Bob Gale, buoyed by the success of the Back To The Future trilogy, took on Mr Payback, the world’s first truly interactive movie. What could possibly go wrong?
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue #49.
When the dust finally settles on the 21st century, just where will cinema find itself? While the silver screen may be able to lay claim to being the dominant cultural force over the last hundred years, the medium currently finds itself surrounded by newer, flashier modes of storytelling. Some of them even promise the same cinematic experience, but with opportunities for interactivity that the medium of film simply can’t match.
You know the ones. Video games make more money than movies and that’s been the case for several years now. Virtual reality film is lurking somewhere in the future too, whilst sadly, AI-generated features are more inevitable than Skynet. Then there’s the “new form of media” promised by game design legend Hideo Kojima recently when he revealed that he would be working on OD, a new project with feted film director Jordan Peele that would be neither film, nor game but a seeming mixture of the two.
However, although fusing cinema with interactive tools may seem like a buzzy new idea, the concept has actually been floating around for a very long time. One notable effort to popularise a ‘playable film’ came in the mid-1990s in the form of Mr Payback, an interactive movie conceived, written and directed by Bob Gale, the writer and producer of the legendary Back To The Future trilogy.
Turn left
The early 1990s was an interesting time for interactive movies: Sega’s Mega-CD system was blending full-motion video with video game mechanics in titles like Night Trap, blurring the line between films and games. On PCs, bona-fide movie stars like Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell appeared in the computer game Wing Commander III. Not as blocky, pixellated sprites – but as actual filmed characters that wouldn’t look out of place on a cinema screen.
For the first interactive film, however, you have to go back even further.
“I vaguely remember seeing some sort of interactive movie at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York,” recalls Bob Gale. “And then of course, there was William Castle’s movie, Mr Sardonicus (1961). I saw it on television and it was only much later I learned [in cinemas] the ending was interactive.”
Mr Sardonicus is largely credited as the first interactive movie, with cinema audiences getting to ‘choose’ from two possible endings, each printed on a separate reel for the projectionist to mount once the crowd voted. However, the film’s history-making choice was perhaps not as liberating as it seemed.
“They discovered in their test screenings that every audience chose the same ending,” explains Gale, “and so they shipped the print without the other ending. My understanding was that they only shipped the print with the ending that offered the most violence and degradation.”
Whether it’s politics or art, playing to the darker impulses of human beings has been a sure-fire winner throughout the annals of history, so you can hardly blame the canny William Castle, director of Mr Sardonicus, for saving a few bob and only printing the reel in which the title character is horribly punished.
Bob Gale’s encounter with interactive technology would arrive when Interfilm sounded him out about directing its latest interactive film. The company, founded by Bob Bejan (who is a high-up these days at Microsoft) had signed a three-picture deal with Sony that also saw the latter invest in the Interfilm’s LaserDisc-based interactive tech to the tune of $6m.
Sony was betting big on Interfilm and Gale was bought in to raise the company’s latest production to a Hollywood standard.
The prime directive
For Gale, the decision to build Mr Payback around a similar structure to Castle’s earlier film, where the audience could decide how the titular cyborg (played by Days Of Our Lives’ Billy Warlock) punished a series of bullying antagonists, “wasn’t a specific nod to Mr Sardonicus, but when I started thinking ‘they’re only going to give me a million dollars to do this, I’ve gotta shoot it in three or four weeks, what is going to engage the audience the most?’ ”
Gale decided that a justice-enforcing cyborg would do the trick. Imagine a more charming, teen-oriented version of RoboCop, only with a prime directive to go after assholes and douchebags rather than actual lawbreakers. “It had a perverse quality to it,” recalls Jeremiah Samuels, a producer on the film. “That was in Bob Gale’s bag – he wanted you to go to your most primitive lizard-brain self.”
Adds Gale, “It was clear to me that the idea that you could get payback, revenge for all of the things in the world that make you crazy. That seemed like it would work out just fine.”
The similarities with Mr Sardonicus didn’t end with sadism. Echoing Castle’s experiment, Gale and his team soon realised that human behaviour is fairly predictable: “Much like Mr Sardonicus,” recalls Gale, “we discovered that you could take two entirely different audiences and they would make 90% of the same choices the first time they looked at the show. That was very instructive. That’s why those guys that do market research are right more often than they’re wrong, because there’s an awful lot of human behaviour which is incredibly predictable.”
Whilst Mr Sardonicus is generally acknowledged as the first interactive film, Mr Payback really amped up the level of audience participation, in more ways than one. The film’s structure was far more sophisticated, containing lots of branching narrative paths, 22 possible endings and a points-based system that determined whether audiences could unlock extra scenes within the film.
“After screening the film for several different audiences, I decided to impose a game structure on it,” recalls Gale, “which told the audience they’d get points for making certain choices. If you were really focused on uncovering the mystery within the film, you got more points for that. We told audiences at the beginning that if they scored a certain number of points, they would get to see a bonus scene at the end. That engaged them a great deal more.”
Take your turn
Engagement was a key element of the interactivity too: unlike conventional cinema, in which audiences are discouraged from making noise, a pre-screening message implored those in attendance to ‘talk, scream, yell’ and generally engage in ‘barnyard behaviour’ when making choices. The technology was in place to support this anarchic style of feverish participation too. Gone was the seemly, democratic participation utilised in Mr Sardonicus where audiences held a glow- in-the-dark thumb up or down, or 1967’s Kinoautomat where each audience member pushed a button just once to register their vote.
