Repo Man

Of all the great films of 1984, Repo Man may hold the most prized place in the hearts, minds, and personas of many in my generation. The debut feature of iconoclast writer/director Alex Cox, Repo Man, hit moviegoers like a bolt of lightning and a breath of fresh air (at least after it was re-released six months after Universal Pictures dumped it into theaters for a week and then forgot about it). Kids like me ate up its counter-culture aesthetic and punk sensibilities. At the same time, critics appreciated its originality and how it eschewed the monotonous formulas so many teen movies had by then adopted.

Repo Man stars Emilio Estevez as a typical "white suburban punk" named Otto Maddox. Otto lives with his ex-hippy parents, whose brains have been fried by drugs, television, and TV evangelists. He works as a supermarket clerk mindlessly stocking generic food, a job someone with his attitude isn't going to hold for very long. Otto hangs out with his fellow young punks, partying, listening to loud music, and trying to get laid. His life is going nowhere until he falls in with a group of middle-aged misfits who repossess cars for a living. At first, Otto dismissed these squares as a bunch of losers in ugly suites, capitalizing on the misfortunes of poor folks. But, in need of cash, he's taken under the wing of one of the best in the game, a weathered old repo-lifer named Bud (played brilliantly by the great Harry Dean Stanton). Under Bud's tutelage, Otto discovers that "the life of a Repo Man is always intense" and, therefore, quite appealing. 

As Bud describes in his "repo code" soliloquy, "Ordinary people spend their lives avoiding tense situations. Repo Man, on the other hand, spends his time getting into tense situations." The lifestyle happens to be all the more intense at the time Otto joins the repo ranks because they are all on the hunt for a 1964 Chevrolet Malibu being driven around the city by a lobotomized, irradiated nuclear physicist named J. Frank Parnell (Fox Harris). Every repo man in LA is after this car and its $20,000 bounty. Also in pursuit of the elusive vehicle are a team of not-so-undercover government agents and a rag-tag band of cooky UFO conspiracy cultists. Both groups believe the car's trunk contains the remnants of two dead aliens whose flying saucer crashed in 1947.

Repo Man was the first mainstream movie to mention all kinds of soon-to-be American preoccupations like the supposed Roswell alien cover-up, the growing awareness of Scientology, and government complacency in the intentional dumbing down of the population. The film's singular blend of science fiction and punk rock makes it a most effective and entertaining satire of Reagan-era consumerism and societal conformity while also skewering the forces and trends that arose in opposition to that 1980s monoculture. In many ways, Repo Man is the only authentic work of Punk Rock Cinema that isn't a documentary like Penelope Spheeris' The Decline of Western Civilization (1981). There had been countless depictions of punk rockers in '80s movies prior to Repo Man (Estevez had even played one the prior year in Joseph Sargent's Nightmares). Still, these were always caricatures—Hollywood's idea of what a punk rock kid was like. Repo Man didn't set out to present punks realistically but rather as caricatures of these caricatures, which is a far more authentically punk rock way to depict punk rockers. Cox would follow up Repo Man with Sid and Nancy, a film about the life of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious and his destructive relationship with his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen. But, while elements of that film are undoubtedly accurate and compelling, Sid and Nancy never escapes the trappings of a traditional biopic—perhaps the least punk rock genre imaginable.

In the early '80s, Cox was a young Oxford University grad who left the UK to attend UCLA film school in 1977. After graduating, he formed a production company with his UCLA buddies Jonathan Wacks and Peter McCarthy, Edge City Productions, with the intention of producing low-budget features. The first was to be Repo Man, which Cox and crew envisioned as a $70,000 Super-16mm production until they teamed up with Michael Nesmith. The former Monkey had also recently launched a production company, Pacific Arts, and was making direct-to-video projects like his hour-long collection of music videos and comedy sketches, Elephant Parts, and feature films like the 1982 sci-fi western, Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann. 

With Nesmith as executive producer, Repo Man went into a kind of dual pre-production dependent on whether it would be a quasi-student film with unknowns or a studio picture with established, though not exactly famous, actors. Many authentic punks that Cox had befriended played a significant role in developing the screenplay, including Dick Rude, who would have played Otto if the movie had been made for $70,000. Cox also hung out with an actual car repossessor named Mark Lewis, who taught him many ticks for the trade and from whom much dialogue made its way into the script verbatim.

