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The document called A Buckaroo Banzai Sampler contains the beginnings of five Buckaroo Banzai scripts written and created by Earl Mac Rauch between 1973 and 1975, and was used to help sell the concept of the world of Banzai that eventually became the Buckaroo Banzai film. The Sampler included the following scripts, each of which was about 15 pages to give a sample of what the full script would be like:

1. The Strange Case of Mister Cigars: A Buckaroo Bandy Mystery
   
   
2. Lepers from Saturn - A Buckaroo Banzai Adventure
   
   
3. A Buckaroo Banzai Thriller - 'Find the Jet Car,' Said the President
   
   
4. Shields Against the Devil - A Buckaroo Banzai Thriller
   
   
5. Forbidden Valley

The following information from the Banzai Institute Facebook page explains how the Sampler was used. "A little history is probably in order. Come with us in the time machine back to March 25, 1981, when the producer Sydney Beckerman received from W.D. Richter and Neil Canton a bound volume they called “A Buckaroo Banzai Sampler” consisting of extracts from no fewer than five separate Buckaroo Banzai adventures. Beckerman read the Buckaroo Sampler and the next day took Canton and Richter into MGM to give studio chief David Begelman a detailed presentation of Rauch’s wholly original, multi-episode saga. They left behind a copy of “A Buckaroo Banzai Sampler” for Begelman’s perusal. One day later, on Friday afternoon, March 27, 1981, Begelman told Beckerman that he had taken a shine to one episode in particular, “LEPERS FROM SATURN — A BUCKAROO BANZAI ADVENTURE”. It had been presented to him as a 57-page treatment in which Buckaroo squared off against grotesque aliens from another planet who were moving amongst us disguised as Earthlings! MGM wanted to hire Mac to turn that into a screenplay."


From Mister Cigars to Lepers from Saturn: A History of Buckaroo Banzai’s Script Development
By Dan Berger

This article originally appeared in the World Watch One newsletter from October, 2016.

In 1999 the Banzai Institute archives thrilled many curious Buckaroo Banzai fans by posting script fragments from the collected early adventures of Dr. Banzai. For many years these bits and pieces represented the majority of what fans knew about Earl Mac Rauch’s early attempts to capture and flesh out the essentials of Buckaroo and his world. It came as something of a revelation then when, earlier this summer, W.D. Richter provided World Watch One with a more detailed look at Buckaroo’s journey through the script development process in a document titled “A Brief History of the Creation of the Original Story Concept and Narrative for the Continuing Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai by Earl Mac Rauch.” It is, without question, the most complete account of Buckaroo’s off screen textual journey to date.

Some explanation is in order regarding “A Brief History” and its relation to this article. The nature of “A Brief History” is primarily that of a chronology rather than a narrative. In addition, “A Brief History” contains information regarding matters beyond the scope of the script development process that are unavailable for printing at this time. To moderate the mostly chronological nature of the useable portions of “A Brief History,” additional interview material and other matters of record have been incorporated to provide further context to Richter’s account. It is our hope that this deepens an already amazing look behind the scenes for you, our readers. –DB

Prologue: 1971 – 1973

Everything with a beginning must start somewhere. For Buckaroo Banzai, that start was in 1971, during which President Richard Milhous Nixon’s first term entered its second half, the United States’ manned space program and military presence in Vietnam continued to wind down, and Jim Morrison was found dead in a bathtub in his Paris rental apartment.

1971 also saw the release of Dartmouth alumnus Earl Mac Rauch’s second novel, Arkansas Adios. After graduating from college, Rauch returned to his native Texas and geared up for post-graduate studies. Matters quickly changed. As Rauch remembers, “I was technically a law school dropout, but only attended a week or so of classes, so basically I was hanging around Austin playing my guitar.” Rauch also kept busy working for a mobile home finance company. “When I went to work for the mobile home finance people, my job involved a lot of driving,” he said. “I didn't have an office or even my own apartment. I was living with five other people, so I really wasn't doing any writing at all. Nor was I making any plans.”



