WestWorld (1973)

“Draw.”

To prove they’ve cornered the market on the ultimate resort package, the Delos Corporation’s latest promotional video for their expansive theme parks takes a roving reporter to the people, resulting in a vox populi testimonial from many a satisfied customer. But what is it that Delos offers that tops Disney, Six Flags or Worlds of Fun that folks are willing to cough up $1000 a day for? The answer is total immersion into an authentically recreated era from three historical periods:

RomanWorld offers the bacchanalia of the Roman Empire at its most decadent heights (-- complete with toga orgies and vomitoriums, I’m sure); meanwhile, MedievalWorld offers chivalrous and swashbuckling adventure for wannabe knights and maidens fair (-- complete with flagons of mead and a torture chamber with a damsel in distress already included deep in the castle keep); and finally, WestWorld offers up a rustic 1880s frontier town (-- with the bonus features of daily bank robberies, jailbreaks, and a well-stocked saloon and whorehouse).

Now, having read all that you would be right in assuming there’s something slightly carnal and debaucherous about all three adult-oriented theme parks; but what makes the Delos package so enticing is you can leave the kids at home and do whatever you want -- eat, drink, screw, and even kill, as much as you want, with no repercussions or emotional baggage.

See, the real draw of Delos is their theme parks are populated by a series of automata -- androids, nearly indistinguishable from their human counterparts just waiting to be fornicated with or be killed, which are then patched-up and hosed-out during the overnight and sent back out to do it all over again.

Thus, everything on the surface of Delos, the people and the animals, are all fake, mechanical, run from a sprawling command bunker below the parks, situated in the middle of the vast deserts of the American southwest. (We can assume this isolation is both for security reasons and allows for more environmental control.) And so, this promotional piece concludes with a clarion call for all to partake in the ultimate vacation of self-indulgence and hedonism, which then ends with this proclamation: “Delos -- the ultimate resort. Where nothing can possibly go wrong."

To reinforce this point, Delos plays this very same video for the passengers on the shuttle to their isolated destination in the far flung future of 1983; among them are John Blane (Brolin) and his reluctant friend, Peter Martin (Benjamin). This will be Blane’s second trip to WestWorld and Martin’s first, who was talked into this little adventure to get his mind off a failed marriage that just broke-up on the rocks of signed divorce papers. 

Both men hail from Chicago but appear to be a tad mismatched, with Blane looking like the Marlboro Man while Martin has ‘nebbish accountant’ written all over him. One could almost read that Blane is using this experience to toughen his friend up a bit in keeping with that macho 1970s vibe. (And if I am being honest, Delos's whole setup lopsidedly skews in ‘services rendered’ to the male demographic.)

But after a kind of rough start followed by a brief period of adjustment -- which allows Blane to explain away a few potential plot-holes on how Delos works -- like how customers can’t accidentally shoot each other during the daily mayhem due to built in safety features, Martin is soon in the swing of things and having the time of his life. This includes outdrawing a bullying gunslinger (Brynner) at the saloon, cathartically blowing him away, and then spending a blissful and sexually satisfying night at the brothel with one of Miss Carrie’s (Barrett) whores.

Yep. It appears to be business as usual at Delos -- only it really isn’t, and hasn’t been for quite some time. 

As with all of these Sci-Fi parables, it started small with a few minor glitches that eventually grew into malfunctioning robots going off-script and acting autonomously, including a recent incident in MedievalWorld, where one maiden-bot slapped and rebuked the advances of a lecherous customer. And yet all later inspections can find nothing diagnostically wrong, either mechanically or with the software used to run the androids.

Still, this problem persisted, and seems to be growing at an alarmingly exponential rate; and so, the head supervisor of Delos’ underbelly (Oppenheimer) takes his concerns to the board of directors, asking that Delos be shut down completely for an indefinite period so a more thorough investigation can be conducted before something really goes wrong. 

And to their credit, the board actually agrees to this request. But! They also feel it’s okay to let the latest batch of customers already there to finish up their allotted stay. And so, the good news is in three days Delos will be shut down. The bad news is, it’s already too late...

