A DIY self-actualizer who had made the gearhead classic Steel Arena (1973) - focusing on the white knuckle exploits of death-defying stunt drivers - on his own dime and went on to craft the drive-in perennials Truck Stop Women (1974), Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw (1976), and Roller Boogie (1979), Lester was inspired to write Class of 1984 after noting that his old high school in the San Fernando Valley community of North Hills had been overrun by youth gangs. "I began doing enormous amounts of research," Lester told the horror website Dread Central in April of 2015. "And I found that there were all these incidents of violence in the schools - and this was way before Columbine... So all of these things - gang fights, prostitutes, drugs, and there was even a teacher who had come to class with a gun... So I put all the incidents together, with a Blackboard Jungle type-story where all of this comes to an urban high school, and that's how it all started."
Lester was able to cast his first choice to play an idealistic school teacher crushed by the axis of administrative incompetence and student hostility in Perry King. Like Lester, a native Ohioan, King's film career had begun in earnest a decade earlier with key roles in George Roy Hill's Slaughterhouse Five (1972) and Waris Hussein's The Possession of Joel Delaney (1972), and as one of the rising stars of Martin Davidson and Stephen Verona's The Lord's of Flatbush (1974) opposite Sylvester Stallone and Henry Winkler. The actor was by this point transitioning from youthful leading man roles to playing more mature characters, a career trajectory that would lead to the fleet of military men, senators, congressmen, and presidents he would portray in a career spanning more than forty years. With a shooting location secured in affordable Toronto, Lester would fill his supporting cast with Canadian actors, while bringing along with him a couple of Hollywood players -- Roddy McDowall, as a sensitive school teacher who cracks under the strain; Timothy Van Patten (then coming off a long run as a regular on TV's high school-set The White Shadow) as the leader of the school gang; and a fresh-faced Canadian-born actor named Michael Fox, whose later success on American television would necessitate the adoption of the professional name Michael J. Fox.
Born in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1961 and raised in British Columbia, Fox got started young in theatre and had made sufficient gains on Canadian television to effect a career move at age 18 to Hollywood. Parts on such American TV series as Lou Grant and Trapper John, M.D., as well as a role in Walt Disney's Midnight Madness (1980), were encouraging, but by the time he accepted a minor role in Class of 1984 Fox was giving serious thought to returning to Canada for good. Shortly after completing the Lester film, Fox auditioned for the NBC sitcom Family Ties, whose pilot episode aired in September 1982, a month after the theatrical rollout of Class of 1984. A perfect fit for the comic relief role of teen neoconservative Alex Keaton, Fox parlayed his small screen success into a run of profitable feature films, most notably Robert Zemeckis' sci-fi comedy Back to the Future (1985) and its sequels. Twenty years after having lost out on the Timothy Hutton role in Ordinary People (1980) and having had to settle for Class of 1984 (which the actor cracked, in his 2003 memoirs, made "Midnight Madness look like Casablanca"), Fox received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Drawing inspiration from Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971), writer/director Mark L. Lester would graft then-voguish punk rock fashions onto the high school hooligans of Class of 1984, tapping a zeitgeist that had long since left the building but was experiencing renewed currency among suburban youths. Though the punk rock movement was considered by purists to be near death by 1981 (Sex Pistols frontman Sid Vicious had died two years earlier), Lester's use of Mohawk haircuts, distressed denim, and studded leather was predictive of a number of films that followed, from Susan Seidelman's Smithereens (1982) and Penelope Spheeris' Suburbia (1983) to Alex Cox's Repo Man (1984) and Dan O'Bannon's The Return of the Living Dead (1985); in Star Trek: The Journey Home (1986), the crew of the SS Enterprise beams down in 20th Century San Francisco, where Leonard Nimoy's Mr. Spock is moved to use the Vulcan nerve pinch on a punk commuter who will not turn down the volume on his boogie box. Like Fox, Lester would enjoy his own brush with mainstream success by adapting Stephen King's Firestarter (1984) for producer Dino De Laurentiis and by directing the Arnold Schwarzenegger action vehicle Commando (1985).
By Richard Harland Smith
Sources:
Lucky Man: A Memoir by Michael J. Fox (Hyperion, 2003)
Mark L. Lester interview by by Matt Boiselle, DreadCentral.com, April 14, 2015
"Mark L. Lester Talks Firestarter, Class of 1984 and Lots More!" by Chris Haberman, DreadCentral.com, January 11, 2011
