MURPHY'S LAW

REVISITING ROBOCOP: WRITER ED NEUMEIER AND DIRECTOR PAUL VERHOEVEN EXPLAIN HOW A LOW-BUDGET SCI-FI SATIRISING REAGAN’S AMERICA SPAWNED A LONG-RUNNING FRANCHISE

- DREW TURNEY

STAR WARS. THE Avengers. Harry Potter. When we think of entertainment empires, an inexpensive, ultra-violent, sociopolitical satire from the late ’80s doesn’t immediately spring to mind. But, like its hero Alex Murphy, RoboCop has proved very hard to kill.

Screenwriters Ed Neumeier and Michael Miner’s story of a cybernetic cop built using the body of an officer slain on duty latched onto fears about runaway Reaganomics, the overturning of ideals about the common good and uncertainty about robots and computers.

As Neumeier tells SFX from his home in suburban Los Angeles, they were themes he was surprisingly knowledgeable about growing up. “1970s Northern California was pretty liberal. It was infused with those ideas, so I wanted to poke fun at them,” he says. “It was nice when audiences were in on the joke. Paul [Verhoeven, director] identified it in the script and made it even clearer.”

Working as a studio development executive at the time, Neumeier wrote RoboCop together with student filmmaker Michael Miner. The script found its way to producer Jon Davison, flying high at the time. “He’d had success with Airplane! so he wasn’t afraid of the humour,” Neumeier says. “Everybody was iffy about it, but not Jon. He understood you could make something funny, political, dramatic and exciting at the same time.”

Davison took it to iconic production stable Orion, and soon RoboCop had a green light. Some directors wanted it but couldn’t schedule it, others didn’t feel like a good fit to Davison, and a Dutch director known for very adult European dramas didn’t seem at all suited. Initially, Verhoeven agreed.