Like most major studios at the time, after a string of high-profile flops, MGM was near financial ruin by 1970. And after a hostile takeover by Kirk Kerkorian, and his appointing former CBS executive, James Aubrey, to run the studio, things only got worse as Aubrey slashed budgets, cut back on promotions, canceled productions, and sold off the majority of MGM’s assets, ranging from equipment, to props, to legendary costumes (-- including Dorothy’s ruby slippers), and even the studio’s famed back-lot was parceled off and fell under the wrecking ball.

But instead of using this infusion of cash to right the floundering studio, the vast majority of the money was funneled into financing Kerkorian’s new MGM Grand Casino in Las Vegas, ushering in the era of Mega-Resorts along the fabled Sin City Strip.

This ruthless house-cleaning also ran off a lot of talent both in front of and behind the camera -- Robert Altman, Blake Edwards, Stanley Kubrick and Sam Peckinpah to name a few. And things were getting so bad, and productions made so cheaply, people in the industry were beginning to wonder if one of the Ms in MGM now stood for Monogram; not quite the dead-end of the old Poverty Row studios -- that would probably be PRC, but the once storied franchise had definitely fallen on hard times.

And yet it was this newly formed vacuum of talent that allowed a certain upstart, best-selling author to fast-talk his way into a chance at directing a major motion picture to help fill that void.

Michael Crichton’s literary bona fides were well established by this time, and one of his novels had just been adapted into a major motion picture by rival Universal. Of course, The Andromeda Strain (1971) was already showcasing the author’s trademark theme of technology being a potential trap that mankind will willingly fall into as the Wildfire lab becomes even more of a threat to a group of xeno-biologists than the alien virus they’ve recovered, and how the whole world was almost doomed to mass extinction thanks to a minor technical glitch when a signal bell doesn’t sound on a printer because a small piece of debris jammed the striker.

Looking to expand on these ideas, Crichton first got the notion of WestWorld (1973) after a trip to Florida, where he visited the Kennedy Space Center and DisneyWorld. At one location he noted how the astronauts were being conditioned to make their responses automatic, perfect, machine-like. And at the other he saw the Hall of Presidents and the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, where machines were made to look, talk and act like a real person.

“The two tendencies toward making people as machine-like as possible and machines as human as possible are creating a lot of confusion,” said Crichton (American Cinematographer, November, 1973). “I saw how astronauts were being trained -- and I realized that they were really being trained to be machines. Those guys were working very hard to make their responses and even their heartbeats, as machine-like and predictable as possible.

“At the other extreme, one can go to Disneyland and see Abraham Lincoln standing up every 15 minutes to deliver the Gettysburg Address. That’s the case of a machine that has been made to look, talk, and act like a person. I think it was the sort of notion that got the picture started. It was the idea of playing with a situation in which the usual distinctions between person and machine -- between a car and the driver of the car-become blurred, and then trying to see if there was something in the situation that would lead to other ways of looking at what’s human and what’s mechanical.”

Michael Crichton

Finding this more fantasy than science fiction, Asimov’s rules of robotics no longer applied. Here, the author also realized the “fantasy” of Delos needed to be realized visually. Said Crichton, “It’s about an amusement park, [and] the actual detailing of these three worlds -- and also the kinds of fantasies that people experienced in them -- were movie fantasies, and because they were movie fantasies, they got to be very strange-looking on the written page. They weren’t things that had literary antecedents. They were things that had antecedents in John Ford and John Wayne and Errol Flynn -- that sort of thing.” (Editor's note: Unless otherwise noted, all Crichton quotes are attributed to his personal website, Michael Crichton: In His Own Words, and the page dedicated to the making of WestWorld.)

Thus, with the notion of a theme park going berserk, where the rides rebel and attempt to kill the passengers, the author felt it was a story that wouldn’t work on paper as a novel. Thus and so, the author wrote the story as a screenplay instead. “In some ways, it’s a lot cleaner as a movie, because it’s a movie about people acting out movie fantasies," said Crichton. "As a result, the film is intentionally structured around old movie cliche situations -- the shoot-out in the saloon, the sword fight in the castle banquet hall -- and we very much tried to play on an audience’s vague memory of having seen it before, and, in a way, wondering what it would be like to be an actor in an old movie." Or, as this movie shows, have sex with them. Or at least their surrogate.

