The horns turn up on the car driven by cowgirl Calamity Jane (Mary Woronov), while the lead racer, Frankenstein (David Carradine), has a saw-toothed custom special called The Monster. Extrapolated from the story, in which Willie drives a car called ‘the Bull’ equipped with razor-sharp horns, is the notion that racers have custom vehicles which reflect their personalities. Griffith wrote The Little Shop of Horrors, 1960 Robert Thom wrote Wild in the Streets, 1968) and Bartel’s previous feature ( Private Parts, 1972) is darkly comic. The MPAA made us take out some of the gore, and Roger compromised and left in some of the gags.’ The question of how satirical Corman intended the film to be is moot: both screenwriters he assigned to the project had track records in comedic-skewing genre films (Charles B. However, in the compromise the film was successful.
There was somewhat of a disagreement on the comedy-violence mixture. There were times when Roger preferred not to communicate with me directly on this film. It was rather chaotic working for Roger then. ‘Roger called me and asked if I’d direct Death Race 2000, which I did,’ said Paul Bartel. ‘The Racer’ was published decades before William Harrison’s ‘Rollerball Murder’ (1973), so Corman could claim his project had deeper roots than the big studio competition, which he did beat into theatres.
Death race 2000 full#
So, Death Race 2000 was a picture full of wild action and humour on the surface, with an implicit comment on the escalation of violence in our society.’ It has been suggested the project was Corman’s ‘attempt to scoop Rollerball (1975), a much-hyped, expensive United Artists production starring James Caan, in which a futuristic society is dominated by a lethal game.’ Later, Corman adopted the same strategy to scoop Jurassic Park (1993), securing the rights to a book (Harry Adam Knight/John Brosnan’s Carnosaur, 1984) which predates Michael Crichton’s novel and Steven Spielberg’s film. I believe in making films which work on two levels: entertainment on the surface, but with some comment or serious point of view on the subtextual level. ‘It was a sly and entertaining comment on violence in our society. ‘ Death Race 2000 was a science fiction film with satiric overtones,’ said producer Roger Corman. In one way, Melchior’s vision was modestly prophetic: he wrote the story well before the inauguration in 1971 of the Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, the unofficial motor rally which would inspire several films, including The Gumball Rally (1976), The Cannonball Run (1981) and Paul Bartel’s Death Race 2000 follow-up Cannonball aka Carquake (1976). Oddly omitted is any mention of television coverage, a feature of most future gladiator stories (and the butt of satire in Death Race 2000). As in Robert Sheckley’s ‘The Prize of Peril’ and Stephen King’s The Running Man, also filmed, the race of ‘The Racer’ is a caricature violent sport rather than a credible pastime of the future.
Increasingly haunted by his victims but nagged by his bloodthirsty, avaricious mechanic – who wants the bonus which will come with a record-breaking score – Willie finally drives into a brick wall. Willie, the racer, is a contestant in a transcontinental race in which making good time is less important than accumulating pedestrian casualties along the route. That became ‘The Racer’ – I wrote it as a short story, a serious kind of piece.’įirst published in Escapade in 1956, ‘The Racer’ is a brief dystopia which adopts the narrative strategy of Nineteen Eighty-Four or Fahrenheit 451: the viewpoint character is a relatively privileged member of a society built around near-symbolic injustice who comes to question an evil everyone around him accepts. And the juxtaposition of watching the horror on the wife’s face and the excitement of the fans – this, after all, was what they really came to see – struck me enormously.
Death race 2000 drivers#
‘There was an accident, and one of the drivers was killed. ‘I had been to the Indianapolis 500 somewhere around 1939, and I sat in the box with the wives of the drivers,’ said Danish-born writer Ib Melchior. A piece on Paul Bartel’s film Death Race 2000, considered as an adaptation of Ib Melchior’s short story ‘The Racer’.
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