Neko Case & Mike Nesmith Talk REPO MAN For Film Acoustic: Part 1

Film Acoustic, the Carolina Theatre’s new series which pairs special guests with their favorite movies, went down in Durham earlier this week on Monday evening, February 23rd, which was luckily the night before the big snowstorm hit the Triangle area. It was an event that was highly anticipated and didn’t disappoint: Neko Case presents Alex Cox’s 1984 cult classic REPO MAN, with Very Special Guest Mike Nesmith.

Unlike last month’s program with Lucinda Williams, there was no music played but the discussion with the two fine musicians, Case and Nesmith, who was the Executive Producer of REPO MAN, after the film was lengthy and incredibly engrossing (it may have been too lengthy for my wife, but that’s another matter). 

The last time I saw REPO MAN It was on its 25th anniversary on the big screen in the Cool Classics series at the Colony Theater (read my post about it from back in the day), and I enjoyed seeing it again. I think it’ll always hold up as Cox’s weird, funny curio and it has one of the greatest soundtracks ever.

After the screening, a video of Case’s was shown, “Maybe Sparrow” from her excellent 2006 album “Fox Confessor Brings the Flood,” then Modern School of Film founder and Duke graduate Robert Milazzo introduced Case, who was greeted warmly by the Fletcher Hall audience.

Case spoke about seeing REPO MAN and how it reflected how scary it was as “a 14-year old who grew up in the Pacific Northwest” living in the Reagan/Cold War era. “People look back now and talk about Ronald Reagan like he was this really beloved President, but people fucking hated that guy,” Case explained to some clapping from the crowd. “People thought George W. Bush was funny, nobody thought Reagan was funny.” 

Case went on about the film: “I looked for myself in everything as well, and I never could find a female. And in this movie, the female characters are all just like fragments of women. Kind of like the men are fragments of men, like nobody’s a complete character. It’s very cartoony, which makes sense since Alex Cox drew a comic book strip first.”

After Case talked about how she “knew a lot of boys exactly like Otto,” how New Wave was the death knell of punk, and that this was the first time she’d ever seen REPO MAN on the big screen (“I’ve only seen it in rooms with shitty Christmas lights”) moderator Milazzo introduced Nesmith who walked from the back of the theatre to huge applause. My wife leaned towards me and said, “that’s a Monkee!”

Milazzo gave the interview over to Case, and they revealed that this was a continuation of their three hour conversation at lunch (Case to Milazzo: “We cheated on you with each other…in a restaurant”).

Here are some highlights from Case’s talk with Nesmith:

Nesmith on the inception of REPO MAN: “I had just finished doing a movie called TIMERIDER. Harry Gittes and a friend of mine, Bill Dear, who I’d been working with for a while, directed that movie. And I made friends with Harry, and Harry was working over in Jack Nicholson’s office at Sony, and this script came across the desk, and he called me up and said ‘you’ve got to see this.’ So he sent it to me, and I read it, and I said ‘this is great! What do we do?’ He said ‘well the studios are going to make this picture but I thought maybe you would be interested in doing it as a independent producer.’ I said ‘well, let’s talk to the guys.’

So they set up a meeting with Alex, Alex Cox, and Jonathan Wacks and Peter McCarthy to his office. And I just went over, and, you know, at that point I was in the middle of kind of a roll-off of my artistic endeavors and so forth. Come off a bunch of albums at RCA, was done with the Monkees, it was, you know, everything was kind of behind me, and TIMERIDER had not been successful either in theaters, or artistically, it just hadn’t quite worked like I wanted it to work. But I had financial freedom because my mother had left me a lot of money, she died in 1980, and I was knocking around looking for something to do, in terms of how to keep going as an artist, because I figured it was over for me at that point.

So when I met them in Harry’s office, I was in a frame of mind which was, I thought maybe what I could do is help get this movie made somehow, and if I can do that, what I should do, not that I can, but what I should do is not mess with it. I shouldn’t try to fit this into some sort of mold. What I could provide as a kind of role where I could stand between the filmmakers and the studio, and the filmmakers could do the film they wanted to do, and the studio would get either delivered to them a product that they could quantify somehow.”

Nesmith on the screenplay: “It was like free association origami. I mean, I knew it was not gonna turn into a swan, but it was folded up somehow; everything had a point, it had a way of referring and closing up loose ends and so forth.”

