Buckaroo Banzai: The Aliens Were in New Jersey All Along - Reactor

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984). Directed by W.D. Richter. Written by Earl Mac Rauch. Starring just about everybody in the world but especially Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, Clancy Brown, and Jeff Goldblum.

If you were to make a wry, tongue-in-cheek, film-within-a-film comedy about the making of some quintessential cult classic American sci fi film from the 1980s, you would end up with a story that looks pretty much exactly like the making of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.

It was a passion project that nobody outside of the passionate filmmakers really understood before, during, or after its release. Everybody in the cast is recognizable, and very little about the plot is easily explainable. There are scenes the director put in just to confirm the studio wasn’t paying attention. Nobody knew how to market it. Critics were sharply divided and audiences stayed away—at least at first.

But people still love this movie today. People still ask about lost footage and deleted scenes and a possible sequel. Go to any major con and you’re likely to see cosplay of one or more characters. I don’t know quite how big the film’s cult fandom is these days, but I know it’s still out there. That’s impressive for a movie that could just as easily have faded into obscurity upon release.

The story of how Buckaroo Banzai came to be begins at Dartmouth College in 1968, when sophomore student Earl Mac Rauch wrote a novel called Dirty Pictures From the Prom. That novel was published by Doubleday the following year. I went looking for a description of the novel, not really sure what to expect, and found a summary in the December ’69 issue of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. The summary does not help me understand the book at all. It involves a child prodigy who dies young and is later elected to be God. But it’s also not important, because what matters is that a few years later, early-career screenwriter (and fellow Dartmouth alum) D.W. Richter read the book on his wife’s recommendation. He reached out to Rauch about potentially adapting the book into a film. That never happened, but the two struck up a friendship.

Rauch was also interested in writing for film, so Richter invited him to move out to California to get started. Richter was making a name for himself in Hollywood; among other things, he wrote the screenplay for Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). Rauch also began making some headway writing for films, such as developing the story for and co-writing Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977). (Confession: Until writing this article I had no idea Scorsese had directed a musical rom com. There are shocking gaps in my film knowledge.)

But all the while, Rauch had a different story occupying his thoughts and filling dozens of notebooks. A story that was bigger and weirder. A story he tried to write dozens of times, in dozens of different ways, before finally finding an approach that worked.

The way Rauch talks about developing the idea that would eventually become Buckaroo Banzai reminds me a lot of the way Luc Besson talks about The Fifth Element (1997), in that the story existed as a messy, sprawling amalgam of characters, worldbuilding, trope-heavy plots, and whiz-bang excitement long before it cohered into anything resembling a filmable screenplay. Rauch had a main character—first called Buckaroo Bandy, later renamed to Banzai—and several hundred pages of ideas involving villains, worldbuilding, sci fi zaniness, humor, and action, including at least one version that featured an enormous mecha, but he struggled to finish a script.

In another life, Rauch might have embarked on a career as a comics writer, or some other medium suited to the kind of ideas he was generating. But he wanted to write a movie, so that’s when he did. With a lot of help from Richter, and a lot more writerly trial and error, Rauch finally came up with a finished script that could be pitched to studios. It was first picked up by United Artists, but after a writers’ strike, some shuffling of studio executives, and a couple of years, it ended up going into production at 20^th Century Fox.

Richter hadn’t directed a film before, and when he set out to woo the primary cast he had to do be pretty persuasive. Both Peter Weller (who plays the hero, Buckaroo Banzai) and John Lithgow (who plays the villain Dr. Lizardo, a.k.a. Lord Whorfin) were extremely skeptical at first. Weller, who was in the very early years of his film career, described it fairly politely, saying he “…wondered what the film’s point-of-view would be. Would it be campy? Would it be a cartoon?” Lithgow was a bit more blunt: “Rick [Richter] and Earl are completely deranged.”

But Richter was very persuasive, and both accepted the offered roles, and by extension accepted the task of diving headfirst into making what would become a very wacky movie.

