DEATH RACE 2000: Days of Future Passed, Part 3

The concluding chapter of our retrospective looks at the film's rock postproduction road.

By Frederick C. Szebin     February 03, 2000

After the shoot, DEATH RACE found itself on the rocky road of executive prerogative with an impassable detour in the shape of Roger Corman. Bartel says the producer's uncertainty of what exactly the film should be, either a comical action film or a pure action film with comedic overtones, found aggravation in two particular sequences. 'A lot of the time I was on my own, so I just did what I wanted to do,' remembers Bartel. 'There was a sequence, for instance, where the rebels lure one of the racers [Mathilda the Hun] off a cliff by putting up a false tunnel entrance and a detour sign, which is a very Warner Brothers cartoon sort of gag. We shot the scene in two pieces. I shot the car going into the fake tunnel, and some time later in post production after we knew we didn't need the car anymore, we shot the car going off the side of a cliff, and I wanted the rear of the fake tunnel, which we just painted on a flat, to show on the cliff as we see the car going down. Roger decided that this whole gag was silly and that there was no reason to have a fake tunnel entrance, except that we had already shot it and there was no alternative shot of the car making a turn without the tunnel entrance in plain view. Nevertheless, he refused to send a flat for the reverse angle, so there is simply a mismatch in the film, although it can be interpreted as the tunnel entrance being just out of view. It's cut so fast that you hardly notice, but it always bothers me. This sort of irrational switching of intent from a producing standpoint was difficult for me to deal with.'
In another scene, a line of dialogue bothered Bartel's producer to the point of it being excised from the final cut. Early in the film, Machine Gun Joe spits on Frankenstein's car and the hero tells him, 'You'll pay for that, Joe.' Later, Joe is caught by Frankenstein harassing Annie. 'Frankenstein beats Joe up,' Bartel explains. 'In my version, Frankenstein looked down at Joe and said, 'You spit on my car,' and walked away from him. Roger took that line out, saying that he thought it made Frankenstein seem petty and not like a great national hero. To me, the line was a pay off to something that had been set up. Pay offs are very satisfying to an audience and help hold a movie together. But,' the director says with a sigh that has lingered for more than two decades, 'this is Hollywood.'
Painting Corman as a tinkering villain may not be the most appropriate portrayal. As an investor protecting his commodity, the producer actually helped DEATH RACE keep its identity when the film went up against the moralistic MPAA Ratings Board. The Board gave the film an X-rating for graphic violence, which included impalings, gougings, decapitations and variations thereof. Chuck Griffith shot that second- unit grue and assured Bartel that it was all very tongue in cheek. The ratings board, however, is notoriously short on wit.
Bartel had originally filmed a bloodless picture, but Corman insisted on Griffith's second unit installing gore for his core audience. When threatened with an X-rating, Corman came to a somewhat clandestine rescue. Says Bartel, 'Roger took all of the violence out, screened it for the MPAA, got his R-rating, then put a few frames of it back in! I think the violence is all quite acceptable and, indeed, that aspect of the film is so unreal-looking that I think it serves the film very well. The violence is cartoony in exactly the same way that the fake tunnel entrance is cartoony.'
Bartel relates that due to Corman's very deep emotional need to be involved in the filmmaking process, the producer would inevitably endeavor to 'save' every New World film produced. This practice involved the unceremonious tossing of the director from the editing room, which is ultimately what happened to Bartel on DEATH RACE. 'Roger made it clear that I had done all that I was required to do,' remembers Bartel. 'He made no secret of the fact that he thought I had spoiled DEATH RACE. And even when it was successful, he was surprised. When the first good reviews came in, he thought that the reviewers were friends of mine and were being nice to me. Roger tried several times to remake DEATH RACE in order to show how the film should have been made in the first place. DEATH SPORT (1978) was an attempt to make a 'serious' hard action film. And I think the results speak for themselves.'
Although Bartel got a better understanding of the cinematic medium's technical aspects in later works, such as in his dark satire EATING RAOUL, in 1974 he was a novice. He admits to a technical naiveté that influenced the final film's overall look. 'There were a couple of scenes that I didn't design very well,' he says, 'and that I didn't know how to shoot to get the maximum illusion of speed and power. The automobiles themselves would hardly go over 40 mph. We skip-framed a lot of the long shots in the beginning of the race to make them look faster. Of course, the price of that kind of printing is, again, a cartoony look. It's a very unnatural speed. I liked that, but I think it probably bothered Roger.