In Los Angeles, W. D. Richter and his wife Susan were already seasoned residents of the City of Angels following his graduate studies at USC film school and a paid internship at Warner Brothers. Richter was also a fellow Dartmouth alumnus, sharing one overlapping year with Rauch during their undergraduate studies, though neither had encountered the other on campus at the time. Serendipity intervened further in the guise of a Dartmouth alumni magazine. In a 2004 interview, Richter recalled, “…there was a review for a book called Arkansas Adios that sounded very funny to me. So I ordered the book, and my wife and I loved it.” Richter was impressed enough to write Rauch a letter praising his writing and suggested that Rauch consider moving to L.A. to write for the movies.

Writing for film wasn’t foremost on Rauch’s mind, however. As he remembers, “When Rick's letter came, I mainly just wanted to see LA and maybe play in a band.” So on Monday, March 20, 1972, Rauch flew to LA, checked into a motel by the freeway, and cold called the Richters to say he had taken W.D.’s advice and come to try his hand at screen writing. Fortunately, the Richters were home to take the call. Richter picked up Rauch from his motel and drove to the 1920s cottage in the Alvarado District that he and Susan were renting. They fed Mac his first Los Angeles dinner, during which, “…the three of us tried to sort out what it meant that Mac was actually sitting there in our house, ready to attack Hollywood,” according to Richter.

Rauch’s priorities still revolved primarily around his music. “I played an amateur night at the Troubadour, performed a couple of my songs,” he said. “Being a screenwriter was nothing I ever planned, although I had to be impressed by the fact that Rick drove a Cadillac.”

Rauch made an impression on Richter as well. Two days later, already enamored of the itinerant Texas scribe, Richter took Mac to meet his agent, Mark Lichtman, who signed Mac on the spot. As Rauch remembers, “My first screenwriting ‘assignment’ was with Jay Weston. He had parties and a house up in the hills and let me come up whenever I wanted to use the pool or hang out. He frequently wasn't there and the housekeeper just let me in. I took a girlfriend up there on occasion to use his pool and mirror-ceiling bedroom.”

Rauch set up shop in an apartment across the street from the Richters’ cottage and went to work. “We’d have dinners and talk a lot, and he started telling us about this character, Buckaroo Bandy, that he was thinking of doing a screenplay about,” said Richter. Buckaroo’s appeal quickly grew for the Richters. “For me it was the twinkle in Mac’s eye when he told us his ideas,” Richter remembers. “We’d read his books, gotten his drift, and just assumed he’d entertain us, maybe even astonish us, with his imagination and fantastic prose.”

Script Development: 1973 – 1980

In late summer of 1973, the Richters decided to bet on Buckaroo and met with Rauch about developing the character for the big screen. “We were young, full of enthusiasm, determined to upgrade the quality of writing in Hollywood if we had a chance,” said Richter. “Mac was a chance worth taking. Susan and I took the plunge, paid Mac fifteen hundred dollars, which was a decent amount of money then for us to risk.” As Richter remembers, “Rauch pitched an original story idea for a series of interlocked, episodic motion-picture adventures to us. These adventures featured a multi-talented country-western singer and jet-car driver named Buckaroo Bandy.”

On September 27, 1973, Rauch entered into a one-year option agreement with the Richters’ corporation, Harry Bailly Productions, for what Richter describes as, “…a seriocomic screenplay, based upon a single episode from his proposed Buckaroo Bandy series. The contract called that script simply “JET CAR”, and Rauch’s first attempt to write it found him retitling it ‘THE STRANGE CASE OF MISTER CIGARS: A BUCKAROO BANDY MYSTERY’ and abandoning it after only 14 pages, but not before introducing the Jet Car and establishing that Buckaroo’s ‘exploits are legendary!’ and that ‘people in far-off Cairo know (his) name.’”

Richter continues, “The proposed plot line of this first episode was to be Buckaroo’s race to defeat Mister Cigars before that villain assassinated dozens of world leaders with exploding cigars at a big global conference.”


As noted in our 2004 interview, “Mac’s working technique then was sort of improvisational,” said Richter. “He would write thirty pages and then give them to us. We’d comment on them, and he’d take them away and so radically alter them no matter what we said that he’d come back with a new story line, new characters.” This process is illustrated in detail as Richter describes the immediate aftermath of Mister Cigars:
 


“Dissatisfied with the progress of this narrative, Rauch immediately began work on a different Buckaroo episode, what would become a complete 57- page treatment for a proposed screenplay entitled “LEPERS FROM SATURN — A BUCKAROO BANZAI ADVENTURE”. In this treatment, Rauch changed Buckaroo’s surname from “Bandy” to “Banzai”, revealed that Buckaroo Banzai was not only a jet-car driver but also Chief of Neurosurgery at a large hospital, and was, in addition, the founder of ‘The Institute’ (his own mysterious think tank). Buckaroo was also a popular musician with a backup band called The Hoppalongs, and he was a confidant of and trusted advisor to the President of the United States.”

