Capricorn One and Outland director Peter Hyams was offered the chance to take the helm. That didn’t work out because Hyams opted to make the Gene Hackman thriller Narrow Margin instead. It’s difficult to find a source for this claim, so it may or may not have happened. What definitely happened is that Romero asked legendary special effects artist Tom Savini to direct. Romero and Savini had a working relationship that went back nearly fifteen years at that point. Savini had been providing the bloodshed and taking acting roles in Romero’s films since Martin in 1976. Romero had also given Savini the chance to get into directing, having him direct three episodes of his anthology series Tales from the Darkside. Based on the strength of those episodes, Romero knew his longtime collaborator could handle Night of the Living Dead 1990.
Romero and Savini had first met when Savini was still in high school. This was in the mid-‘60s, when Romero was thinking of making a movie called Whine of the Fawn. It would have been a coming-of-age movie set in the Middle Ages, centering on a couple teenagers. The teenage Savini was interested in being involved with the movie. When that project was scrapped and eventually replaced by Night of the Living Dead, Savini wanted to do the special effects. But he got sent off to the Vietnam War before filming began. When the new Night was brought up to him, it was like getting a second chance to work on the movie he missed out on.
Savini had some ideas for the new movie that got shot down very quickly. Since the first Night had been in black and white, he thought the remake should start that way, with color gradually seeping in. The producers weren’t into that. The remake is in color from the first frame. He also pitched the idea of zombie point-of-view shots that would be in black and white, going in and out of focus. Romero didn’t like that, feeling that seeing the world through the eyes of the zombies would give the dead too much life.
One major change that Savini was able to bring to the table was the evolution of the Barbara character. In the original film, Barbara – played by Judith O’Dea – had been shocked into a catatonic state early on and never really emerged from it. Savini wanted her to start off as an unstable, mousy schoolmarm type. Someone who needs her brother to drive her two hundred miles to the cemetery her mother is buried in. She can’t handle the drive on her own. But as the world falls apart around her, Barbara finds her inner strength and becomes a badass heroine. His vision for Barbara even drew comparisons to Sigourney Weaver in Aliens. Romero went along with it. A chance to make up for how weak Barbara had been the first time around. Caroline Williams, who had worked with Savini on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, was considered for Barbara, but the role went to Patricia Tallman. An actress and stuntwoman who had known Savini and Romero for a long time; she even had roles in Knightriders and one of Savini’s Darkside episodes.
A very strong character in the original film had been Ben, played by Duane Jones. It was going to be tough for anyone to try to live up to Jones’ performance. Ving Rhames, Laurence Fishburne, and Eriq La Salle were up for the role. Romero’s then-wife Christine, an associate producer on the project, was particularly impressed by La Salle’s audition. But then future genre icon Tony Todd, still a few years away from playing Candyman, came in and blew Savini away with his audition. He got the part.
Aside from Barbara, who would be looking quite different with short red hair, Savini wanted the cast to resemble the original’s as much as possible. Given his association with horror, you might think he cast Tom Towles in the film because he was familiar with him from Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. But Savini hadn’t seen Henry. He cast Towles as the hard-headed, hot-tempered Harry Cooper, Ben’s nemesis, because he could act and looked like Karl Hardman from the first movie. McKee Anderson was cast as Harry’s long-suffering wife Helen, originally played by Marilyn Eastman. The Coopers have a young daughter who’s suffering from a zombie bite. This character, named Karen and played by Kyra Schon in ‘68, is now Sarah, played by Heather Mazur. Stepping in for Keith Wayne and Judith Ridley as young lovers Tom and Judy were William Butler and Kate Finneran. This was Finneran’s screen debut. Genre fans already knew Butler from things like Ghoulies II, Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, Freddy’s Nightmares, and Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III. That’s right, the guy shared the screen with Ghoulies, Jason, Freddy, Leatherface, and Romero zombies. Now that’s a career to be proud of.
Of course, it was also necessary to cast someone special in the role of Johnny. Barbara’s short-lived brother who speaks the famous line, “They’re coming to get you, Barbara.” For this role, Savini chose Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2’s Bill Moseley. The original Johnny had been played by Night of the Living Dead producer Russ Streiner, who returned to produce the remake alongside Romero and original co-writer John A. Russo.
BACKGROUND: Night of the Living Dead 1990 – or Night ’90, as it’s called by fans and the people who behind it – exists because of an error a distributor made twenty-two years earlier. The original film had landed a distribution deal with Continental Releasing. A division of the Walter Reade Organization. But when they handed the film over, it was called Night of the Flesh Eaters. The decision was made to change the title to Night of the Living Dead… and when the distributor changed the title, they forgot to put a copyright notice on the film. Without that, Night of the Living Dead became public domain as soon as Continental sent it out into the world.
