Somewhere in the California desert, a police officer pulls over a 1964 Chevrolet Malibu because it lurches wildly across the highway. After interrogating the driver, he opens the trunk and is immediately vaporized by a blinding light that reduces him to a skeleton, abandoning only a pair of smoldering leather boots.
Thus begins Repo Man, a sci-fi cult classic sci-fi with a nihilistic worldview and a punk rock soundtrack that by all accounts probably shouldn’t exist. Thanks to a combination of excellent luck and sheer force of will, what began as a student film from writer-director Alex Cox eventually became one of the biggest independent movies of all time.
“If it was a Hollywood movie that had been made about punks and stuff, it would’ve died,” Cox tells Inverse. “But because it was authentic in its origins and sincere in its intentions, it had more of a life.”
Released on March 2, 1984, Repo Man stars a young Emilio Estevez as Otto, a punk rocker from Los Angeles who loses his supermarket job and winds up repossessing cars after he’s taken under the wing of a repo man named Bud (played by Harry Dean Stanton). Otto is soon wrapped up in a struggle for the Malibu and the otherworldly object in its trunk, resulting in a climactic showdown through which the automotive glows green and flies up into space (with Otto in it).
The plot is propulsive, however it’s the eclectic solid, starting from real-life punk musicians to Jimmy Buffett as a CIA agent (“He just came to the set,” Cox says. “So we put him in a suit.”) and dreamlike dialogue that make Repo Man stand out 4 many years later.
To rejoice the movie’s fortieth anniversary, Inverse spoke to Cox and 7 other members of the solid and crew to inform the definitive history of Repo Man.
The starting
Still in film school, three students at the University of California, Los Angeles, team up with plans to make a feature.
Del Zamora (plays Lagarto Rodriguez): Repo Man started off as a student film.
Peter McCarthy (producer): We all went to film school at UCLA. Alex was a Fulbright Scholar. Jonathan had been an enormous sociology professor. I used to be only a Midwest kid who decided to exit to L.A.
Jonathan Wacks (producer): We were attempting to make movies and short movies and do edit work and whatever we could get to survive.
Peter McCarthy: There was an old funeral home that had gone bankrupt. I rented out the embalming room and turned it into an editing suite. Jonathan had a nicer office with stained glass windows. We began one another’s movies. Then we got kicked out. So I discovered an office for 200 bucks in Venice Beach. The neighborhood was rough.
“I lived in that office on a mattress in the back.”
Jonathan Wacks: One day Alex got here by. I used to be standing outside on Sunset Avenue, and he said, “Well, why don’t we make a feature?”
Alex Cox (author and director): They said, “We have no dramatic feature scripts right now.” I said, “Well, I will bring you some.” Repo Man was the second script I delivered to them.
Peter McCarthy: I hear a motorbike outside, and Alex comes walking in. He couldn’t consider we had an office.
Alex Cox: I lived in that office on a mattress in the back.
Abbe Wool (video coordinator): It was such a hangout.
Peter McCarthy: I’d cut it into three sections, got some wood and located some glass in the alley. It was really funky, however it was an office. It had slightly kitchen and a room off the kitchen that I was my bedroom. That was the genesis of Edge City Productions.
Jonathan Wacks: We had a gathering and decided we’d write a screenplay for a feature, and whoever’s was chosen would get to direct. Alex got here back in a pair of weeks with a script called The Hot Club.
Peter McCarthy: The Hot Club had an apocalyptic feel to it. It was going to be way too expensive.
Jonathan Wacks: We convinced Alex that no person would make this movie. But that was really an alibi to purchase us time to maintain working on our scripts. But Alex, who writes at the speed of knots, got here back with one other script, which was Repo Man.
Repo Man was the amalgamation of several ideas, mixing together plot elements from Cox’s script for The Hot Club together with dialogue borrowed from real-life repo man Mark Lewis and a story about punk kids originally written by an acting student named Dick Rude.
Peter McCarthy: Dick Rude was very influential for Alex. Dick was his filter into rather a lot of stuff about American culture, and particularly punk culture.