Nesmith on the original ending: “It was supposed to end with Otto as a Salvadorian rebel. And Marlene and the Rodriquez brothers were really sort of the American conscription for South American rebels.”

Case: “And that’s why you see her in her Che Guevara outfit.”

Nesmith on revisiting the movie: “When I watch this movie, and this is the first time I’ve seen it with an audience in 30 years, as it develops along, one of the things that’s outstanding to me about it, and it just holds, is that it is a comedy that doesn’t have one gag in it. They don’t play anything for funny. Even ‘let’s go get sushi and not pay,’ he reads that line flat! And Alex never cuts tight on the generic food cans, you can barely see it say “food,” he’s eating food. And the standard play, the TV play, the formula play is cut, cut on “food,” so people go ‘ho ho, it’s food.”

Nesmith on the ending they used: “Alex called me up at some point, and he said ‘you know, I’ve been doing this movie now so, and I still don’t know how to end it, but I think something’s happened with Miller *. I think he’s come forward as a fulcrum, a kind of nexus of the film.’ And I thought, ‘this is genius. This is smart. This is right. What are you gonna do?’ He said ‘I don’t know. But can I have some money for special effects? I think I want the Malibu to glow.’ I said ‘that’s a great idea.’ ‘Can I have some money.’ I said ‘no.’ Million eight, that’s it. ‘I’ve got to make it glow for a million eight.’ So he went out and bought the reflective tube they use on the highway, and painted the whole car with a brush. And shot green lights on it – that’s what you see in the film! That was great filmmaking.”

Nesmith on what was in Otto’s can of “food”: “Corned beef hash.” 

Nesmith on the killer punk soundtrack: “The soundtrack ultimately redeemed the film financially - it made money.”

Case: “Which is my favorite story about the movie.”

Nesmith: “It came out, Universal released it and put it in one theater in Boston, where it played for a year. And that was it! We were done, we were toast. And so we, you know, slumped shoulders and went home, and then suddenly, Universal people at music said ‘holy crap, look at this soundtrack!’ And they put it out and it sold 5 times what soundtracks sell, which was not a huge number but was enough to get us attention.”

Nesmith on nearly contributing the score for EASY RIDER: “Dennis (Hopper) said ‘would you be interested in doing the music?’ So I came up with some sort of thing, it was like a cross between Memphis horns and cherry pink and apple blossom pie– it was some stupid idea, about I would use brass band in sections, and I realized that I didn’t have a sense of this, I didn’t have any idea. And he looked at me and he was courteous, which was kind of a first for Dennis, and he was ‘okay, good’ and I was out! And then the next thing you hear is “If 6 Was 9” by Hendrix, and you realize ‘okay, they created a whole other world that I could’ve massively fucked up with cherry pink and apple blossom pie.’”

Nesmith discusses one of my favorite films ever, the Monkees' movie HEAD, a possible REPO MAN sequel, and much much more in Part 2.

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Celebrating The 25th Anniversary Of REPO MAN

REPO MAN (Dir. Alex Cox, 1984) 

It doesn’t get any cult classic-ier than Alan Cox’s 1984 ode to the sleazy underbelly of Los Angeles, REPO MAN. As such, I wasn’t alone to be thrilled to see it on the schedule for their great revival series Cool Classics at the Colony as the packed house proved last night.

Denver Hill, manager of the North Raleigh theater, introduced the film and asked how many had seen it before. A huge percentage of the audience including me raised their hands.

He then asked how many had seen it at the theater and a very few people raised their hands. I was too young to see it on the big screen in its original release because of its R rating but I saw the movie many times when it hit cable in the mid '80s.

I believe I had it on a VHS tape recorded in the fast speed so it could be crammed with a couple other movies. That tape is long gone but the movie remained in my memory as one of the funniest weird movies I had ever seen.

I was anxious to revisit REPO MAN and see if it still holds up. I downloaded the soundtrack and its beautiful but scary blend of punk - Iggy Pop who provided the title theme with tracks by the Circle Jerks, the Plugz, Fear, and Black Flag was deliriously dated but still held up. The movie is unsurprisingly the same way - Cox’s surreal story of crusty jaded repossession agents, punk rock thieves, and a 1964 Chevrolet Malibu that may contain aliens in its trunk has lost none of its crazy charm. The audience laughed heartily at the first close-up of a young Emilio Estevez as the movies protagonist Otto with his buzz cut and a crucifix earring but then they laughed at just about every other shot too.