When the script was finished, Crichton shopped it around Hollywood but only got a nibble from MGM, currently in the middle of that chaotic regime change. Pushing his luck, Crichton also made a pitch to make it a package deal that would also allow him to direct the picture. 

By now, Crichton had already leveraged his way into directing an adaptation of one of his books into a made for TV movie, Pursuit (1972), which gave him more of a leg to stand on. And at that point, no one else was really willing to work with MGM, which opened the back door for Crichton.

Longview News-Journal, December 10, 1972.

Still, the studio had plenty of demands and would only agree to make the picture for 1.3 million with a shooting schedule of just thirty days. And while the novice director thought this would be nearly impossible given the scope of the picture, figuring this might be his only chance, he took the offer and shooting began in the spring of 1972.

Strangely enough, Crichton never really spells out what went wrong with Delos. No concrete explanation is ever given, but there are a few clues and plausible possibilities presented as a once well-oiled machine throws a rod and descends into deadly chaos.

Throughout the film we are given brief but effective glimpses of Delos’ inner-workings -- from the ethereal nightly clean-up, to the nuts and bolts of the repair centers, to the somewhat detached inhabitants of the command center, where this once magnificent feat of engineering has become somewhat of a dull routine. At this point it appears the park essentially runs itself as these techs are so on cruise control it’s almost comical, seemingly more interested in what’s on the breakfast menu than the morning checklist.

And perhaps in an effort to keep up with demand, corners were cut and the expanded support staff were no longer quite as qualified to repair this kind of intricate stuff as those who first built and maintained them. These same corners were probably cut on the replacement androids, too, as the first wave wore out.

There’s also talk of upgrades and new hardware that needed to be installed that doesn’t quite fit properly into the individual chassis -- but is installed anyway, forced to fit, in the likes of the Gunslinger, who had also been showing signs of misbehavior, giving him faster reflexes, more acute audio and visual inputs, and a longer shelf-life on his battery, which normally expired in about 12-hours.

Now, with that impending shut-down imminent, one could and should question why these upgrades weren’t just put on hold, too, adding a communications breakdown to the litany of problems facing Delos at this crucial moment. And speaking honestly, the androids come off as more human than their masters at times.

There's also references to a possible computer virus causing this erratic instability, which makes more sense in today’s world of malware and backdoor trojans. But in 1972, such a thing wasn’t really invented yet until almost two years later. And after studying the data, the chief supervisor appears to be convinced by the myriad symptoms that this is the case, impossible as it may seem. And although his superiors feel this is preposterous, they cannot deny the evidence that something has gone wrong (-- alas, their tepid response will be their ultimate undoing and cost hundreds of lives.)

Thus, one cannot rule out sabotage by some insidious rival -- or, more than likely, a disgruntled employee. Then again, this whole disaster could be chalked-up to plain old entropy. Things fall apart. Order always declines into disorder. And it’s only a matter of time. Have these machines reached true sentience? And does this lead to open rebellion? A new epoch that calls for the genocide of what came before? That’s me shrugging right now.

Regardless, things are definitely going awry at Delos, and then we officially pass the rubicon when the Black Knight (Mikler) in MedievalWorld punctuates that point of no return by running his broadsword through one of the slovenly tourists he was dueling, which triggers an all out massacre as the androids turn on all the humans and butcher them. This murder mange quickly spreads to RomanWorld and WestWorld, too.

Meantime, down below, the controllers are desperately trying to restore order. And, believe it or not, the best idea their IT crowd can come up with is to try turning Delos off and then on again. Only Delos stubbornly refuses to reboot, cutting power to everything, including the electronic door to the command center. That has no manual release. Leaving them trapped in an airtight room. With no more oxygen coming in. Due to the power being shut off. Because at Delos, nothing can ever go wrong. Ever. Brilliant piece of engineering, says I -- and Crichton, too, whose commentary on this fit of narcissism and hubris is quite brutal.

