On this episode, we dive into the deep end of the 8th Dimension to talk about how one of the best movies of the 1980s was able to escape from the minds of writer Earl Mac Rauch and director W.D. Richter and into our consciousness, 1984’s The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.
The movie you should know and love, but probably don’t, because no one knew what to do with it at the time, and a complex series of mismanagements, chicanery and downright thievery that’s kept it from becoming a bigger cult hit.
Join us as we talk about this amazing, hilarious movie.
Learn more about the fascinating story behind the story on this week’s episode. And, if you’d like to read along with the episode, a full transcript can be found below.
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Thank you again.
Edward
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Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.
I am so excited to finally be touching on one of my favorite movies of the 1980s that I am going to skip my regular opening call to action in order to dive right in to W.D. Richter’s 1984 classic, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension.
Buckaroo Banzai is one of those movies that doesn’t seem to have any middle ground. You either embrace the silly absurdity of the story, or you don’t. You either really, really love it, or you really, really hate it. You either find it cute and charming and fun, or you get bored really quickly because it’s pretty damn stupid when you think about it, and you’re thinking about it a lot because you’re just not into it.
Either way is completely cool. I won’t fault you if you don’t like Buckaroo Banzai. But I’m presuming that, if you’re listening to this episode, you probably do. Or you’re curious enough about it to hear me talk about it.
Our story begins in the early 1970s, when Walter Richter, a screenwriter in Hollywood who was starting to make a name for himself, became aware of a novel called Dirty Pictures from the Prom, written by fellow Dartmouth College graduate Earl Mac Rauch.
Richter would write a fan letter to Rauch, which would become the start of a beautiful friendship. Like Richter, Rauch wanted to become a screenwriter in Hollywood, and Richter would tell Rauch that if he ever decided to make the move to Los Angeles, Richter would give him a hand. A few years later, Rauch would finally make the move, and Richter would introduce him to Irwin Winkler, the future Oscar-winning producer of Rocky, who would take a liking to the younger writer, fronting him rent money for six months so he could concentrate on his writing. Rauch would have regular dinners with Richter and his wife, and entertain them with stories about a character named Buckaroo Bandy he was considering writing a screenplay about. The couple loved the stories, and would pay Rauch $1500 to start developing a storyline for Buckaroo. Rauch would write a few drafts of the script, never actually finishing any of them, because he couldn’t come up with a good ending. One version, called The Strange Case of Mr. Cigars, would find Buckaroo Bandy and his sidekicks, called The Hong Kong Cavaliers, fighting a giant robot, but Rauch would have to put that on hold when Winkler hired him to write the screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s follow-up to Taxi Driver, New York New York.
Once that assignment was completed, Rauch decided to forget the giant robot story, which also somehow involved a box of Adolf Hitler’s cigars, and came up with a new idea, which Rauch would title Find the Jetcar, Said the President – A Buckaroo Banzai Thriller.
But like several of the other treatments and scripts, that one too would end up being abandoned before completion.
Cut to 1979.
Richter is now one of the hottest screenwriters in Hollywood, having written the script for Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, John Badham’s 1979 version of Dracula, and Robert Redford was in the middle of filming Richter’s prison drama Brubaker, for which Richter would be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. At this point in the story, Richter had been responsible for two big hits, and he was looking to move into the director’s chair. And he had a screenplay that he would take with him when he met with producers.
Earl Mac Rauch’s The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai. A sci-fi romantic action musical comedy about a guy who is a physicist, a neurosurgeon, a test pilot, and a rock star, who is recruited by a group of aliens called Black Lectroids to help them defeat another group of aliens, the Red Lectroids, who are looking to leave Earth, on which they have been stranded since October 1938, and return to their home planet, Planet 10, where the two factions have been at war for years.
Most everyone in town would turn him down.