The movie racked up millions of dollars that didn’t go to Romero, his collaborators, or the rest of the investors. The Night makers filed a lawsuit against Continental that dragged on for years. As soon as a three million dollar judgment was made in filmmakers’ favor, Continental went bankrupt, so that three million went out the window. They did get the rights to their movie back, but the bootlegging was so prolific they still didn’t make much profit from it. They tried their best to take unauthorized copies and merchandise off the market, but it proved difficult to keep control of that stuff. Around 1986, another lawsuit had to be filed when Hal Roach Studios made a colorized version of the film without permission. Once that issue was dealt with, Russo decided it was time to face another problem. The possibility that someone would try to remake Night of the Living Dead. When he heard that a company in Texas was considering doing just that, he called Romero to get the ball rolling on their own remake.
Romero openly admitted to Fangoria that the decision to make Night ’90 was purely financial. They wanted to make money for the original investors who had been screwed over by the copyright ordeal. In the decades since Night ’90 was released, we have seen unauthorized remakes being released. Along with other attempts to cash in on the familiar name without involving the original filmmakers. But at the end of the ‘80s, Romero, Russo, and their associates were able to get their remake into production before anyone else could. Almost everyone who had a hand in Night ’68 was invited back to be part of Night ’90 – but there was one notable absence. Bill Hinzman had played the Cemetery Ghoul, the first zombie we see in the original film. He was one of the original Night investors, and you might expect to see him at least make a cameo in the remake. That didn’t happen because he and the others had just had a falling out. While they were trying to get the remake off the ground, Hinzman had decided to make his own low budget zombie movie. He basically played the Cemetery Ghoul again in that film, which is best known by the title FleshEater. Romero and Russo had sent cease and desist letters to Hinzman telling him not to make it. He made it anyway. So he’s not in Night ’90. Thankfully, the old friends did bury the hatchet eventually. And FleshEater is really entertaining too.
While the original Night was made for just over one hundred thousand dollars, Night ’90 had a budget of four million. Menahem Golan’s production company 21st Century Film Corporation got involved. A distribution deal was made with Columbia Pictures – a company that had passed on the chance to release the original because they didn’t like the downbeat ending. That makes it sound like things should have been great on Night ’90. Production should have gone smoothly. It should have been a blast to work on. And yet Savini has called the experience of directing the film the worst nightmare of his life.
The trouble started well before filming. Savini had storyboards drawn of every single shot he wanted to capture on film. Romero was impressed. Then he pointed out that Savini had more shots planned than he’d be able to pull off during the thirty-six day shooting schedule. So the director already had to start whittling down his vision in the storyboard stage. Like the previous Dead movies, Night ’90 was shot in Pennsylvania. But once filming began, Romero was only on set for a few days. He was writing the Stephen King adaptation The Dark Half and had to get back to his home in Florida. He was facing a deadline and needed to focus on his script. Once Romero left, everything went to Hell as far as Savini was concerned. He did not get along with the two producers who were left in charge. He has never named names, but has said he didn’t have any issues with Romero, his wife, Russo, or Streiner. So you can try to figure out who gave him grief from there.
These producers were constantly rushing Savini. They told him there wasn’t enough time for some of the interesting shots he had planned. He wasn’t given any time to shoot the moments necessary for suspense-building scenes. He has even claimed that one of the producers would call Romero and lie to him, telling him Savini was wasting time on set. During an interview with Film Monthly, Savini said, “My hands were just slapped all over the place. I couldn’t do a lot of stuff. The movie is about forty percent of what I intended. It would be a much better movie if I had gotten to put in all the stuff I really wanted to do.”
One interesting scene that Savini had shot needed to be removed from the film in case of a lawsuit. The movie begins with Barbara and her brother Johnny visiting the cemetery where their mother is buried. Johnny is attacked and killed by a zombie there, and Barbara runs off to the nearest farmhouse. Later, when zombies are attacking the farmhouse, Barbara was supposed to see a female ghoul that reminded her of her mother. This scene was filmed, Barbara imagining that an approaching zombie is her mom. Then the zombie gets shot in the head. Unfortunately, the person playing the mom look-alike zombie got a concussion from the blood squib on their head. The producers decided to take her out of the movie in case she ended up suing them for that injury. Her scene was replaced by the shirtless zombie who comes busting in. Barbara uses him as an example, showing that he can’t be killed unless he’s shot in the head.
Night ’90 was cut down more at the behest of the MPAA. They seemed to have it out for Savini, since he was known as the King of Splatter. And they probably weren’t too happy that Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead had bypassed them and been released unrated. So they made sure to take as much blood out of Night ’90 as they could.
Night ’90 earned its R rating and was given a theatrical release in October of 1990. But despite the well-known title and the Halloween season release, it wasn’t a hit. The audience didn’t seem very interested in watching a new version of Night of the Living Dead. The film made just under six million at the box office. Night ’90 remains in the conversation because it was a remake with Romero’s involvement. It has just never been as popular as the Dead movies that came before it. It does have a solid fan following, and some horror fans even enjoy it more than the original. But a lot less horror fans have seen it than have seen Night of the Living Dead ’68. Made for financial reasons, Night ’90 didn’t make much money and didn’t have much of an impact.