Dick Rude (plays Duke): I used to be a youngster going to the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in Los Angeles. I wrote a script called Leather Rubberneck with a friend of mine from school, about two kids who get drafted. Alex desired to make the film, however it didn’t pan out. So he incorporated it into Repo Man. So much of the characters, some of the dialogue, some of the ideas, there was quite a bit of it that was utilized in Repo Man.
Peter McCarthy: There was this repo man who lived round the corner to him. And Alex began going around with him doing repos and got here up with this screenplay.
Alex Cox: Mark Lewis, he was our neighbor. I began riding around with Mark on these late night ventures to repossess people’s cars since it gave the look of a great idea for a screenplay. And indeed it was. So much of what’s in the script is predicated on things that Mark and his colleagues told me.
Peter McCarthy: Edge City now owned the screenplay. We bought it from Alex for a dollar.
“All of a sudden, there were lines of actors coming to our dingy little office in Venice.”
Jonathan Wacks: We went through the Yellow Pages and looked up studios and producers and we sat and typed letters. We knew they wouldn’t pick up our phone. We sent lots of of letters out and got zero responses. So we decided to boost $500,000 and shoot it at UCLA so we could use the equipment without spending a dime.
Peter McCarthy: The thing with UCLA is you never desired to get your diploma. Once you probably did, you couldn’t return and use anything.
Dick Rude: Alex and I began casting people for the film, just reaching out and bringing people in.
Jonathan Wacks: All of a sudden, there have been lines of actors coming to our dingy little office in Venice.
Del Zamora: I used to be a struggling actor living in my van. So I got here in to audition with my then-girlfriend, and immediately Alex freaked her out. He had a shaved head on one side after which really long shoulder-length hair kind of hiding one eye.
Olivia Barash (plays Leila): My agents didn’t find out about the movie, they usually told me to not go because they didn’t know who these people were, they usually thought it was dangerous. I went anyway, and I read in a garage.
From student film to studio movie
As Edge City prepares to start out filming on a movie school budget, the movie gets a significant upgrade due to rock-star-turned-movie-producer Michael Nesmith.
Alex Cox: Abbe Wool, who was a really dear friend of mine, and the video coordinator on the film, knew a producer who was a friend of her father, a man called Harry Gittes, and this Harry Gittes knew Michael Nesmith.
Abbe Wool: Harry asked me what’s up in film school, and I said, “Two of my friends just wrote these great scripts.” He goes, “Well, let me see.” And those scripts were each made into movies in long and circuitous ways.
Jonathan Wacks: Harry Gittes is the guy who J.J. Gittes is called after in Chinatown.
Peter McCarthy: He had done a movie with Michael Nesmith called Timerider, they usually were in search of more projects. Nesmith had made rather a lot of money as a Monkee that he had blown living large. One day, he looked out his window in Beverly Hills, and his Bentley was being repossessed. So the Repo Man thing really resonated with him.
Alex Cox: Nesmith sent the script to Universal, they usually rejected it. And he went out for a drink with a man who desired to be his manager. And this manager looks over at the bar, and there’s Bob Rehme, the head of Universal. And the guy goes, “Hey, Bob, Michael here has got a great script, and you guys turned it down.” The next day, Nesmith got a disgruntled call from an executive at Universal saying, “Oh, I guess we’re doing Repo Man.”
Casting the movie
Under pressure from Universal, the team behind Repo Man begrudgingly agrees to solid some Hollywood stars.
Peter McCarthy: When Nesmith got Universal involved, the studio was like, “Who are any of these people?” So we had to start out in search of alternatives.
Alex Cox: Originally, I desired to do it with Dennis Hopper and Dick Rude.
Dick Rude: I used to be going to play Otto, but eventually that fell to the wayside because they needed someone slightly more cached and experienced. I used to be a bit heartbroken, but I used to be also really stoked to only be making my film and my art.
Peter McCarthy: Emilio’s agent didn’t want to point out it to him. But there was a lady named Mari Kornhauser who worked for Martin Sheen and the Sheen family in some capability. She was a babysitter or something, but she was also a connection through UCLA.
Jonathan Wacks: So she arrange a gathering for us at some sushi restaurant. He was a fun guy, and we said, “You want to do it?” He said, “Yeah, sure.”
