Exclusive – Mark L. Lester Talks Class of 1984; Remake Announced!
Matt Boiselle
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With The Scream Factory release of Director Mark L. Lester’s 1982 cult-classic, Class of 1984 (review) out today, we here at Dread Central had the opportunity to speak with the man who also led the way on such memorable 80’s films such as Firestarter and Commando.
Coming up with a premise that offered a potential sneak-peek at the violence that could be plaguing the school communities over the course of the future was indeed a gutsy one at the time, and Mark was only too happy to shed some light on just how this movie came to be.
Dread Central – Can you tell us about the film’s inception – how did you come up with the idea for this?
Mark Lester – I actually was visiting my old high school back in 1981, which was Monroe High School in the valley to see an old teacher, and I was walking around, and it had changed completely from when I was attending the school. There were gangs roaming around the hallways, and there was no dress code, and it looked like a very dangerous place, and I remembered back to this movie Blackboard Jungle, which was one of my favorites growing up, and I thought “Wow, what if I should do something like a teacher that comes back to the high school and confronts a gang that’s ruling the place.” That was the idea, and then I began doing enormous amounts of research, and I found that there were all these incidents of violence in the schools, and this was way before Columbine and these types of things. So all of these things: gang fights, prostitutes, drugs, and there was even a teacher who had come to class with a gun, and I thought “Maybe he teaches with it?” So I put all the incidents together, with a Blackboard Jungle type-story where all of this comes to an urban high school, and that’s how it all started.
DC – Did you think that when you made this way back in the day, that it would have reached cult-status, much like it has now?
ML – No, I had no idea that it would take off like it did, although until it opened, it was very controversial when it came out. It was in Time Magazine, and Ronald Reagan once had a speech about education, and they put the pictures from the movie into an editorial, and it had such controversial press, so it took off back then, and at the beginning of the film, I’d put a warning to the country that this would happen, the future couldn’t get much worse – I don’t have the EXACT wording, but it’s on the DVD!
DC – What did you see as some of the biggest challenges when you were making the film?
ML – Well, casting the gang had to be very specific – I had to create these characters that hadn’t existed before – the actors were portraying punk-rockers, so I took that whole element of the punk-rockers and incorporated that into the film. Along with trying to come up with a script, and this was before the days of CGI, so everything had to be creative – one scene where someone crashes through a glass balcony had to be done with a stuntman, whereas now you could just get it done with CGI.
DC – With the cast that you’d had enacted in the film, and a generally unknown at the time with the name of Michael J. Fox, did you think that his career would have taken offthe way it did?
ML – No, I thought that Timothy Van Patten would have been the star, and at the time he was written up by film critic Vincent Canby as “One of the five actors to watch,” and it worked out the other way, with Timothy becoming a well-known TV director, and Michael became the star, so it worked out exactly the opposite of what I thought was
going to happen.
DC – Finally, what can we look forward from you in the future?
ML – Well right now I can tell you that I’m working on a remake of Class of 1984 – I’ve already got the script, and it will be a more modernized version of the story.
Directed and co-written by Mark L. Lester (Class of 1999, Commando, Firestarter), Class of 1984, with its vision of a decaying, violence-plagued inner city school, is one of the most provocative cult movies of the early 1980s. With an original story and screenplay co-written by genre veteran Tom Holland (Fright Night, Child’s Play, Psycho II, The Beast Within), the film is also notable for its Alice Cooper theme song “I Am The Future” as well as its memorable cast, which includes Lisa Langlois (Deadly Eyes, The Nest), Roddy McDowall, Stefan Arngrim (Fear No Evil), and Michael J. Fox in an early role.
Synopsis:
In Class of 1984, Andy Norris (Slaughterhouse Five’s Perry King) is an idealistic and naive music teacher who has moved into the Lincoln High community with his pregnant wife, Diane. Appalled by the crime-infested school, Norris soon crosses sabers with its teenage kingpin, the shrewd and sadistic Peter Stegman (“The White Shadow’s” Timothy Van Patten). With Norris setting his sights on reforming Stegman, the young miscreant declares war on his teacher, and the duo set a fateful showdown into motion on the night of an important school orchestra performance.
Special Features:
- New High-Definition Transfer of the Film from the Interpositive
- New interviews with director Mark Lester, composer Lalo Schifrin, actors Perry King, Lisa Langlois, and Erin Noble
- New career retrospective interview with Perry King
- Audio Commentary with director Mark Lester
- Blood and Blackboards – featuring interviews with director Mark Lester, actors Perry King and Merrie Lynn Ross
- Poster & Still Gallery
- Original Theatrical Trailer and TV Spots
Categorized:News