'Roger's sense of humor is very specific to him, and he's afraid of being laughed at. He's afraid of what he calls 'bad laughs.' One crucial part of the final editing process for all the New World pictures was the preview after which the 'bad laughs' were cut out of the negative. Sometimes I think he wasn't really clear on what a good laugh was and what a bad laugh was. I think for DEATH RACE, Frankenstein's line 'You spit on my car' was an example of Roger interpreting a bad laugh at the expense of the movie when, in fact, I think it was a good laugh generated by the character.'
The film was given one unofficial preview at the Paris Theater in New York. By April 30, 1975, New World Pictures product was at the height of its popularity, and Corman saturated the market with his latest creation. Such prestigious publications as the Los Angeles Times Time Magazine applauded the little film that could when the bigger-budgeted production of ROLLERBALL was being denounced for pretentiousness.
The creator of 'The Racer' saw the film, and had his own view on the subject. 'In my story,' says Melchior, 'the entire country becomes involved in the race; people try to stop it or challenge the drivers. It was a story against violence. When I saw the film, I nearly had a heart attack! It had been made into a comedy! I said, 'Oh my God! What have they done?' But then as I continued to watch I realized that they had gone me one better because the film does exactly the same thing I wanted to do in the storyit complains about the violencebut then it goes on to ridicule it. And that is even stronger than anything else. DEATH RACE 2000 is so violent that it becomes totally ridiculous. I really thought that they had done a hell of a job on it.'
From its initial investment, DEATH RACE grossed $5 million nationwide at a time when $5 million was still a chunk of change (a full-price, adult ticket cost less than a child's discount matinee price today).To date, the film runs neck-and-neck with the car crash opus EAT ME DUST as the studio's most financially successful film, and David Carradine, with nearly 80 pictures behind him, says DEATH RACE was his most successful and that two decades later he still receives royalties from it.
During one of the film's few quiet moments, navigator Annie asks Frankenstein if winning is all he cares about. 'Yes,' he says. 'It's the only standard of excellence left.' Sometimes that chilling statement seems to be more fact than fiction, but the energetic group responsible for the vehicle of that message, DEATH RACE 2000, proved that true excellence comes from imagination and heart, allowing them to rise above their poverty-row roots and create an enduring SF adventure from which the increasingly over-priced major studios can still learn a thing or two.
But what did we really learn from this low-budget epic? Sure, twenty-five years later, as we stand in the real year 2000, there is no cross-country death race, but there is a rampant blood lust that gets to be enjoyed in the privacy of our own homes, fed by the media in various ways. As in the SRO days at the Roman Coliseum, we civilized individuals enjoy our violence, though admittedly served up a little cleaner than in those ancient times. We get it through the endless popular Animal Attack and car crash shows with their instant replay and singling out of the most vicious and deadly details; we praise the purveyors of violence, calling them sports figures who maim other players, rape, kill. Mike Tyson was still filling seats even after his rape conviction, and it wasn't until he bit the tip of Evander Hollyfield's ear off that somebody said, 'Wait a sec! That's not right.'
DEATH RACE also showcased the national obsession with scape-goating, blaming the French for all our woes while refusing to accept or even acknowledge any accountability for our own actions. The media plays nicely into this little prophecy: who was to blame for the two boys at Columbine? asked CNN. Why, the movies of course. As anchors and reporters tried to pin the blame on THE MATRIX and violent video games, they quickly side-stepped any culpability in their own viewers as bad parents, remaining moot on the point that their advertisers might have had a little to do with helping to raise sociopaths, suggesting that demographics are more crucial to the day than uncompromising reporting that points fingers at any but Hollywood. It's a simple-minded ideology that DEATH RACE played upon a quarter of a century ago, and the satire remains even more valid today.
Oh, and then there is that whole road rage thing. Although not a focused sport, it is probably the true number one American pastime. All it really needs to truly mirror the events portrayed in this little fiction is league backing. All ages participate, either as drivers or interested passengers. The big cheat, however, is drivers of our A.D. 2000 get to use guns, while the wheel jockey's in Bartel's picture relied on pure driving skill. So, okay, we don't quite match the 1975 vision of A.D. 2000, but heywe're working on it.

A New World Pictures release, 1975. Produced by Roger Corman. Associate Producer Jim Weatherill. Directed by Paul Bartel. Screenplay by Charles B. Griffith and Robert Thom, based on the short story, 'The Racer', by Ib Melchior. Cinematographer: Tak Fujimoto. Car Designer: James Powers. Car Construction by Dean Jagger.

David Carradine: Frankenstein
Simone Griffeth: Annie
Sylvester Stallone: Machine-Gun Joe Viterbo
Mary Woronov: Calamity Jane
Roberta Collins: Matilda the Hun
Martin Kove: Nero the Hero
Louisa Moritz: Myra
Don Steele: Junior Bruce