To be more specific: a very wacky movie with a lot of serious talent behind it. That’s part of why it remains so beloved decades later, in spite of being about a rock star-neurosurgeon-particle physicist who drives his souped-up Ford F-350 through a mountain and encounters hostile aliens who have been imprisoned in an alternate dimension for decades.

I’m not going to get into every detail, but it’s worth touching on just how stacked the production roster was. For all its camp and craziness, Buckaroo Banzai was made by people who knew how to make movies. Production designer J. Michael Riva took some time in between working on award-winning dramatic films like Ordinary People (1980) and The Color Purple (1985) to create the world and the aliens of Buckaroo Banzai; his team included visual effects supervisor Michael Fink, who had previously worked on the effects teams on Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1982). To dress Buckaroo Banzai’s ragtag band of heroes, they brought on costume designer Aggie Guerard Rodgers, the woman responsible for the costuming in Return of the Jedi (1983) and who would later go on the design the absolutely iconic costumes in Beetlejuice (1988).

One of the most memorable of the Buckaroo Banzai costumes comes from a fun bit of fashion history. When Dr. Sidney “New Jersey” Zweibel (Jeff Goldblum) shows up to join the Hong Kong Cavaliers, he’s wearing a delightfully outrageous cowboy outfit. That suit came from the shop of legendary western wear designer Nudie Cohn, a Ukrainian-born tailor who made western wear for men. Cohn and his wife, Helen Kruger, got their start in fashion designing custom undergarments for burlesque showgirls in New York. After they moved to California in the ’40s they focused on western suits that would come to define the flashy, flamboyant “rhinestone cowboy” look that was so popular in ’50s and ’60s American pop culture. (Earworm: exactly what you expect. You’re welcome/I’m sorry.)

There was a lot of filmmaking skill behind the cameras as well. At first the film’s director of photography was Jordan Cronenweth, the cinematographer of Blade Runner (1982), but partway through producer David Begelman replaced him with Fred J. Koenekamp, the cinematographer of disaster film The Towering Inferno (1974). I’ve done some digging but I can’t find a real explanation for why Begelman made that call. That information may be out there somewhere—there are a lot of interviews and articles about this movie!—but what I did learn is that it didn’t make anybody on the film happy. Richter, Rauch, and Weller all argued against the change, as they preferred Cronenweth’s style to Koenekamp’s. Some of Cronenweth’s work remains in the film, most notably in the nightclub scene where Buckaroo and his band first encounter Penny Priddy (Ellen Barkin).

(Aside: Peter Weller is an accomplished musician who plays the trumpet, so the rock star part of his character’s resume is not that far-fetched. He also has a Ph.D. in Italian Renaissance Art History, which has nothing to do with this film but is so cool I wanted to share it anyway. He wrote his dissertation on Leon Battista Alberti’s De pictura, a book about painting that impacted how Renaissance artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli understood perspective.)

(Second aside: Yes, of course we are going to watch Weller in Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop at some point in the future. I just need to find the emotional fortitude to dedicate a month to science fictional depictions of law enforcement, a topic that is likely to make everybody living through 2025 feel really super great about the state of the world.)

It sounds like Richter and Begelman clashed a lot during the film’s production. In a 2011 interview, Richter put it rather bluntly: “Begelman was crazy. He would sabotage the movie in any way.” They argued about a great many things, and Richter was constantly worried that Begelman was going to pull the plug on the production.

It got to the point where the crew began to suspect that Begelman wasn’t even watching the dailies anymore because he had apparently given up on arguing with them. One day the crew decided to test this theory. Production designer J. Michael Riva had picked up a watermelon from a roadside fruit stand on his way to work, and Richter came up with the idea of sticking it in one of the defunct machines in the factory. The dialogue was improvised, the mysterious watermelon was included in the dailies and the final cut, and as Richter suspected, nobody from the studio ever questioned it.