Especially shots of a grocery store full of generically packaged products such as white plain beer cans with only the word -->“beer” on the label. Estevez slugs a coworker (Circle Jerks bassist Zander Schloss) and quits his stock clerk job at said store, but his bad attitude collides head on with bad luck as he finds his girlfriend (Jennifer Balgobin) cheating on him and that his hippie parents have donated his college fund to a television evangelist.



Estevez stumbles into the repo business by way of the crotchety, but always lovable Harry Dean Stanton who is a veteran agent for the humorously named Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation.

At first our hero is reluctant to take the job, protesting by pouring one of those generic beers on their office floor but the lure of loot finds him getting chased and shot at in the process of repossessing cars from delinquent owners. Meanwhile, the before mentioned Malibu driven by a mad government scientist (Fox Harris) is being sought after all over town by an FBI agent (Susan Barnes), and competing repo men for its Top Secret cargo. 

A lethal glow emits when somebody opens the trunk to investigate it - a device which was undoubtedly an inspiration on Quentin Tarentino’s glowing briefcase in PULP FICTION. 

This is all punctuated with that before mentioned punchy punk soundtrack that never lets up, and littered with a bunch of quotable lines including: “John Wayne was a fag,” “Only an asshole gets killed for a car,” “I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees,” “Look at -->‘em, ordinary fucking people, I hate ‘em,” and my favorite: “I know a life of crime has led me to this sorry fate, and yet, I blame society. Society made me what I am.”

The screening at the Colony last night confirmed that REPO MAN still wears the '80s cult classic crown. Sure, it may creak a little at times but it's impossible to imagine the independent film landscape of the '90s and beyond without it.

There is talk of Cox making a sequel called REPO CHICK and why not? I doubt anything he would do would dim the glow of this awesome oddity. If anything it will point more folks to the original but if the enthusiastic audience last evening are any indication the film has legs long enough to last on its own.

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Cult Movie Catch-Up Via NEw Special Edition DVDs

Since this blog is relatively new we like to catch up with older films and appraise their recent special edition DVDs. Here I meet up with a couple of old friends: 

REPO MAN (Dir. Alex Cox, 1984)

A young punk (Emilio Estevez) becomes a automobile repossession man, who stumbles upon a car with dead space aliens in it and an entire low-life network bent on stealing it.

Harry Dean Stanton puts in a great gruff performance as Estevez's partner and has many pivotal lines that build his character as a master of poor man philosophy. Songs by the Circle Jerks, Iggy Pop (who wrote the theme song), the Plugz, and the Juicy Bananas among many other punk staples all line the frames of this flick perfectly. I saw this movie on cable many times in the '80s and love almost everything about it - especially the way every product - whether beer can or soup can is generically labelled i.e. with a white label and the word - "food" or "drink" printed alone.

The new DVD has a print of the film that looks better than I ever remember it looking and the overcrowded commentary with director Cox, executive producer Michael Nesmith (the Monkees!), three of the actors, and the casting director is fun too.

SUBURBIA (Dir. Penelope Spheeris, 1984)

I can't remember if I actually saw this movie back in the day. I remember the commercials for it with one punk saying “wake up and smell the coffee, man” being the first time I had ever heard that expression, but I don't remember it or other Roger Corman-produced movies for that matter being in heavy circulation on '80s HBO or Showtime.

Well, I mean as heavy as PORKY'S or POLICE ACADEMY or even BUCKAROO BANZAI for that matter. 

This movie about kids who squat on the outskirts of the suburbs in abandoned tract housing sure feels familiar, but maybe I'm thinking of OVER THE EDGE with Matt Dillon. Man, I loved that flick. This one has more roaches, rats, and rawk music in it so it goes much further over that supposed edge.

It’s funny that from this cast the most well known player here is Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Chris Pederson who recited the “smell the coffee” line was later in Oliver Stone's PLATOON and Kathryn Bigelow's POINT BREAK, but I doubt he’d really register with today's movie watching crowd.

This disc released as part of a Roger Corman Director's series on New Horizon video, has great commentary by director Spheeris. “The kids today look exactly the same,” she says more than once talking about the current resurgence of the punk movement.

With blueprints like this and SID AND NANCY getting the special treatment in rereleases and spiffy new digital transfers the punk kids of 20 years from now will look the same too. 

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