His name is Willie Connors, but to the world he is simply the Racer. As the reigning champion of the Trans-Continental Road Race, he drives a souped-up speed devil dubbed "The Bull," decorated to match. Winning the race involves more than mere speed-drivers rack up points for running over pedestrians.

When Connors plows his Bull through an unsuspecting crowd, the bloodbath blots his windshield. Stepping from the car to survey his gargantuan score, he expects to be accosted by fans. Instead, this rare interaction with the public is biting-a young woman cradles the corpse of a murdered child in her arms, and calls him "butcher." Connors drives off, confused. It had never occurred to him to think of his scores as people, and now that her harsh word rings in his ears, his enthusiasm for the race rapidly dwindles. If the bodies of the dead are anything other than numbers on a scoreboard, how can he continue to play this bloody sport?

This is the plot of a short story by Ib Melchior, first published in the October 1956 issue of Escapade magazine. It was the first work of science-fiction ever written by Melchior, who would go on to be among the leading lights of the genre. Many years earlier (we can be precise if you want-it was in 1939), young Ib was a guest at the Indianapolis 500, seated in the same box as the racers' wives. A fiery crash incinerated one of the drivers. Ib sat helplessly as the dead racer's widow recoiled in shock while the crowd roared with delight at having experienced such exciting horror firsthand. Melchior realized the sickening truth, that the sport was premised on the possibility of witnessing death. The Racer did little but exaggerate reality slightly.

Given a decade or so to percolate, The Racer started to exhibit more prescience than before. As the culture grew increasingly coarse, vulgar, and casually violent, the idea of a future in which human life was dismissed for the purposes of entertainment was not so outrageous.

Even the names chosen by Melchior took on unintended significance: in the 1960s, any reader coming across Willie Connors at the helm of "The Bull" could not help but think of the legendary racist Bull Connors, the poster boy for state-sponsored violence. Throughout the Civil Rights era, his name would be synonymous with the dehumanization of others, even if this connection was nothing but coincidental.

In the pitch of the Civil Rights struggle, dystopian fiction had started to take on a new significance in American culture. Previously, dystopian writing had happily confined itself to depictions of totalitarianism in the Nazi-occupied Europe of the past or the Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe of the then-present. Cold War audiences could enjoy the reassurance that We were superior to Them. Come the late 1960s, the democratic West looked discomfitingly like its enemies. Assassinations, political violence, abuses of power, misguided wars, the depletion of natural resources, an economy on the brink of collapse-enough of that, and the writers of speculative fiction recast dystopia as our collective, perhaps inevitable, fate.

According to the architects of movie Armageddon, people were destined to be eaten as soylent green, enslaved on a planet of the apes, or killed for sport in rollerball rinks. It was in this climate that Roger Corman felt compelled to adapt The Racer for the screen. Corman had a knack for jumping on bandwagons even before the wagons had their wheels fitted. This is the man who would get Carnosaur to theaters weeks before Jurassic Park (both 1993). Asked if Death Race 2000 was a knock-off of Rollerball (1975), Corman simply replies that his film was in theaters first, by a good two months-which is both technically true, and not an answer to the question.

Director Paul Bartel is more candid when he admits, "It was very important to [Roger] to be the David against the studio Goliath, and to come up with a cheap version that could be marketed along the same lines as some megaproduction."

Getting Death Race 2000 out ahead of the competition was no easy task, though. It had a troubled gestation. The short story is more short than a story-it is a premise and a few incidents, but not enough for the basis of an entire movie. Corman initially took it upon himself to flesh the idea into a movie treatment, but was unhappy with the result. He turned to writer Robert Thom, an Emmy-winning writer with a knack for outrageous social satire. His script for AIP's 1968 Wild in the Streets had helped earn that low-budget B-picture an Oscar® nomination. Thom followed his satirist's instincts and produced an absurdist script that Corman flatly rejected.

Here is where the story gets muddled. In his autobiography, Corman claims he was inspired by the likes of Dr. Strangelove (1964), always intending Death Race to evince madcap wit. Not one of Corman's collaborators agree. Only recently has Corman started to admit that, in fact, he had stubbornly insisted that the film be played straight, and had resisted all attempts to emphasize its comic aspects. Dissatisfied with Thom's farcical approach, Corman handed the project to his longtime screenwriter Chuck Griffith. As the writer of many of Corman's most successful horror comedies, Griffith knew well how to sell his often humorless boss on the idea. Griffith painstakingly rewrote Death Race 2000 to maintain the ironic touch but not go so far as to alienate Corman. The thing went through multiple drafts, with much back-and-forth with a cantankerous Corman. The producer even threatened to abandon the project altogether, until he was reminded that he'd already invested more than five thousand dollars in it, which meant the spendthrift was committed. Beverly Gray put a few crowning ideas into the mix, and reluctantly Corman agreed to shoot it as a comic thriller.

Paul Bartel was a young director with but one feature film on his resume, but that film was the cult classic Private Parts (1972), produced by Corman's brother Gene. Having handled second-unit photography for New World Pictures on Big Bad Mama (1974), Bartel had proven his worth to Corman. For $5,000, Bartel would get a chance to direct his second feature-a fee that just happened to match what Corman was spending on the creation of the custom race cars featured in the film.

Bartel had heard the siren song of filmmaking since childhood. He attended UCLA's film school before taking a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Center for Experimental Film in Rome. His career would encompass directing, writing, and acting, with a recurrent emphasis on scathing satire. Not even Hollywood was especially welcoming of an openly gay man in the 1970s, so Bartel naturally gravitated to the underground world of independent cinema, a subculture that embraced his dry wit and keen visual style.

Bartel was especially attracted to the black humor of Death Race 2000, but found himself perpetually locking horns with Corman over that very aspect. On the set, Bartel found an unexpected ally in star David Carradine, who colluded with the director to shoot certain scenes in direct defiance of their producer. During post-production, Corman shut Bartel out and recut the picture to emphasize its nudity and gore at the expense of the arch humor favored by Bartel.

The controversy over the tone actually helped the film tremendously, because between them, the warring parties struck a perfect balance between over the top farce and serious sci-fi social commentary. Had the film wobbled too far over the line into either the serious or comic sides, the result would have been diminished-as the filmmakers unhappily discovered in the years to come. In 1976, Bartel directed Cannonball! as a sort of revised second edition of Death Race 2000, but with a more obvious tendency toward parody. Bartel brought back star David Carradine, along with appearances by fellow Death Race alums Mary Woronov and Sylvester Stallone, for yet another "Trans-American outlaw road race" yarn. Trying too hard to be funny and failing, this film has been justly forgotten.

In 1978, Roger Corman hired director Allan Arkush to make Deathsport, a film so closely modeled on Death Race that Corman felt morally obliged to pay Ib Melchior again as acknowledgment of the debt to The Racer. Once more, David Carradine starred, but this time Corman convinced Arkush to shoot the thing straight, with none of that fey jesting Corman so disliked from Bartel. This concoction was no more effective or popular than Bartel's Cannonball!. The real deal, Death Race 2000 was a huge hit, one of the biggest successes of Corman's storied career, and one of the few films of the underrated Bartel to be well-remembered today. It cost somewhere between $300,000 (according to Roger) and $480,000 (according to Paul) to make, and brought in just shy of $5 million in ticket sales.

When Ib Melchior became one of those ticket buyers in 1975, his initial response was one of shock and horror: "My God!" he exclaimed, "What have they done to my story? Then I started laughing, and by the time the film was over I thought it was one of the funniest things I had ever seen."

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.