The movie was eventually made as an independent film under a negative pickup deal, with Nesmeth's company financing the entire shoot and Universal Pictures agreeing to distribute the film once it was completed. This enabled Cox and the brilliant young casting director, Victoria Thomas, to land Estevez (who had a minor role in Tim Hunter's Tex, a supporting part in Francis Ford Coppola's The Outsiders, and starred in the aforementioned Nightmares), as well as Harry Dean Stanton, whom a pal of the writer/director had recommended because of his "Old West/Cadaver look.

Though Cox's first choice for Bud had been Dennis Hopper, no one could have played this role better than Stanton. The combination of his weathered face and frail frame with his commanding voice and determined eyes make him seem like someone who could get knocked over by a gust of wind but could also kick your ass. A solid character actor who has looked middle-aged since he was 20 years old, Stanton lived by a personal philosophy no less "out there" than Bud's. Cox has frequently credited Stanton for creating the "repo code" speech by pulling together several threads from the script and many of the phrases Cox wrote down when hanging out with Mark Lewis. Twice as old and 100 times more experienced in filmmaking than Cox, Stanton famously clashed with the first-time director who claimed that Stanton once yelled at him, "I've worked with Sam Peckinpah, Monte Hellman, Francis Coppola, John Huston, and you know why they were all great directors? 'Cuz they let me do whatever the fuck I wanted!" Stanton maintains that Cox was not a good filmmaker but acknowledges that Repo Man ended up being a great film. There's no denying what the picture did for Stanton's career. Never out of work since he entered the film business in the late '50s, Stanton had become a staple of New Hollywood cinema but hadn't broke into major stardom like his pal and former roommate, Jack Nicholson. Repo Man changed that, leading directly to his greatest picture, Wim Wenders' majestic Paris, Texas, also released in 1984.

Many of the folks slated to star in the ultra-low budget version of the Repo Man stayed on in smaller roles when Universal finally agreed to the negative pickup deal. Some casting changes occurred during shooting, such as when Cox and Chris Penn had a falling out on Penn's first day of shooting, and the actor was replaced as Otto's nerdy friend with Zander Schloss, who was working as a PA and happened to fit into Penn's wardrobe. His performance as "Kevin the Nerd" is one of the most memorable, with his signature line, "Hey, there's room to move as a fry cook," encapsulating one of the film’s themes about Regan-era upward mobility. Schloss ended up joining the punk bands the Circle Jerks and the Weirdos, playing bass; he also appeared in most of Cox's later films and contributed music to many indie movies.

Victoria Thomas, who, along with Reuben Cannon and Robi Reed, was, and remains, one of the few Black casting directors working in Hollywood, was just starting out when she committed to this picture. Fresh out of UCLA, like Cox and his production partners, Thomas was on board regardless of whether the movie would be made as a student film or a studio production. She was instrumental in Repo Man at both its inception and its conclusion, as her suggestion that Cox write monologues for some of the secondary characters so she could have something to audition actors led to one of the film's greatest scenes as well as its ultimate resolution.

Of the many iconic sequences in Repo Man, the "lattice of coincidence" monologue delivered by Tracy Walter is on par with "the repo code" speech in serving the film's unifying philosophy. With its endless quotable references to aliens, time machines, and serendipity, and its phrases like, "ya know the way everybody's into weirdness right now?" "plate a shrimp," and "the more you drive, the less intelligent you are," the speech was conceived as just something to audition the actors with. Cox wrote it as a stream-of-consciousness for the character of Miller, the mechanic at the repo man yard, but everyone who read for that part loved it so much that it was eventually incorporated into the script. When they filmed it, Walter was so captivating that when the filmmakers started to rethink the ending, they hit upon the idea of supposing everything the crazy Miller is theorizing about was, in fact, true. A more apocalyptic ending was scripted in which Otto ends up as a reluctant revolutionary in Nicaragua with a Neutron bomb. However, the less expensive and far more original and "out there" ending they ultimately went with made the film infinitely more satisfying and memorable.

Repo Man is one of those quintessential examples of a movie where everything went right; every problem turned into an advantage, every budgetary setback improved the picture, and every argument resulted in a positive outcome. Stanton famously got so fed up with Cox by mid-shoot that Cox wrote him out of a key sequence, replacing him with another of the repo men, Sy Richardson. This change helped flesh out and demonize the other characters in the repo yard. Getting to see the philosophy and techniques of other repo men besides Bud expands the world of the film and provides insight into the job, just like all the various aluminum siding salesmen in Barry Levenson's Tin Men a few years later paints a vivid picture of that little-known profession in which the rivalry between its two lead characters plays out.