Olivia Barash: He was a extremely great actor for our age range. So it was very easy. He was really natural, and it was great working with him.
Abbe Wool: Everyone was kind of suspicious about Emilio, like nepo baby, which we did not have a term for yet.
Alex Cox: The nepotism of Hollywood was really taking off at the moment. So much of actors got their sons into the career.
Casting the role of Bud proved barely harder, and included a 14-hour drive from Los Angeles to Taos, New Mexico.
Peter McCarthy: We had thought of Dennis Hopper, but no person could get anything to him. We thought, “Why don’t we drive to Taos and see if we can run into Dennis Hopper?” So we jumped in Alex’s pickup truck. It took us a pair days. This truck didn’t run super well. We slept on the side of the road. We had no money. I remember Alex playing “Mexican Radio” on this cassette the whole time. It was driving me crazy.
We discovered Dennis bought his booze at this liquor store, and we sat outside there for some time, but we never bumped into him. Then we got here back to L.A. and were in a position to arrange a gathering.
Jonathan Wacks: He showed up all wearing white. White shoes, white tie, every little thing white. It was weird. And some young woman on his arm. He kept popping vitamin pills throughout the meal. We thought he was perfect for that role. But Michael said, “Absolutely not, the guy’s got an addiction problem.”
Peter McCarthy: We all liked Harry Dean. He’s an incredible actor. He was at the very bottom rung of what Universal would accept.
Jonathan Wacks: A friend of ours worked at a pizzeria on Mulholland and told us Harry got here and ate there every Thursday night, pizza and beer by himself. So we went on Thursday night, and lo and behold, there was Harry, and he was delighted to have someone to discuss with. So we sent him the script.
Del Zamora: Abbe Wool was saying, “Harry Dean’s face is the face of America.” So I went to Alex and I said, “You should cast him. He has that weird craziness.”
Peter McCarthy: Harry Dean’s agent suggested using Mick Jagger. It was sort of amusing in a way. I’m sure Mick Jagger could have done it, however it would’ve been a extremely different film, however it wouldn’t have been the kind of film that it was.
Chris Penn (Sean Penn’s brother) was also briefly solid in Repo Man.
Jonathan Wacks: We were in a position to get Chris Penn to play Kevin. He was a friend of Emilio, and he desired to be in the movie. But Alex was absolutely adamant that he wanted Zander Schloss to play Kevin. So I believe Alex found some alibi through which to fireside Chris Penn, and we brought on Zander.
Behind the camera, Repo Man scored auteur cinematographer Robby Müller, who’d built up a profession working with German director Wim Wenders and had a while to kill before his first U.S. project.
Alex Cox: I desired to have a man called Steve Fierberg shoot it, but Nesmith didn’t like the cinematography. I used to be depressed, but Peter said, “Now you can ask for whoever you want. Who’s the best cinematographer in the world?”
Peter McCarthy: Robby was coming to the United States to do Paris, Texas. But he had this window, and he liked the script. And suddenly it was happening.
Del Zamora: I told Alex, “I noticed you never tell Robby where to put the camera.” And he’s like, “If you hire great artists like Robby, you let them be creative and then they make you look good.”
Peter McCarthy: He was an actual character. We got him slightly motel room in Venice by the beach. He didn’t drive, so we had to choose him up all the time. He was kind of a quiet guy. Very thoughtful.
Making the movie
Everyone involved just about describes production as either a particularly efficient shoot, a nonstop party, or each.
Olivia Barash: I used to be on the set every night, which is unusual. It was like a family. It was a celebration, It wasn’t like anything I ever did.
Dick Rude: Sometimes we’d wrap pretty late in the morning around 2 or 3 a.m., and other people wouldn’t need to go home. They’d sit around and have a campfire around the barrel. Harry Dean was all the time leading the charge. He’d pull out the acoustic guitar and hit the bottle or the beers and keep going.
Olivia Barash: Harry Dean Stanton would teach me Spanish love songs, and we’d harmonize.
Dick Rude: The people involved were having a great time creating art, and I believe you actually see it in the end product.
“I actually think the whole thing was the teamsters fucking with us.”
