Reading Andy's typically stellar write-up of this film (one of my favorites as a kid), I was disheartened to learn about the massive alterations of Dan O'Bannon's script. While Badham and the actors got the most out of a very basic story, the Scheider character really lent itself to an atypical kind of action film, one I'm sure O'Bannon's original script delivered. Again, I liked the movie, but now it feels like a missed opportunity.
That's how I view the movie too Mike. It's fun for what it is, but what it is was compromised by the script being toned down. Let's face it, perhaps Columbia was right that "TAXI DRIVER In The Sky" wasn't something they wanted to make...yet I couldn't help but think the quality of the alterations didn't result in a movie tilted too much in the other direction, like a silly comic book. It's cool, but at least WARGAMES holds up better thanks to better-rounded characters and some tense direction from Badham.
I noticed reading an Amazon review that someone complained there's footage still cut (on both the old and the new DVD) of Candy Clark driving down an alley way while being pursued by the police...the poster stated that in some international versions, Scheider's reaction is due to her car going off to the side in a ridiculous stunt (probably why it was cut?), which isn't shown in the U.S. for whatever reason. I do have the Region 4 Australian DVD and the footage isn't in there, either, so perhaps someone who's seen the movie in theaters can recall.
According to the documentary on the new DVD, there were two scenes cut from the film, and while bits of them are shown in the documentary, we have not been given complete scenes in a "deleted scenes" section. One scene involved Murphy being given a psych evaluation that proves inconclusive. This was apparently a scene that O'Bannon really wanted to be in the movie - it was likely one of the last vestiges of his original story - but Badham disagreed and felt it simply bogged the movie down. The second scene really needed to be cut - it involved Candy Clark driving down an alley, seeing a cop car in her way, AND THEN TAKING HER CAR UP ON TWO WHEELS TO SLIDE PAST THE COPS while speeding down the alley. After this got laughed at in the preview screenings, Badham took it out, noting that it was unbelievable that she could pull a stunt move like that. Badham notes on the DVD that this stunt causes roof damage to her car which we see later but which now has no explanation.
As for Dan O'Bannon's original plan for the movie, it's pretty well outlined in the documentary. Time has mellowed him, though. When Blue Thunder came out in 1983, O'Bannon gave an infuriated interview to Starlog magazine, in which he bitterly complained about the changes made by the studio and by Badham. O'Bannon noted at that time that he got the idea when he was crashing on a friend's couch (possibly when he was writing ALIEN with Ron Shusett) because the LAPD were constantly buzzing the area with their helicopters looking for various perps. Since he couldn't get peace and quiet during the day or at night, O'Bannon decided to write about a psycho LAPD helicopter pilot, and what the LAPD does to try to bring him down. O'Bannon's feeling was that cops don't care about the innocent bystander - he figured they just want to catch the crook, regardless of who gets caught in the middle.
O'Bannon then noted in the interview that the studio made him and Dan Jakoby change a lot of this for their own purposes, and then brought in Dean Reisner to rewrite him, which REALLY made him mad. ("After we slavishly and obediently made all the changes, they went and brought in Dean Reisner, who moved all the commas around.") O'Bannon's memories of the shoot on the DVD documentary are quite different from what he was saying in 1983, when he denounced Badham as a hack director. O'Bannon said he thought the chase sequence was ridiculous, that he really didn't like the helicopter design ("I was thinking of a fast black wasp, and they brought in this thing and hung all this crap on it"), and that he felt disrespected by Badham, noting that during one set visit he heard Badham tell one of the cast who didn't know their lines, "Don't worry, it's just dialogue. Just say something and put the word s**t in it." There are vestiges of this criticism still in the documentary if you look for them. Malcolm McDowell is a good actor, but the part clearly called for a non-British actor. (Picture Gene Hackman or James Coburn in the part and you get more of the idea of what O'Bannon was thinking)
Granted, O'Bannon is a curmudgeon. (During the same interview, he completely badmouthed the ALIEN producers as well) And again, time has mellowed him. One of the more fun bits in the documentary is watching him grudgingly admit that it's hard to stay mad at the LAPD when all these cops come up to him to thank him for the movie. And it's fun to watch O'Bannon admit that he had no idea how they were going to shoot helicopter to helicopter in the middle of LA, only to see that this was possibly the simplest part of the shoot.
I know this kind of tinkering is all too common in Hollywood, but it's still unfortunate to see a promising project get that kind of treatment.
And you're totally right about O'Bannon being a curmudgeon. He's a little prickly on those ALIEN documentaries in the "Quadrilogy" (whatever the hell that is) set.
