Movies - Mad Max

	Movies - Mad Max

Mad Max is an Australian apocalyptic science fiction film starring Mel Gibson. Released in Australia by 1979, it was directed by George Miller, and written by Miller, James McCausland, and Byron Kennedy, who produced the film. It was released by 1980 in North America, and even later in Europe.

Taglines:

The Maximum Force of the Future.
The last law in a world gone out of control. Pray that he's out there somewhere.
When the gangs take over the highway... ...Remember he's on your side.
The Film That Started It All.

Plot Summary

The film is set in a dystopian near-future Australia. The beginning of the film only hints that the story takes place "a few years from now" but it is obviously set in a society that is suffering from a prolonged fuel shortage which has resulted in a breakdown of civil order. (The sequel, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior
, opens with a far more elaborate presentation of a back story describing a global disaster involving conflict over oil.)

The over-riding theme of Mad Max is revenge. A young and idealistic police officer, Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson), is the top driver (he's referenced as "your top pursuit man" at one point by a superior) for a rundown and poorly funded highway patrol called the Main Force Patrol (MFP). Their primary function is to secure the desolate highways of the outback from predatory motorized Gangs. During a high-speed pursuit he inadvertently kills one of these gangs' chief lieutenants, the Nightrider. When the gang subsequently hunts down and burns his partner, Jim Goose, alive ("the Goose is cooked"), Max becomes disillusioned with his duty and quits the police force to settle down with his wife and infant son.

Meanwhile the gang's leader, the Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne), still thirsts for revenge against Max. As the Fates would have it, the two once again cross paths when the now ex-highway patrolman and his family vacation in a remote beachfront area. The gang runs down Max's wife and son, leaving their crushed bodies lying in the middle of the road. Max arrives too late to intervene.

Using "the last of the V8 interceptors," a black supercharged V8 Ford XB Falcon "Pursuit Special," Max seeks to avenge the death of his family.

Conception

Whilst in residency at a Melbourne hospital, Dr. George Miller met amateur film maker Byron Kennedy at a summer film school in 1971. The duo went on to produce the short film Violence in the Cinema, Part 1, which was screened at a number of film festivals and won several awards.

Eight years later the duo created Mad Max, with the assistance of first time screen writer James McCausland. George Miller was an M.D. in Australia who worked in a hospital Emergency Room. In his work he had seen many injuries and deaths of the types depicted in the movie, and felt that audiences would not believe such things were happening today, so he decided to place the story instead in a dystopic future.

The film was shot over a period of twelve weeks, between December 1978 and February 1979, just outside Melbourne. Many of the car chase scenes for the original Mad Max were filmed near the town of Lara, just north of Geelong (Victoria, Australia). The movie was shot with a widescreen anamorphic lens, making it the first Australian film to do so.

Due to the film's low budget, the post-production was done in Kennedy's house, with George & Byron editing the film in Byron's bedroom on an editing machine that Byron's father, as an engineer, had made especially for them. The duo also edited the sound.

Success

The film achieved incredible success, holding a record in Guinness Book of Records as the highest profit-to-cost ratio of a motion picture, and only losing the record in 2000 to The Blair Witch Project
.

The film was totally independently financed and had a reported budget of $300,000 AUD — of which $15,000 was paid to Mel Gibson for his performance — and went on to earn $100 million world wide. The film was awarded four Australian Film Institute Awards in 1979.

When the film was first released in America, all the voices, including that of Mel Gibson's character, were dubbed with U.S. accents at the behest of the distributor, American International Pictures, for fear that audiences would not take warmly to actors speaking entirely with Australian accents. The only exception was the singing voice of the singer in the Sugartown Cabaret, played by Robina Chaffey. The original Australian dialogue track was finally released in the U.S. in 2000 in a limited theatrical reissue by MGM, the film's current rights holders (it has since been released in the U.S. on DVD).

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Mad Max ]

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Movies - Mad Max

Plot Summary

Conception

Success

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