Meanwhile, Blane and Martin first become aware that something isn’t quite right after spending most of the day alone, hiding out in the desert after Blane gunned down the town sheriff and busted Martin out of jail in another bit of role-playing. Then, when Blane is bitten by a rattlesnake, at first thinking it’s real, Martin blasts it to pieces, revealing the shredded reptile was just another android.

Figuring this was just a minor malfunction, and unaware of what’s really been happening, the two ride back into town, which is strewn with dead bodies -- but they figure another bank robbery went down, which always results in a lot of collateral damage. Things also appear to be eerily silent -- except for the jangling spurs of the approaching Gunslinger, who seems to have had a hard on for these two over the past couple days. 

And since Blane hasn’t had the opportunity to kill him yet, Martin backs off and lets his friend take care of this showdown -- only the Gunslinger is no longer playing by the rules, proves the faster draw, and guns down a very surprised Blane.

His friend dead, a bewildered Martin is soon on the run from this relentless killing machine, which leads to the best part of the film as this deadly game of cat and mouse continues with the Gunslinger running his prey right out of WestWorld and into an adjoining park, which is littered with more dead people and malfunctioning androids.

Martin does find one lone technician trying to flee the area, who reveals what happened but has no explanation for the android rebellion. He also reveals there's a slim chance for survival if they can find some place to hole-up and hide since the androids will eventually run out of juice. Only the technician’s time has just run out as he is gunned down by the pursuing Gunslinger.

Thus, the chase continues into the bowels of Delos itself, where Martin finds the sealed off command center and all the asphyxiated people trapped inside. He also proves fairly wily by laying a trap for the Gunslinger in one of the repair shops, pretending to be a deactivated android on a workbench to lure his nemesis close enough for a face full of acid.

But while this disfigures the Gunslinger and plays hell with his visual infrared receptors, it’s still pursues Martin by sound into what’s left of MedievalWorld (-- luckily, nearly all the other Delos androids are now running on fumes except for you know who, thanks to that ill-timed upgrade). There, Martin hears a cry for help and finds a woman chained up in the dungeon. He releases her, tries to comfort the girl, only to realize she’s an android, too. Worse yet, he’s also backed himself into a corner as the only way out of the dungeon is now blocked by the Gunslinger. Thus, with not much left in his own tank, an exhausted Martin rallies himself one more time for the final showdown between man and machine.

Again, I cannot stress enough how great the last act of WestWorld is, especially when you consider how deceptively simple the action comes off. And it is simple, but extremely effective. I mean, all it consists of is Martin, played beautifully by Richard Benjamin as an ersatz Final Girl, fleeing from a deranged unstoppable killer, played equally beautifully by Yul Brynner.

Brynner was a familiar face in that cowboy get-up, playing-in to what Crichton was trying to sell, movie fantasy wise, as his costume appears to be his old outfit from The Magnificent Seven (1960). But it’s not how he looks, which is intimidating enough, honestly, but how he acts: His thumbs constantly hooked in his gun belt; his pace rock steady and unfaltering. There’s no need to run. Yes, it will eventually run out of juice but odds are good its prey will run out of gas first.

And while that doesn’t sound very scary, think about how this android will never, ever stop until its prey is dead. And how invulnerable it is. And how it can’t be reasoned with. And how its steady, unceasing gait, with the rhythmic clack of his boot heels mixed with Fred Karlin’s eerie score, almost an electronic drone, really ratchets up the tension. And this whole scenario would prove hugely influential to future films and filmmakers, ranging from John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), who based Michael Myers on the Gunslinger, and James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984), as it’s not too big a leap to get from the unstoppable Gunslinger to a ruthless cyborg assassin from the future.

Alas, the rest of the film cannot quite reach the same heights as the climax. 

Yeah, for the most part WestWorld, like a lot of MGM product from this period, kinda comes across as a cheap, Made for TV knock-off of some blockbuster feature film that inspired it. And most of that can be blamed on MGM’s frugal budget. Said Crichton, “We could give the art director, Herman Blumenthal, only $75,000 for set construction. Anyone who has ever considered building a larger garage or finishing a basement playroom will understand the dimensions of his problem. 