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: Savini is disappointed with a lot of things about Night ’90. He doesn’t like the music by Paul McCollough, a composer he didn’t choose himself. He seems to feel that night falls too late in the movie. One Blu-ray release tried to fix that for him by darkening the image. Fans didn’t appreciate that very much. Savini’s vision was compromised, and he even released a book of his storyboards to show fans what could have been. He did have some good ideas for moments that would have made the movie even better. But while the movie isn’t what he imagined, it’s still really good.
Savini and cinematographer Frank Prinzi were able to capture an unsettling tone for the film. And while the director feels differently, McCollough’s music goes well with the imagery. There’s something very chilling about this movie. You truly feel like you’re stuck in that farmhouse with the characters. On a dark, lonely night. Surrounded by the dead. And the farmhouse they filmed in was an incredible find, the perfect location on an awesome-looking piece of property.
There’s an intensity to Night ’90 for most of the running time. It feels like the characters never get a chance to let their guard down for more than a second. In both this film and the original, the people in the farmhouse board up the doors and windows to keep the zombies out. Or so they hope. The boarding process is done fairly early on in the ’68 film, and the boards are mostly secure. The characters are allowed to take a breather now and then. Watch some television. That’s not really the case in this one. And not just because the TV gets smashed. The boarding process continues throughout the majority of the film. The characters are constantly hammering things over doors and windows. And the zombies are always right there to complicate the process.
Savini and Romero use the viewer’s knowledge of the original to drop in misdirects. There are times when you think you know what’s going to happen, because you saw the first movie. But then Savini hits you with a surprise. A big example of this comes during the first zombie attack. When Barbara and Johnny see a dazed-looking old man approach them, you assume it’s a zombie. The Cemetery Ghoul. But he’s just an injured mourner. Barbara and Johnny are so focused on him, they don’t see the actual Cemetery Ghoul until it’s too late. The Barbara character is another curveball. At first, it looks like she’s going to be overwhelmed and follow the original Barbara into catatonia. But then she snaps out of it. She becomes stronger as the night goes on.
Just like in the ’68 movie, Ben and Harry Cooper have a serious disagreement over whether or not they should hide in the cellar. This time, Barbara presents another option: the zombies move so slowly, she feels they can just walk away from the farmhouse. Take their guns and walk to safety. In this case, Barbara is right. Walking out of there is the best thing to do. But the others are too afraid of the zombies to take that risk.
Tallman delivered a great performance as Barbara, and the cast around her do strong work in their roles as well. Standouts are, of course, Todd and Towles as Ben and Cooper. Those are the showiest parts, their conflict gets a lot of attention, and the actors made a meal of it. Their arguments get extremely heated. You can feel their violent anger emanating off the screen.
BEST SCENE(S): Todd impressed Savini in his audition by memorizing lines quickly and getting emotional while reciting them. You can see his skill at this in the finished movie as well. One of the best scenes comes when Ben gives a monologue about his experiences with the dead before reaching the farmhouse. As Todd speaks, tears are rolling down his face. It’s captivating.
But aside from all the emotional moments, there’s plenty of zombie action to hold your attention and keep you entertained as well. It starts early, with an exciting sequence set at the cemetery. That’s quickly followed by more action when Barbara and Ben first reach the farmhouse. Bursts of horror come frequently throughout. As Savini said on his audio commentary, “People go to the movies to see things happen, not to watch people talk.” He made sure there was always something happening in his movie. As he told the Los Angeles Times, he was aiming to make this a remake along the lines of The Thing and The Fly. “Not better, but different. It’s not a strict remake of the original. Same characters, about the same plot, but it’s more intense. A lot more intense.”
From increasing the amount of action to increasing the anger Ben and Cooper feel toward each other, he did successfully make an intense movie.
Toward the end of the film, Romero’s script also takes the story into territory he had entered with Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead. The idea that there’s still a hint of humanity in the zombies. And that people lose their humanity while dealing with this situation. We see people making a game of the zombie outbreak. Hanging zombies. Holding zombie fights. Watching this happen around her, Barbara says, “They’re us. We’re them and they’re us.” It’s very reminiscent of the zombie movies Romero made between the two Nights.
PARTING SHOT: The original Night of the Living Dead is a very important film in horror history. The remake, not so important, but it is absolutely worth watching. It’s fun to see Romero and his collaborators return to the material after a couple decades. The result is a movie that may not be an immortal classic, but is still one of the best entries in the zombie sub-genre. Even with producer interference dragging him down, Savini proved to be a solid director. It’s a shame there hasn’t been a lot more Savini-directed movies since this one. But at least he made one that viewers will always be curious about and seek out, due to the title. And unlike other remakes, sequels, and spin-offs that have come since, at least this Night of the Living Dead was done with the approval of the creators.
More video scripts have been written, so another batch of videos will be shared here on Life Between Frames eventually. In the meantime, keep an eye on JoBlo Horror Originals and JoBlo Originals!
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