But two men who wouldn’t were Frank Marshall and Neil Canton. Today, you know Frank Marshall as the co-founder of Amblin Entertainment with his wife, Kathleen Kennedy, and some guy named Steven Spielberg, while Neil Canton would go on to produce the Back to the Future series. In 1980, the pair had each done some work in Hollywood but hadn’t broken through yet, and they loved the idea of Buckaroo Banzai. It was crazy and funny, and if they played their cards right, could become the first movie in a series of adventures not unlike the James Bond series in England.
In fact, Richter and Canton felt so in sync about working together, they would start their own production company, and planned for Buckaroo Banzai to be their first production. They would take the project to every studio in town, but they’d only receive one nibble, from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the once powerful studio whose tagline in the 1930s and 1940s was “More Stars Than There Are in Heaven,” which was no longer the studio it once was. In 1981, MGM was being run by a guy named David Begelman, a once-respected studio executive who is most famous, or infamous, as you may prefer, as the millionaire studio head of Columbia Pictures in the late 1970s who was caught in a check forging scandal. There’s a great book about the whole incident if you want to learn more. It’s called Indecent Exposure, written by David McClintock. It came out in 1982, so you might have to look for it at a used book store.
Anyway, Richter and Canton had left something called “A Buckaroo Banzai Sampler” with Begelman, which contained parts of no less than five different unfinished screenplays written by Rauch. Of the five stories, Begelman had enjoyed reading the one called Lepers from Saturn, which featured Buckaroo Banzai fighting off a group of aliens from, you guessed it, Saturn, who were hiding right here on Earth, disguised as Earthlings. Begelman made a deal with the Banzai production team, and Rauch would get to work on completing the Lepers from Saturn screenplay.
But Hollywood being Hollywood, it would not be smooth sailing getting to the start of production.
Shortly after Begelman and MGM made the deal to make the movie, the owners of MGM purchased United Artists. Trying to merge two companies into one, especially one that was literally printing money every two years with a new James Bond movie, would cause Begelman to lose grip on the financial scams he was running out of MGM, and in July 1982, while Rauch was completing a new draft of the screenplay, David Begelman was fired from MGM/UA.
The new head of MGM/UA was not as enthusiastic about making Buckaroo Banzai as Begelman was, so they would put the project into turnaround.
But instead of trying to sell it off to another studio for as much as they could recover from the money they had spent so far developing it, MGM/UA would assign it to a brand new production company called Sherwood Productions, which just happened to be owned by… wait for it… David Begelman.
Sherwood Productions, which should not be confused with the Alex Kendrick-run Sherwood Pictures, which made those faith-based movies like Facing the Giants and Fireproof and Courageous, was able to make a distribution deal with Twentieth Century-Fox, and the film was off and running again.
One of the first fights Richter would have with Fox was who to cast in the title role. In an interview published in the 1984 Marvel Comics adaptation of the movie, Richter said he wanted an actor who could “both look heroic with grease all over his face, and project the kind of intelligence you would associate with a neurosurgeon and inventor.” The suits at Fox, despite agreeing to fund a $12m budget for the film, $5m less than what MGM had budgeted, wanted a recognizable film star, to protect their investment, while Richter was adamant about having an unknown actor take the role, who didn’t carry any baggage from previous roles with them in the eyes of the audience.
Richter would find his Banzai in Peter Weller, a little known actor who at the time was best known as Diane Keaton’s new boyfriend in Alan Parker 1981 divorce drama Shoot the Moon.
Weller was worried about the film’s potential campiness, but Richter would give Weller the whole history of Buckaroo Banzai, and that would sell Weller on Richter and Rauch’s earnestness for the character and the film.
For the role of the film’s main antagonist, Dr. Emilio Lizardo, the studio, ironically, wanted an unknown actor, while Rauch was writing the role with John Lithgow in mind. Lithgow, too, was uncertain about the tone of the film as it came across the screenplay, but soon he would realize how much fun he was going to have playing a dual role, especially when one of the characters is an out of control maniac. During the time leading up to the production, Richter and Lithgow would work on the character, including little touches like basing the way Lizardo talked on an Italian tailor the actor had met on the MGM lot years earlier.