“The technology was set up so you could hit the button for your choice over and over again,” laughs Gale, recalling the madness that would ensue as younger-skewing audiences would scream in delight and fury as they exercised their button-mashing skills, honed by years of video gaming while loudly imploring their peers to do the same. “You would see the votes for your choice tally in real time; it wasn’t one person, one vote, it was how fast you could whale on that button. It was a good choice, it made everybody more engaged.”
However, not everybody agreed with Gale’s reframing of the cinematic experience. Famed film critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel used their TV review show to slam the film, with Ebert in particular taking exception to its tone, offering an anecdote about being ‘appalled’ that ‘a sweet, young grade school girl’ sitting next to him throughout the screening was making choices as to how the hero would be abused by a villainous dominatrix (played by Police Academy’s Leslie Easterbrook).
“He thought I’d completely destroyed cinema by allowing the audience to make choices,” remembers Gale. Whilst Ebert’s evisceration of the film will forever adorn its headstone, what remains less celebrated is how excitedly young audience members on the same show express their unbridled enjoyment of Mr Payback. One even puts it on a par with Forrest Gump, the previous year’s biggest cinematic success.
Gale puts this down to a critic of Ebert’s generation not really understanding what (or who) Mr Payback was for. Samuels remembers these screenings as fulfilling the creative team’s aims: “There was a lot of laughter and screaming,” he says, “it was pretty raucous.”
Polarising reception
“One of the inspirations were the Choose Your Own Adventure books,” states Gale. “That was the mechanic I was after in putting this whole thing together and we thought that young people would understand that far better than their parents or grandparents.”
Of course, this was an era in which video games were exploding in popularity too. From Night Trap’s salacious material using full-motion video to Mortal Kombat’s grisly fatalities, the early ’90s were all about empowering young people to explore increasingly violent and sexualised content via increasingly powerful interactive tools.
In 1993 and 1994, the two video games mentioned above were instrumental in sparking a series of United States Senate hearings that were formed to deal with the growing moral panic and in 1995, Ebert’s outrage at Mr Payback clearly echoed this growing concern.
“The reviews were not very encouraging,” remembers Samuels in a rather diplomatic tone. Ebert also challenged Mr Payback’s status as a movie, proclaiming that “interactive movies are not movies,” as “you act upon them, they don’t act upon you.”
To this day, Gale disputes this point, contending that: “what he [Ebert] didn’t understand was the audience could never choose anything I didn’t want them to see… The audience that totally got it were teenage boys as they were used to playing video games.”
So what happened? Around 40 US cinemas invested the required $85,000 to install Interfilm’s interactive system, with Sony’s partnership with the company covering the cost of ten of those for several of its own Loews multiplexes. Despite pleasing audiences and offering two views for the price of one ticket (the better to enjoy the film’s branching narrative paths), Mr Payback struggled to make back its relatively modest budget at the box office, presumably not helped by the format’s unsuitability for the home market which could have brought in plenty more dollars over time. Had it come just a few years later when DVD had pushed the consumer disc market into overdrive, who knows if things might have been different?
According to Gale, Sony didn’t exactly push the film either, with marketing for the movie being slashed ahead of its release.
“Right around the time Mr Payback was due to be released through a division of Sony, Sony had a terrible year and a pretty significant write-down,” he says. “The word came down from on high that we had to cut everything we could and that included the advertising budget for Mr Payback, so we didn’t get the opportunity to advertise this to the audience that might have tried it.”
Three months later, Interfilm followed Mr Payback with Ride My Bike, an interactive film that Gale describes as “a really weird story about bicycle messengers and aliens… it was very strange and it was not really a good follow-up to what we did. That was the death knell for it. It was not a concept you could sell… it never made any sense to me.”
Variety agreed, with the Hollywood trade publishing a piece in May of 1995 comparing Ride My Bike’s ‘bumpy’ launch to the rip-roaring multiplex success of Crimson Tide, one of the summer’s early blockbuster releases. Whilst perhaps a trifle unfair, the piece even included box-office figures, comparing the Burbank AMC’s $52,000 weekend haul for Tony Scott’s star-driven taut submarine drama to Ride My Bike’s dismal tally of $363.
Facing the end
By then, the writing was already on the wall for interactive cinema. Sony, spooked by the low numbers, pulled out of its deal with Interactive. Production on the company’s next film, Bombmeister, was suspended and the lawsuits began flying. While Gale looks back at the whole enterprise as a missed opportunity, he admits to having learned one or two things:
“This might have been more successful,” he suggests, “had we not put it in movie theatres, because people go to movie theatres and they expect a certain thing. Had we put it in an arcade or on the fair circuit or a shopping centre, it might have caught on more because people would have seen it as something brand new.”
Interactive film never entirely went away, though. Lots of video games would continue to become more like interactive movies and then 2019 saw the release of perhaps the most enterprising attempt yet to resurrect the format: Netflix’s Black Mirror: Bandersnatch was an artistically ambitious effort at reviving the genre and whilst it has many ardent fans, the five years since its release has seen Netflix – driven by its all-seeing algorithm – to relegate the technology to creating little more than kids’ films.
“It doesn’t fit with what people expect when they turn on the television,” argues Gale. “On a PlayStation or Xbox perhaps, it would be a whole different deal. Television audiences have certain expectations, that’s a fact of life. What does that say about the future of interactive media?”
Honestly, we don’t know… but for Gale, Mr Payback’s cutting-edge approach was a useful learning tool, teaching him new things whilst reminding him of the most valuable lesson Hollywood can teach you.
“My education in show business?” he says with a smile. “It’s constantly been that ‘no matter how many ways you can think of for them to screw you, there’ll always be some way you haven’t thought of.’ ”
