"You can't drive it," they tried to tell him. "You'll be arrested." Roger Corman looked at the car in question. It had once been a humble rear-engine VW, a Herbie, junked at auction, stripped to the frame, and reconstructed by the film's designers with a fiberglass shell decorated to look like an alligator. It had no license tag, no headlights, no bumpers-but it had fangs and fins and garish paint. It was a movie prop, and a terrific one at that, but it was not street legal, and the stunt men refused to take the wheel.

Not that they excused themselves from speeding the things on the back roads and race tracks earlier in the shoot-if 45 mph can be called speeding. But for this shot, Roger Corman wanted Frankenstein's car to shoot down a city boulevard at top speed. It was not the sort of thing a professional would do and expect to keep his license. "The hell with it," grumbled Corman, and crawled into the vehicle himself. Frankenstein's full-body leather fetish outfit meant anybody could play his role at times like these, safely concealed behind a mask and cape. Corman waited for a break in traffic, and gunned the engine. As luck would have it, another film company was in town that day, attended by a cluster of traffic cops, and Corman's brazen disregard for protocol didn't even turn a single head. The shot is the film.

Corman loved those cars. Mary Woronov suspects the main reason Roger even made the film was to have an excuse to play with life-size Hot Wheels. While he and his writing team wrangled how to transform Ib Melchior's short story into a workable script, Corman had some sketches drawn up of the various cars-and it was from these drawings alone he got production financing, from equally car-happy bankers. Boys love their toys.

Ironically, the whole thing was set in motion by Melchior's revulsion at attending a car race in which a driver was killed, but it was this tension between conflicting attitudes and interests that gives the film its unique kick. The film speaks out of both sides of its mouth, condemning violence while exploiting it, reveling in the very culture it critiques. Director Paul Bartel recognized this tension in the script, and insisted that at the end of the film Frankenstein should drive over a pesky reporter asking imprudent questions. Corman objected adamantly. To his eye, such an ending invalidated the message of the movie. Bartel and Corman fought over this last scene extensively, finally agreeing on a compromise scene that proposed that the FBI would gun the reporter down, leaving Frankenstein not directly responsible for this final death. Bartel grumbled about the idea, convinced that a movie about running people over should conclude with running a person over. After so many disagreements about the tone of the film, though, Bartel felt he needed to give Corman this one. On the day of the shoot, David Carradine talked his director into shooting both versions, just for fun's sake. No sooner had they gotten the original version in the can then the difficult star suddenly decided he didn't want to work any more that day-and with a wink and a nod, the star and director called it a day, never having shot the scene their producer expected. Corman was furious, but it was too late to change.

For Carradine and Bartel to have colluded so effectively was a bit of a surprise, given how rocky their relationship started. In the early days of the production, Bartel saw Carradine as a spoiled star. They locked horns repeatedly, until Bartel had enough and decided to fire him and recast the role with Lee Majors. Humbled, Carradine fell in line, and the two bonded over their shared appreciation of George Gershwin!

One evening, to blow off steam, Bartel sat at an old upright piano and clinked out a Gershwin tune. Carradine started dancing tenderly...and in that one mad moment, director and star found the magic to film one of the most memorable scenes of the film, as Frankenstein dances half-naked save for a leather mask, romantically entranced by a woman he knows is plotting his death.

Killer cars and Gershwin-the crazy pavement of Death Race 2000 encompassed a wide variety of passions and inspirations, with a little something for everyone.

The film was a significant commercial success right away, prompting Corman to consider adapting it into a television series. Meanwhile, an attempt to turn it into a video game misfired. In 1976, software company Exidy put out an arcade game in which players maneuvered a crudely drawn car over even more crudely rendered "gremlins." The screen was little more than white blips on a black field, but with the addition of a little screaming sound effect as a tiny cross appeared to mark the kill, the game earned a notoriety for fostering violence. Ironically, the game was not originally designed to have anything to do with Death Race 2000, but when the Chicago Coin Machine Company failed to pay their bills on time, Exidy rechristened "Demolition Derby" in honor of the hit movie. There was an outcry, protests, complaints, and eventually the game was banned. Nowadays, the use of hit-and-runs as video game fodder is routine, and appears in games rated no higher than T for Teen-a sign that the film may indeed have foreseen the gradual degradation of human life.

by David Kalat

Sources:
Paul Bartel, Another Evening With David Carradine, Take One July 1978.
Roger Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Delta Publishing.
Roger Corman and Mary Woronov, commentary track on the Buena Vista Death Race 2000 DVD.
Beverly Gray, Roger Corman, Thunder's Mouth Press.
Justin Gustainis, ,i>Paul Bartel, www.filmreference.com.
Ib Melchior, The Racer, reprinted in Science Fiction Classics: The Stories That Morphed Into Movies, TV Books LLC.
Tom Rainone, Still Drunk as Hell with David Carradine, Psychotronic Number 5.
Cynthia Rose, Interview with Mary Woronov, Psychotronic Number 27.
Robert Skotak, Ib Melchior: Man of Imagination, Midnight Marquee Press.
Tom Weaver, Return of the B Science Fiction and Horror Heroes, McFarland Press.
When Two Tribes go to War: A History of Video Game Controversy, www.gamespot.com.