The remainder of the cast would feature a who’s who of future stars and beloved actors, including Jonathan Banks, Ellen Barkin, Clancy Brown, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jeff Goldblum, Dan Hedeya, Christopher Lloyd, and Vincent Schiavelli.
[insert record scratch noise here]
Wait.
Jamie Lee Curtis?
She’s not in the movie, you say.
True, but we’re not at that part of the story yet.
The movie would begin production in Los Angeles in early September 1983, with most of the location shooting being shot in the suburb of South Gate, not four miles north of where I am sitting right now as I record this episode. The film would also shoot in Brentwood and Torrance, and in the San Bernardino Mountains, the San Fernando Valley, and the Santa Monica Mountains, as well as twelve weeks on the lot at MGM Studios in Culver City.
At first, David Begelman would send Richter notes and demands for what he wanted to see done after watching each day’s dailies, the raw footage from the previous day’s shoot, but as the shoot went on, and Richter pretty much ignored most of the suggestions, Begelman would ghost the production. Richter was certain Begelman just gave up on the film, and to test the theory, he would add a quick shot during a scene when Buckaroo and his Hong Kong Cavaliers try to stop Lizardo and his men from stealing an important piece of equipment called an Oscillation Overthruster that literally drives the entire plot of the film.
In this new shot, Goldblum’s character, nicknamed New Jersey, is following Pepe Serna’s Reno Nevada through the complex maze that makes up the Banzai Institute. They come across a watermelon that is in a very large machine press. New Jersey asks Reno a question while they pass by…
[insert watermelon scene here]
When Richter received no notes from Begelman or anyone else at Sherwood about this new scene, he knew nobody was paying attention to the film, and that he could try and slip in anything he wanted.
There wasn’t a whole lot of problems with the production, save one. About a third of the way through the shoot, the original director of photography, Jordan Cronenweth, would be fired off the film, and replaced by Fred J. Koenekamp. Cronenweth, who had shot such movies as Altered States and Blade Runner, was let go because he was shooting the film as if it was a movie like Altered States and Blade Runner, while Begelman wanted it to look more two dimensional. More flat. Don’t feel bad for Cronenweth, though. Jonathan Demme would hire him immediately to be the main cinematographer on his Talking Heads concert film, Stop Making Sense. Not that having Koenenkamp was a consolation prize.
The man had won an Oscar for shooting The Towering Inferno, and he had also did the cinematography on Patton, Papillon, and one of my favorite movies from the earliest days of cable movie channels, Jonathan Kaplan’s White Line Fever.
After production ended in late November, Richter and his editing team quickly assembled his first cut of the film to show David Begelman. Begelman only gave two notes.
First, he didn’t like the opening of the movie, which sets up the death of Buckaroo’s parents at the hands of the evil Hanoi Xan. Thus, Jamie Lee Curtis, who played Buckaroo’s mom in the prologue, was out of the film.
Second, Begelman didn’t want the film to end on Buckaroo and Penny’s kiss, so he asked for something else with the entirety of the cast to end with. But Begelman wouldn’t give the production any extra money, so Richter and Rauch would come up with something that equally confused and excited future fans of the movie. Shot in front of the Sepulveda Dam in the Valley, the shot would feature Weller, Barkin, Brown, Goldblum and most of the Hong Kong Cavaliers in their main movie costumes just walking around for a few minutes, as the end credits and main theme play over the scene, with a title card before the start of the sequence that Buckaroo Banzai would be returning in a future episode called Buckaroo Banzai Against The World Crime League.
That movie would never happen.
Fox had originally planned on opening the film in a thousand plus theatres on June 8th, 1984, which was also the planned opening date of two other movies, a Bill Murray/Dan Aykroyd comedy, Ghostbusters, and a horror/fantasy film produced by Steven Spielberg, Gremlins.