Peter McCarthy: We tried to get monetary savings by only having one Chevy Malibu. The teamster said, “You should have a backup car.” We said, “No, we can save like $3,000.” And then Alex didn’t have a automotive, so it became his vehicle.
On the second or third night of production, we had a gathering because we’re already two days behind. And the automotive gets stolen from right in front of the office. So now we don’t have the automotive, the essential prop, so to talk, and we’re behind schedule. That’s why I began getting gray hair.
Del Zamora: When the automotive got stolen, it was amazing how Peter, Jonathan, and Alex didn’t skip a beat. They just adjusted on the fly.
Peter McCarthy: After we lost the automotive, we ended up getting one other Chevy, and we were in a position to make it appear like the original. Then the original was found somewhere. I actually think the whole thing was the teamsters fucking with us.
Various celebrities stopped by the set at one point or one other. Some people recall visits from Tom Cruise (who had worked with Emilio Estevez on The Outsiders), but one celebrity who actually wound up in the movie was Jimmy Buffett.
Alex Cox: He was between activities and he just got here to the set. So we put him in a single of those CIA agent suits because he already had blond hair. He’s one of the guys setting fire to the body on the burning bench in downtown Los Angeles.
There were plenty of big personalities already on set and tension between them, especially when it got here right down to an explosive confrontation between Alex Cox and Harry Dean Stanton.
Alex Cox: I don’t regret working with Harry Dean.
Jonathan Wacks: Alex got right into a fight with Harry Dean because Harry wanted to make use of an actual baseball bat in a single scene. And Alex correctly didn’t want him to do this. They got right into a fight, an actual fight.
Peter McCarthy: Robby Müller was afraid and wanted everybody to have plastic bats; I understood why Harry wanted to make use of an actual bat. A plastic bat is just an entire other fake thing.
Alex Cox: Maybe it was a failing on his part to consider that to be able to play an offended character, he needed to turn out to be offended. I believe there was a certain misinterpretation of the method.
Jonathan Wacks: Alex principally wrote him out of much of the end of the script and put Sy Richardson in rather a lot of those scenes.
Sy Richardson (plays Lite): I do not remember any of that.
Los Angeles also became an integral character in Repo Man, for higher or worse.
Dick Rude: I remember being downtown and making the film, and it was just about a ghost town at the moment. It was the L.A. River, and it was the factories, and no person frolicked down there.
Peter McCarthy: We were shooting sooner or later in the valley, the scene with the shootout in the liquor store. We even had two motorcycle policemen there. And while we were in that shootout, anyone got here pulling into the car parking zone and just began the automotive spinning around in the car parking zone doing this crazy thing. I’m paying these police guys $400 each. And they’re like just sitting there with their mouth open. And I’m going like, “You’re supposed to protect us from stuff like this!” There was rather a lot of crazy stuff that I don’t know methods to explain.
The ending
Repo Man famously ends with the glowing Chevy Malibu flying up into the sky, but that wasn’t all the time the plan. The movie originally featured a more explosive finale that was scrapped at the very last minute.
Peter McCarthy: We had run out of money. We had run out of days.
Jonathan Wacks: The way the movie was speculated to end was that there may be in truth a nuclear device in the trunk they usually open the trunk and it explodes, and L.A. goes up in a mushroom cloud.
Peter McCarthy: We were originally going to shoot it at a Minuteman’s site, those silo sites where ICBMs were in the ground.
Alex Cox: We had it scheduled to shoot up on a helicopter pad up in the Santa Monica mountains overlooking the ocean. But we got fogged in, and the fog was so thick the helicopter couldn’t land. So we needed to cancel the night of shooting.
Jonathan Wacks: Alex just threw his hands up and said, “Fuck it.” So I sat down with Martin Turner, the on-set photographer, at my house in Venice after every shoot and we wrote it. Everybody looked as if it would like what we got here up with.
Peter McCarthy: There was an enormous debate about whether the ending needs to be apocalyptic or transcendental. It literally got here right down to location.
Olivia Barash: There were three different endings. Alex would not tell us what we were doing until we were on set, which made it interesting.
Peter McCarthy: The glowing automotive, how can we do this? We got these things called Scotchguard and painted it with buckets of the stuff. The automotive elevating? Oh, my God, please. We had a crane. We were literally picking the automotive up.