"For that $75,000, Herman had to build twenty sets covering nearly 200,000 square feet. And although he had certain advantages over standard construction requirements, he also had certain special problems. His floors had to be built with such fine tolerances that a camera rolling over them would not wobble or bounce. Many interiors had to be aged. The detail work had to be excellent because minor flaws become glaring when the image is projected on an eighty-foot-wide screen.”

I’m not sure if the WestWorld frontier town was already built but I do know it was reused the next year in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles (1974). More money was saved by renting out Harold Lloyd’s estate for the brief glimpses we get of RomanWorld and MedievalWorld. And to alleviate some of these budgetary concerns, Crichton sent out a memo to his production designers to do the best they could with what little they had and not sweat the small details, saying, “I hesitate to state this so bluntly, but this movie is fantasy and in the end I don’t really care if the equipment surrounding each table is ‘appropriate’ or not, so long as the total effect is impressive and organized in some way. There is a fine line between a thrown-together look, and an organized look.”

The film has some serious pacing issues, too, and kinda drags in a few spots, showing several telltale earmarks of a first time feature director. That barroom brawl feels a little too self-indulgent and goes on way too long for one. And it could’ve been even worse.

Apparently, after taking a look at the film's first rough-cut, Crichton was so depressed by how boring it was he immediately tore it apart, trimming out whole scenes, reducing others, and redid the entire ending because it seemed phony and, “It didn’t work.”

Seems the original ending was more of a brawl that saw the Gunslinger winding up on the rack in that dungeon, where he is torn apart. Instead, Martin is reduced to caveman status with his only weapon being a lit torch. And to tighten things up even further, the director cut out most of the scenes of the homicidal androids, which, to me, seems to be a tactical mistake once you consider everything else that he left in.

Still, I liked WestWorld well enough and feel Crichton acquitted himself rather well considering the limitations, studio interference, and his own inexperience; and it did prove to be a rare hit for MGM upon its release. I think it’s a neat idea with some cool things to say on first impression but found it’s best not to think about the premise any harder than that as it quickly crumbles, fantasy or not.

I mean, Why are the androids even given live ammunition? For that matter, Why is ANYONE given live ammunition? What happens with ricochets or stray shots? With those infrared sensors they claim to have that prevents any shooting at a live target, these same sensor arrays could trigger the blood squibs on the targeted android, giving the use of blanks the same visceral kick and result.

And what the hell kind of safety features do you put on a battleax, a sword, an arrow, or a mace? That is just silly. I can’t even imagine what Delos would have to pay a month for liability insurance but I can guarantee you they would definitely have to charge AH-lot more than $1,000 a day per customer to cover it. Also, is there any worse future job in Sci-Fi cinema than the poor Delos-tech in charge of cleaning-up and *ahem* 'cleaning-out' the sex-bots? *bleaurgh*

Of course, Crichton would take another run at this kind of catastrophic theme park breakdown with his novel, Jurassic Park, opening a whole new can of worms of science gone amok on a genetic level -- and in the interim, InGen apparently learned nothing from Delos. And while I liked the book and Spielberg’s 1993 film adaptation it lacks a certain sense of humanity from his earlier effort. Life prevails in both but in completely different ways.

For while it is fun to watch homicidal androids running amok, and dinosaurs on a rampage, at the heart of WestWorld you have the tale of Peter Martin searching for a new identity post-divorce. And while his friend tries to mold him into a tough guy, any progress made is quickly lost once he’s on the run -- his newfound bravado a facade like everything else in WestWorld. And only when it gets to the point where an exhausted Martin is stripped down to nothing and starts using his wits instead of his brawn does the tide of the fight turn and our evil robot overlords are turned back. 

At least for now. 

Originally posted on June 15, 2017, at Micro-Brewed Reviews.

WestWorld (1973) Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) / P: Paul N. Lazarus III / AP: Michael Rachmil / D: Michael Crichton / W: Michael Crichton / C: Gene Polito / E: David Bretherton / M: Fred Karlin / S: Richard Benjamin, James Brolin, Yul Brynner, Alan Oppenheimer, Michael T. Mikler, Majel Barrett