Fox would push the film back to an August 10th opening, in the hopes that the expected early summer blockbusters like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, were mostly played out, leaving room for something different like Buckaroo Banzai. But the summer of 1984 would be a record breaker, with three movies, Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones, and Gremlins, each topping $125m in ticket sales, with surprise hits like The Karate Kid hitting $100m and Purple Rain grossing more than $70m. This would cause a lot of movies that might have been successful in other years to be neglected this summer, including Cloak and Dagger with Henry Thomas and Dabney Colman, The Last Starfigher, The Muppets Take Manhattan, and The Philadelphia Experiment.
When Richter turned in his final cut, no one at Fox knew what to do with it. They would hire a team of publicists to promote the movie at sci-fi conventions, handing out Buckaroo Banzai headbands, like ones seen in the movie, which have since become coveted by fans of the film.
There’d be some magazine advertising, one trailer released to theatres in the hopes theatre managers would program it in front of like-minded films, and the aforementioned Marvel Comics adaptation, but Fox would not spend any money advertising the film on television.
They would also downgrade the film’s release, sending it out to only 236 theatres.
The film would open in markets like Los Angeles and Seattle, but not New York City or San Francisco. In its first three days, the film would only gross $620k. In its second week, the screen count fell 23%, while its gross would drop to just $415k. And after three weeks, Fox would pull the film from the remaining 80 theatres it was still playing in, with a cumulative gross of $1.8m.
But, to their credit, they weren’t ready to give up on the film just yet.
They would do some slight tinkering of the advertising materials, finally deciding on an ad that highlighted eight things film goers should know before seeing the film. And if you haven’t seen the film yet, and I presume if you’re listening to this episode, there’s a good chance you have, but if you haven’t, you should go ahead and skip ahead seventy-five seconds, because these definitely would be considered spoilers.
Number One Thing: Aliens from Planet 10 are divided between Red Lectroids and Black Lectroids (the good guys).
Two: Black Lectroids hate Red Lectroids, and may have to blow up our world to get rid of them.
Three: Buckaroo Banzai stands between you, the President (his buddy), nuclear disaster, and having a nice day.
Four: Buckaroo’s sidekicks, The Hong Kong Cavaliers, are tougher than insert name of local professional football team here. For New York City, they put “tougher than the Jets.”
Five: Penny Priddy’s twin sister was once Buckaroo’s wife.
Six: Lord John Whorfin, alias Dr. Lizardo, needs Buckaroo’s Oscillation Overthruster to get back to the 8th Dimension.
Seven: Orson Welles’ 1938 War of the World broadcast was not a hoax.
And Eight: If Buckaroo wins, we all win. If he doesn’t…
Way to give the entire movie away, Fox marketing team.
But, it kinda worked.
On September 28th, Fox would send the movie out to another 58 theatres in markets like Chicago, St. Louis and Washington DC, but still no New York City or San Francisco. The film would perform better, $211k from those 58 screens, its $3,633 per screen average being a full thousand dollars higher than the first time around, which gave Fox hope that maybe, just maybe, they could pull this one out.
But they never really tried. They’d add a few screens here, and a few screens there, and the film would continue to perform decently, but they wouldn’t give it any wider a release than the 200 or so 35mm prints they already had printed up.
The film would finally open in New York City on October 5th, nine weeks after its first release, where it would gross a very respectable $167k from just 31 theatres. That’s $5400 per screen. Now, granted, New York City ticket prices were $5 at the time, compared to $3.50 in Chicago, where the film also opened on October 5th and grossed a good $38k from six theatres. But again, Fox just didn’t have that much faith in the film breaking out. The film would be out of theatres after 18 weeks and $6.25m in tickets sold.
Over the next few years, the film would become something of a cult hit. Including with me and my friends.
Now, regular listeners of the show know that sometimes, I struggle with remembering where I saw a certain film for the first time.
Not with Buckaroo Banzai.
I absolutely remember the first time I saw it.
