Demolition Man (1993)
Demolition Man is a 1993 American science fiction action film directed by Marco Brambilla in his directorial debut. It stars Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Sandra Bullock, and Nigel Hawthorne. Stallone is John Spartan, a risk-taking police officer who has a reputation for causing destruction while carrying out his work. After a failed attempt to rescue hostages from evil crime lord Simon Phoenix (Snipes), they are both sentenced to be cryogenically frozen in 1996. Phoenix is thawed for a parole hearing in 2032, but escapes. Society has changed and all crime has seemingly been eliminated. Unable to deal with a criminal as dangerous as Phoenix, the authorities awaken Spartan to help capture him again. The story makes allusions to many other works including Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World, and H. G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes. The film was released in the United States on October 8, 1993. It earned $159 million worldwide, and was considered a successful film for Stallone.
Plot.
n 1996, psychopathic career criminal Simon Phoenix kidnaps a busload of hostages and takes refuge in an abandoned building. LAPD Sergeant John Spartan, nicknamed “The Demolition Man” for the large amounts of collateral damage he often causes in apprehending suspects, mounts an unauthorized assault to capture Phoenix. When a thermal scan of the area reveals no trace of the hostages, he raids the building and confronts Phoenix, who sets off explosives to destroy it. The hostages’ corpses are later found in the rubble, and Phoenix claims that Spartan knew about them and attacked anyway. Both men are sentenced to lengthy terms in the city’s new “California Cryo-Penitentiary”, a prison in which convicts are cryogenically frozen and exposed to subliminal rehabilitation techniques.
In 2032, the city of San Angeles – a megalopolis formed from the merger of Los Angeles, San Diego, and Santa Barbara – is a seemingly peaceful utopia designed and run by Dr. Raymond Cocteau. Phoenix is thawed for a parole hearing and escapes from the cryo-prison by saying a secret password, without knowing how he had learned it. He subsequently murders his guards and the warden, making his way into the city where he easily overpowers and kills several police officers who have never had to deal with violent crime. Lieutenant Lenina Huxley, an idealistic officer who is fascinated with 20th-century culture,
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learns about Spartan’s career from veteran officer Zachary Lamb, who suggests the best chance to stop Phoenix is to enlist an officer with the experience and mindset needed to anticipate his actions. Huxley persuades her superiors to parole Spartan and reinstate him to active duty. Spartan finds life in San Angeles to be sterile and oppressive, since all types of behavior deemed immoral or unhealthy, such as sports, alcohol, swearing, eating meat and having sex have been declared illegal. Conversely, many members of the police department and the public view Spartan as savage and uncivilized, while Huxley idolizes him.
Development.
The original script was written by Peter Lenkov, who retained a story by credit. Lenkov came to Hollywood straight out of college with no connections, and wrote seven different scripts, desperately hoping to break into Hollywood. Selling the spec script of Demolition Man to Warner Bros. was his first big break. Lenkov had been inspired by Lethal Weapon and wanted to do something about cops, and had also read about celebrities wanting to be cryogenically frozen. His initial pitch was rejected by an executive who did not understand his “frozen cop” idea. The finished script, where a super cop has to battle the world’s deadliest criminal, in a future where there is almost no crime, generated more interest. Writer Daniel Waters (known for Heathers) said his version of the screenplay was essentially a rewrite; he changed the script so extensively that when the script went to arbitration he received first screenplay writing credit.
In the early drafts the script was a regular action movie, with no attempt at comedy. Waters pitched it as an action movie version of Woody Allen’s Sleeper. Waters had an idea about a small part of Universal City, a shopping and entertainment area called CityWalk, and wondered what it might be like if one day all of Los Angeles might be like that, and the idea grew from there. Waters says his intention was to have fun, that he was not trying to be political or deeply examine political correctness. He cited the conclusion of the film, where society will need to find a new balance and compromise, as representing his own position in the political middle ground. Burger King was originally written as the winner of the restaurant wars, but they and also McDonald’s were not interested in being part of the film, but Taco Bell were happy to be involved.
Casting.
Stallone passed on the project at first, but came back around to it. He liked the idea of two equal opponents in Spartan and Phoenix, and decided to take a chance on doing something he had not done before. Stallone wanted Jackie Chan for the role of Simon Phoenix. Chan turned it down, not wanting to play a villain. Wesley Snipes turned down the role several times, so Joel Silver and Marco Brambilla went to the set of the film Rising Sun to try and convince him in person. Brambilla explained what he thought the film could be and his passion for the script they were writing, and the next day they received a call and Snipes agreed to do the film. Brambilla said of Snipes, “He works without rehearsing too much, and he improvises a lot. The two of them, that combination of energies and the way they interact, really did the movie a lot of favors.RELATED:
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They completely respected each other and were really professional, and they did get along. There was no ego or any competition between the actors.” Lori Petty was originally cast as Huxley, but was fired after two days of filming due to what producer Joel Silver called “creative differences”. Petty attributed it to personality differences, as she and Stallone did not get along, and said “Sly and I were like oil and water.” Silver was looking for a replacement and Lorenzo di Bonaventura recommended Bullock; impressed by her audition tape, Silver hired her. Denis Leary said he was hired for his comedy rants, which he wrote himself and had to undergo a long approval process by the studio before it was included in the script.
Filming.
General Motors provided the production team with 18 concept vehicles, including the Ultralite. More than 20 fiberglass replicas of the Ultralite were produced to portray civilian and SAPD patrol vehicles in the film. After filming had completed, the remaining Ultralites were returned to Michigan as part of GM’s concept vehicle fleet. The film featured the actual demolition of one of the buildings of the no longer operative Belknap Hardware and Manufacturing Company in Louisville, Kentucky. The City of L.A. allowed the filmmakers to use and demolish an old Department of Water & Power building in downtown Los Angeles. This enabled them to have more control over the explosion, instead of having to cut straight to the building being gone and rubble as they had been forced to do with other projects. “We actually created a crater in the middle of the building.
And have the explosion and rubble more designed, so to speak. It’s fun to do that, because those big pyrotechnics always look great”, Silver noted.
The film suffered repeated delays, and the original 72-day production schedule ran to 112 days. Stallone was out for a week due to injury. Heavy rains in Los Angeles delayed filming. A soundstage was also damaged in a fire. The production went through five assistant directors, and many crew had to leave to work on other projects. Insiders at Warner Bros. were critical of Silver for hiring a director without previous feature film experience. Silver rejected this view, saying, “Marco’s done a brilliant job. We’re over-schedule because this is a very hard movie to make, not because Marco is inexperienced.”