At the last minute, Repo Man also almost managed to attain what would have been a memorable cameo for the final scene.
Alex Cox: Vicki Thomas, the casting director, told me that Muhammad Ali was at Gold’s Gym in Venice. So I ran around the corner, and there was Muhammad Ali sitting with all these guys. I approached him and said, “I’m making this movie, and I’d like you to appear in the final scene of the film, which we’re going to shoot tonight.” And in a really soft-spoken voice he goes, “Listen, I’ve got a manager now and he says, whatever I do, I have to get paid a million dollars. So if you can organize this in the next three or four hours, then get back to me, and I’ll be down there.” And we shook hands and I called Nesmith and Universal. I attempted to get them to authorize a payment of one million dollars to Muhammad Ali, but they wouldn’t pay.
Peter McCarthy: After the film was over, we did reshoots. Every two or three weeks, we’d exit for a protracted weekend. Alex ended up being the stunt driver in rather a lot of those.
The soundtrack
Music, and punk rock particularly, plays a significant role in Repo Man. The solid and crew all recall a energetic punk scene in Los Angeles at the time, which bled into the movie and ultimately can have saved it from total obscurity.
Peter McCarthy: The music is what saved the film, so to talk, distribution-wise.
Alex Cox: The L.A. punk scene was burgeoning and really exciting. That was the aesthetic of the film. That was our aesthetic. We liked that music, and so it was inevitably going to be a punk rating.
Peter McCarthy: If you lived in L.A. in the ’80s, the music scene was just unbelievable. I remember seeing early performances of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. You’d go into The Lingerie Bar and there’d be Flea.
Del Zamora: I got to fulfill all of them, and I used to be in videos for the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Jonathan Wacks: We used to go to the Elks Lodge, and there was rather a lot happening. X was big and Suicidal Tendencies and Fear.
Olivia Barash: There was a club — it wasn’t a club; it was a store in Westward — but they’d Devo play there on Sunday afternoon.
Dick Rude: At the time, people hadn’t heard of Black Flag or the Circle Jerks or the Plugz; all the bands that we had on the soundtrack.
“People were buying the record, and they kept saying, ‘When’s the film coming out?’”
Alex Cox: Iggy had come out to L.A. because he knew something was happening in Los Angeles that wasn’t happening in New York. He’d come to seek out his rock and roll quest.
Olivia Barash: I used to be talking to Alex, and I said, “Who are you going to have do the title track?” And he goes, “There’s one of two people. David Byrne, we have something out to his agent. But I really want Iggy Pop, we just don’t know where to find him.” And I said, “I know where to find him. He’s in my building. He’s my neighbor.” So Alex got here over, and we rang the intercom outside, and Iggy answered. And that’s how we got Iggy.
Peter McCarthy: His life and profession was not going well. We got him relatively inexpensive for an original song.
Jonathan Wacks: We put together the album, after which we took it to Kathleen Nelson at MCA Records, which owned Universal.
Peter McCarthy: They find yourself establishing an entire latest label called San Andreas. They kept saying, “Oh, it’s going to be this new indie label.”
Del Zamora: San Andreas Records has only released one record, the Repo Man soundtrack. They created it only for that.
Peter McCarthy: I recently saw an interview of a man who worked at MCA, and he talked about establishing San Andreas for Repo Man. And he said, “The reason we called it San Andreas is because that’s the fault that runs right through California, and we thought was going to be a disaster.” And I assumed, “Son of a bitch.”
Releasing the movie
Repo Man premiered in 1984 with little or no support from Universal before eventually finding its audience.
Jonathan Wacks: The first release was a disaster. Universal put it out in Chicago, and no person showed up. It was just pathetic.
Peter McCarthy: The test release in Chicago didn’t go the way they wanted it to go.
Del Zamora: We were there watching the movie to see what the audience thought, they usually interviewed us for Siskel and Ebert. They didn’t realize it was us. So we gave it eight thumbs up.
Jonathan Wacks: Our take care of Universal was that they’d to release it in 12 major markets. So now they were going to only dump it in these different other markets.