I don’t remember the specific date, outside of it being in the fall. I was a senior in high school, but I didn’t have a car. I had wrecked mine in a very bizarre accident on the first Friday of the school year, when I somehow flew off a freeway on-ramp, jumped over the street running parallel to the freeway, and slammed into a redwood tree fourteen feet above the ground before the car came smashing back down to Earth. I don’t remember anything about the accident. I remember being at the Arco station down the street, filling my tank up, and then I remember waking up in the hospital, the top half of my head wrapped in gauze and bandages from the cuts and scrapes I received in the accident, but somehow, through whatever you want to call it, I did not break any bones. One of my classmates witnessed the crash and said it was brutal, and was certain whomever was in that car had died.
But I digress.
Without a car, I was dependent on my friend Dick Hollywood to get me around.
And since it was his car, it was his choice. And he wanted to see The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension at the Del Mar Theatre, which was having a midnight show for the film on top of its regularly scheduled afternoon and evening shows.
I don’t remember what exact car he had, but it was one of those mid 1970s beasts of a car, like the Chevy Malibu that was at the center of Repo Man. So Dick and I stop at Beach’s house to pick him up, because that was us. The three amigos. The three musketeers. The three stooges. Me, Dick and Beach. Dick parks the beast a block or so away from the theatre. Not because there wasn’t any parking closer, because there was plenty of parking. Downtown Santa Cruz on a late Friday night in late fall? Ghost town. But we parked where we parked because it was not too bright and not too dark, a perfect place to blaze up a joint before heading to the theatre to watch the movie.
And I’m thinking that being a little high the first time I saw Buckaroo Banzai helped me to appreciate the film more than I suspect I would have had I been… uhm… not high. I laughed at all the gags, and fell even harder for Ellen Barkin than I had seeing her in Diner or Tender Mercies or Eddie and the Cruisers.
I became a fan of Peter Weller and Clancy Brown, became an even bigger fan of Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Lloyd and Vincent Schiavelli, a very lovely man who I was fortunate to actually work with years later, when he was a featured actor in an AFI student film I was a production assistant on. Buckaroo Banzai inspired me to keep writing, to keep dreaming about becoming a screenwriter and director, because if movies like this and Repo Man and Eating Raoul could not only get made but seen in theatres, maybe there was hope for me yet.
What I have always loved about the movie more than anything else is that despite all its bizarreness and absolute absurdity of the proceedings, Buckaroo Banzai, both the character and his movie, are genuinely earnest. It doesn’t make fun of its audience. It doesn’t treat you like an idiot if you don’t get all of its jokes. It isn’t buried under an avalanche of sarcasm. It’s just a fun movie that is maybe a little more complicated than it needed to be, but I don’t always want my filmed entertainment to be low brow. Sure, I love to turn my mind off sometimes and just veg out. But sometimes, I want to be engaged as I am entertained. And Buckaroo Banzai does that for me in spades.
But, more recently, I have come to appreciate how progressive it was when it came to Penny Priddy. At the onset, she seems like she’ll just be another useless damsel in distress, a disposable character who only exists to remind the lead character of what he once had before she is killed herself, so that the story can progress.
Penny ends up becoming a valuable if unofficial member of the Banzai team. It’s she who instinctually grabs the Oscillation Overthruster when the Red Lectroids kidnap Professor Hikita at the press conference. It’s Penny who helps keep the Overthruster out of the hands of the Red Lectroids at the Banzai Institute, at least for as long as she can. And… spoiler alert, skip ahead 15 seconds if you’ve never seen it… although Penny does die towards the end, she dies protecting her new family, people she’s only known for a couple days, and the closest thing she’s ever had to a real family, and, indeed, her sacrifice saves humanity itself. Although, thankfully, there is a workaround to her finality.
As fun as the movie is, there’s a reason why its not as well known today as it should be, despite its pretty major cast.