Perhaps the most significant effect the infusion of studio money had on Repo Man was it enabled the hiring of Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller, known for his many collaborations with Wim Wenders. Müller had shot the German director's first feature, Summer in the City (1970), as well as his classic road movie series, Alice in the Cities, Kings of the Road, The American Friend, and Paris, Texas, which was Wenders' first American film and one of the best movies of 1984. In my opinion, Müller is the most distinctive DP of the 1980s, which is saying something since, despite the false impression that the decade was a wasteland of interchangeable commercial product, the 1980s saw an explosion of talented oversees cinematographers coming to Hollywood, like Sven Nykvist, Michael Ballhaus, John Seale, Peter Suschitzky, and Adrian Biddle, as well as all the great American DPs who were just starting out, like Ed Lachman, Caleb Deschanel, Frederick Elmes, Roger Deakins, Barry Sonnenfeld, Tak Fujimoto, and Ernest Dickerson, not to mention all the great visualists of the prior generations still doing incredible work in the 1980s, like László Kovács, Gordon Willis, Vilmos Zsigmond, Néstor Almendros, Conrad Hall, Dean Cundey, Jordan Cronenweth, Owen Roizman, Bruce Surtees, Michael Chapman, and Haskell Wexler.

What distinguishes Müller's '80s American is that it is so undeniably distinctive without ever drawing attention to itself. When people ask me to explain the difference between seeing a film on 35mm vs DCP, I always say that if one can watch a print of Repo Man in a theater in both formats, they'll never ask that question again. Muller also clashed with Cox in ways that enhanced the film. He disliked close-ups, believing that locked-down master shots always capture the truth better, whereas Cox hated shooting with a tripod. The preponderance of long two-shots and well-composed master shots is a visual aspect that sets the film apart from so many low-budget indies that shoot tight to hide their lack of budget. Still, Cox brought on Robert Richardson to shoot second unit inserts to punch the film up. Richardson's ability to match Müller's distinctive look is beyond impressive. The great DP would go on to shoot movies like Platoon, JFK, Eight Men Out, The Aviator, World War Z, and all of Quentin Tarantino's films from Kill Bill on.

By the time Repo Man was released, there had been a regime change at Universal, and the new studio heads were totally disinterested in this weird little film they didn't understand. They were all in on their big-budget Rock 'n' Roll musical thriller Streets of Fire, Walter Hill's bloated, empty spectacle that features a few of those studio's-idea-of-a-punk rockers mixed in with its pseudo-new-wavers and '50s-throwback rockers and doo-whoppers. Universal buried Repo Man on its initial theatrical release in February '84, pulling it from theaters after one week. By then, however, Universal's parent company, MCA, had released the soundtrack, and it was selling well. The ultra-cool movie poster had been used for the album cover, and the collection of punk rock musicians, ranging from established rockers like Iggy Pop to more obscure LA bands, brought the rebellious music of the Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies, Fear, The Plugz, and Black Flag into thousands of middle-class homes, much to the chagrin of parents and the delight of the record company. The suits at MCA pressured Universal to reissue the film, and Repo Man went back into theaters in August, where it got positive attention from critics and did moderately well at the box office.

Of course, home video was where Repo Man really hit its stride, becoming the coolest VHS box to line the Staff Picks shelves at discriminating video stores. It also went on to have one of the most celebrated TV versions of an R-rated movie. The film had to be edited down so drastically to play on television that Cox turned the production of the TV version over to Dick Rude, who oversaw the editing in of many deleted scenes and outtakes to fill out the diminished running time, and he created fake slang to redub the myriad curses and other objectionable language in the scenes that remained. This is now a common practice, but back in 1984/'85 it was a novel idea. Kids like me who knew the movie by heart were delighted to later discover the TV version that replaced lines like, "Fuck You Motherfucker" with "Flip You Melonfarmer!"

A number of proposed Repo Man sequels have been in the works for decades, but (thank God) none has come close to getting made. Repo Man remains a one-off and a one-of-a-kind picture. Many filmmakers have attempted to capture what made it special, but the circumstances that brought this movie to life could never be engineered or duplicated. The savvy film contains many connections to movies of the past—most notably its direct homages to another iconic LA movie, Robert Aldrich and A.I. Bezzerides' Kiss Me Deadly, with its glowing atomic suitcase MacGuffin repurposed here as the truck of the Chevrolet Malibu—while also looking forward to the more nihilistic future of dystopian sci-fi, though always with its tongue firmly in its cheek.