Peter McCarthy: We hated the original poster from Universal. So we got a few hundred of them, and we spray painted our own design on it. Right before it opened in L.A. in May, we went out and pasted up the posters ourselves. We almost got busted. We got stopped in Venice Beach, but the cops thought it was so weird they allow us to be.
Olivia Barash: Me and Emilio went to Westwood to see it. It had just come out. The theater was empty. That wasn’t good.
Peter McCarthy: Universal wanted to only put it out on VHS. Get some awareness after which get it to Blockbuster.
Dick Rude: But people were buying the record, they usually kept saying, “When’s the film coming out?”
Peter McCarthy: Irving Azoff, who was the head of MCA records, desired to know what the hell was with this Repo Man. “Where’s the film?”
Alex Cox: They began bugging management at Universal to bring the picture out. And that’s the way it got a second life.
Dick Rude: That punk rock soundtrack really spread across the U.S. Suddenly, you weren’t a freak in the event you had red spiked hair.
Jonathan Wacks: Universal had just hired a man named Kelly Neal to re-release the Hitchcock movies one theater at a time. He knew the whole independent distribution scene. That was his thing. We played the movie for Kelly, and he loved it.
Del Zamora: It starts playing in art houses in all the big cities, and it never stops. It ran at the Nuart Theatre in L.A. for 2 years. They’d play it at 10 o’clock, after which at midnight, Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Peter McCarthy: Suddenly, it became an art film that everyone desired to see. A movie about our society and culture and the world and whatnot — and Alex’s good tackle it as an outsider looking in.
Sy Richardson: I used to be living in an area called Antelope Valley in the mountains. I got up one morning and went outside to clean my automotive. And these three preteens checked out me they usually said, “Hey, man, are you that dude in Repo Man?”
Dick Rude: It was sort of like a comet. The individuals who saw the comet wouldn’t shut up about it, and the individuals who hadn’t seen the comet really desired to know. And so once it began hitting the VHS market, it really blew up and have become cult status.
Peter McCarthy: We had a solid and crew screening at the Fox Venice Theatre. The night of the screening, I look outside, and there’s 500 people. Then there’s more. It’s growing all the time. People start banging on the glass doors. It looked like the glass was going to interrupt, in order that they finally just began flinging open the doors, they usually all just got here rushing into the theater like crazy. That theater was so full. Every fire hazard in the world was being violated. And I remember turning to Alex and just going, “Holy shit, the buzz on this thing is unbelievable. How do you think they’re going to react to it?” And Alex goes, “I hope they rip the seats out and throw it at the screen. I just hope they rip the theater apart.”
“Repo World”
In the years since Repo Man’s release, Cox attempted multiple sequels with mixed results.
Alex Cox: The graphic novel Waldo’s Hawaiian Holiday was speculated to be the sequel. It was originally called Otto’s Hawaiian Holiday, and it was a sequel that I had written in the Nineties to make on the tenth anniversary of Repo Man. Jonathan and Peter and Nesmith were going to be the producers, and all of us went right down to L.A. and tried to persuade Universal.
Peter McCarthy: We had a reading of the script at Harry Dean’s house. Emilio wasn’t sure if he desired to be involved, but Willem Defoe desired to be in it. I even had a poster made. But Universal didn’t want any sequels. And that’s why Alex, in doing Repo Chick, kind of just went “Fuck them, I’m going to just do what I want then.”
Alex Cox: Repo Chick isn’t actually a sequel. It’s a story in the Repo World, however it takes place not in Los Angeles but on a model railroad layout. The characters are classic model railroad figures, like 7 or 8 centimeters high. It’s very Barbie in terms of its visual aspect, or I should say Barbie could be very like Repo Chick.
In February 2024, Cox officially announced plans for a direct sequel, titled Repo Man 2: The Wages of Beer.
Dick Rude: It was only lately that he got the rights back to the film. Around the pandemic, he and I began emailing backwards and forwards ideas about doing one other sequel or series.
Sy Richardson: I used to be reading it whenever you called. I prefer it, and I like the direction they went with it. I can’t talk an excessive amount of about it, but I prefer it.
Alex Cox: The advent of incredible technology means, for the repo man, that every little thing has modified — and nothing has modified.
Credit : www.inverse.com