In a Facebook post from October 2016, director W.D. Richter and writer Earl Mac Rauch posted a two thousand word message explaining the convoluted reasons why there has never been a sequel to the film, or a continuation of the story through television networks or streaming services over the past then thirty-two years. I’ll post a link to the article on this episode’s page at our website, the80smoviepodcast.com. But in a nutshell, it’s because of David Begelman and his shifty, thieving ways. I’m going to directly quote to sections from the Richter/Rauch Facebook, to give you a basic idea, in case you don’t feel like doing any additional homework.
First, about the transfer of the rights to the project from MGM to Sherwood Productions, they write: “The new administration was wholeheartedly unenthusiastic about Buckaroo Banzai and agreed to sign the project over to Begelman’s freshly minted independent company, the bankruptcy-plagued outfit known as Sherwood Productions, which Begelman would leverage into a complex and chaotic series of mortgages, assignments, and a host of other dubious financial manipulations involving unwitting entities like European American Bank and Trust Company, Continental Illinois Bank and Trust Company of Chicago, Time Warner Entertainment Company LP, August Entertainment, Inc., the Kushner-Locke Company, and many, many more.
These bizarre, conflicting and overlapping entanglements hollowed out and threw into great confusion the ownership rights to ‘The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension’ and eventually resulted in the bankruptcy of both Sherwood Productions and Gladden Entertainment (a company Mr. Begelman formed after the collapse of Sherwood Productions).”
It then continues: “as years turned into decades, the rights to Buckaroo twisted and turned, jumping from company to company, from bank to bank, disappearing entirely at times and then reappearing first in one studio’s library and then inexplicably in another’s, leaving a paper trail no legal bloodhound could hope to follow.
In short, from the moment Begelman lost control of the title, it became, from month to month, anybody’s guess who might or might not have possessed documentation proving their exclusive ownership of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.”
Richter and Rauch even include a couple of emails between Warner Brothers lawyers, who believed they owned the rights to the movie, and the research company Richter and Rauch had hired to try and figure out who actually did. And because of all of Begelman’s house of cards dealings, nobody was ever able to figure out who owned the rights to the movie. There were just too many gaps for any company to commit to making another movie or a show, only to find another company had the rights and was trying to weasel their way in. Which I’ll get to in a sec.
As of October 2022, it appears that MGM is the probable owner of the rights to the movie, and the company has a tenuous relationship with Richter and Rauch when it comes to ownership of the film. It was released on Blu-Ray through a licensing agreement between MGM and Shout Home Video, and one can stream it for free with commercials on the AVOD streaming service Pluto TV, or rent or buy it off a number of services like Apple TV and Redbox, but that could change at any minute, as I discovered on October 1st, as I was working on the research and writing of this episode. I had been watching portions of the film on Paramount+ on September 30th, but it would gone without warning the very next day.
It also appears that there will likely never be any kind of further screen adventures for Buckaroo and the Hong Kong Cavaliers. There have been two books written by Earl Mac Rauch, the first in 1984 to tie-in to the film’s release, and a second, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League, et al: A Compendium of Evils, published in 2021, and there were several Banzai comic books, also written by Earl Mac Rauch, released between 2006 and 2009.
There were two attempts to make a Buckaroo Banzai television show, once in 1998, when the Fox television network, thinking it still owned the rights to the film, teamed with W.D. Richter to create “Buckaroo Banzai: Ancient Secrets and New Mysteries,” while in 2016, Clerks director Kevin Smith was going to team with MGM to make a new series to be shown on Amazon Prime, and it was Smith’s intention to get Rauch to write the pilot and have Richter direct it, but then there was some kind of kerfuffle between the creators and the studio about the rights. One entity sued the other, and Kevin Smith walked away.
The chances of us ever seeing a proper continuation of the Buckaroo Banzai universe on a movie screen is practically nil. And that’s a shame, because there really was, and really, still is, the benchmarks of a series of cinematic adventures there. Earl Mac Rauch has already created the blueprint.
So there you have it. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. I hope you enjoyed our travels through time and space.
Thank you for joining us. We’ll talk again soon.
Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Buckaroo Banzai.
The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.
Thank you again.
Good night.