The watermelon scene has become something of a legend among Buckaroo Banzai fans, and I think it’s pretty emblematic of the film as a whole. This was a movie made by a very enthusiastic group of people who were cheerfully trying to get away with as much as possible. They tried to stuff as much of Rauch’s story and fictional world into the film as possible, even though most of it wouldn’t fit. They shoved in an enormous cast of characters, which actually works better than it should, in large part because so many of the actors have an easy camaraderie with each other.

There’s so much that is in the film simply for the gag: the president’s hospital setup, the duck hunters who find the Lectroid ship, the very silly Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds backstory to the alien presence, the dizzying array of absurdist Lectroid names that all begin with “John.” You don’t call one of your primary villains “John Bigbooté” and cast Christopher Lloyd to play him unless you’re trying to make people snicker. (Lloyd also appear in another sci fi film in the summer of ’84. That was Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, which also makes people snicker, but only because we get to see Spock go through accelerated Vulcan puberty.)

All of those things that make the film so fun to watch are, alas, the very same things that made it such a hard sell in 1984. 20^th Century Fox had no real idea how to market it. They targeted sci fi audiences but didn’t reach out any farther, so when the film came out most people had no idea what to expect.

But it didn’t fade away, because all of those same things are also the exact things that make it cinematic catnip to a certain type of sci fi movie fan. The wacky plot, the deadpan humor, the many nonsensical inclusions, the big cast of unlikely heroes, the hints of complexity and sprawling comics-style structure of the larger world, the anything-goes sensibility, this is all stuff that sci fi nerds absolutely love. (I say that with both affection and self-awareness.) It took some time and a home video release, but Buckaroo Banzai did eventually find its audience.

It never did get a filmed sequel, in spite of what is promised at the end of the film. Even after the film’s cult status grew to the point where there was both interest and money enough to make it happen, a legal battle regarding the rights stalled the most promising adaptation before it went anywhere. The rights situation had in fact been complicated for years before that, partly due to the lasting effects of Begelman’s shady business practices, and partly due to ownership disputes between the creators and MGM, which acquired the rights as part of a larger deal. A few years ago Rauch published a novel version of the sequel, Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League (Dark Horse, 2021), but I’m not entirely sure what the film rights situation is right now.

I’ve never been among those who have any sort of attachment to Buckaroo Banzai. Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s a fun movie with a great cast. I’ve just never wanted or needed to see the story continued. It’s not just that I don’t think there needs to be more, and it’s not really about a resistance to nostalgia either. It’s more that I think Buckaroo Banzai belongs so completely to a certain time and place that removing it from that context changes the film completely.

There was an odd trend during the few years between the earnest and epic mainstream blockbusters like Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and the comedic and family-friendly mainstream hits of the latter half of the ’80s, such as Back to the Future (1985) or Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) or Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989). During those few years American sci fi films had a tendency to be a weird, sharp, and unexpected—a delight for sci fi fans but often a bit of a miss for mainstream movie-going audiences. This includes several other early ’80s American sci fi films that we’ve watched and discussed in this column: Repo Man (1984), Tron (1982), The Brother From Another Planet (1984), even Dune (1984). There are real gems in that period, but they are gems in part because they were playing around with things that didn’t fit either the save-the-galaxy cosmic-importance tone of what came before or the aggressively suburban normalization of what came after. They hit at the right time, in the right place, when American cinema needed a dose of off-beat oddity that wasn’t yet polished up for broader appeal.

Buckaroo Banzai fits right in among those films, and that’s why it’s still so much fun forty-some years later. It is such an ’80s movie—but I don’t mean that in a derogatory manner, the way people will sometimes describe media from the ’80s. I mean that it’s campy and weird, it’s shamelessly wacky, it’s politically clumsy but has its heart in the right place, it doesn’t bother to explain itself, and most of all, it was made by people having a grand old time filling the film with everything they loved.

What do you think about Buckaroo Banzai? Do you have any memories of watching it with other sci fi fans back in the ’80s or ’90s?

Next week: We’re watching India’s beloved superhero film Mr. India. Watch it on Amazon, several unofficial YouTube uploads, or anywhere else you can find it.