Richter goes on to say, “In ‘LEPERS FROM SATURN’, Buckaroo Banzai carried a six-shooter, first encountered the beautiful Penny Priddy, and was forced to marshal his trusted legion of volunteer crimefighters, The Shields, to prevail against an otherworldly sci-fi threat to Earth: hordes of alien Lepers from Saturn disguised as ordinary human beings!”

Still not content, “Rauch at once began work on a new script that he called ‘A BUCKAROO BANZAI THRILLER — ‘FIND THE JET CAR,’ SAID THE PRESIDENT’, said Richter. “His title page declared this particular Buckaroo-Banzai episode to be “An Original Screenplay by John Texas (Earl Mac Rauch)”. Here Rauch introduced more foundational details about his fictional world and about its heroes (Buckaroo Banzai and the Hong Kong Cavaliers) and its villains (Dr. Lizard). Rauch set aside this incomplete episode after 67 pages.”

By this point, Rauch tallied a total of three adventures in various stages of completion across 138 pages of scripting and treatment, without a finished screenplay to show for his efforts. That state of fragmentation finally changed in 1980 with Shields Against the Devil — A Buckaroo Banzai Thriller, his first complete Buckaroo Banzai screenplay clocking in at 109 pages.

“In ‘SHIELDS AGAINST THE DEVIL’, Rauch changed the name of ‘The Shields’ to ‘Knights of The Blue Shield’ (precursors of ‘The Blue Blaze Irregulars’ who appear in subsequent episodes),” Richter said. “Buckaroo himself was further lionized as ‘the great man, BUCKAROO BANZAI, well known expert in every field’ who spoke Quechua, an Indian language of South America. ‘I learned it when I worked on a case once involving some priceless jewels,’ Buckaroo says — much like Sherlock Holmes (one of Rauch’s models for Buckaroo Banzai) often alluded to his own earlier adventures.”

Richter continues, “Two major plots are entwined in the episode entitled ‘SHIELDS AGAINST THE DEVIL’, one concerning a gigantic weaponized robot steered by crude gears and levers and sophisticated computers operated by bad guys from a cockpit in its head. This King-Kong-like robot was owned by a vicious cartel that Buckaroo had battled before, The World Crime League, whose headquarters was a ‘Fascist Fortress…a super-secret hideout in an unknown Asian land’ and whose ‘sinister members’ were ‘like a criminal United Nations’, their ‘reigning chairman’ in this episode ‘the semi-Oriental villain HOT FAT FROM SINGAPORE.’”

Hot Fat from Singapore? What about Hanoi Xan? Rauch explains, “About Hanoi Xan...I had bought numerous Ashton-Wolfe books and believed – thinking the stories to be true accounts – that it would add a touch of realism to have a real, albeit legendary villain as opposed to having to invent one. Little did I know that Ashton-Wolfe was himself largely a self-invention who made up the majority of his stories, including Hanoi Shan.”

Ashton-Wolfe’s sketchy life is explained further in Rick Lai’s intro to The Crimes of Hanois Shan by H. Ashton-Wolfe:

“Ashton-Wolfe’s literary career seems to have peaked in 1932. He sold the film rights to his “true” Sûreté accounts to David O. Selznick of RKO pictures. Selznick was hoping to make a series of B movies featuring Frank Morgan, the actor best known for playing the title character in The Wizard of Oz, as Ashton-Wolfe. According to the Turner Classic Movie (TCM) website, the RKO legal department discovered that Ashton-Wolfe’s accounts were full of blatant falsehoods. Subsequently, only one film, Secrets of the French Police (1932), was released. The name of Frank Morgan’s character was changed from Harry Ashton-Wolfe to Francois St. Cyr. The screenplay was based on Ashton-Wolfe’s “The Mystery of the Orly Highway” and two untitled stories from American Weekly, as well as Samuel Ornitz’s Lost Empress, an unpublished novel about Princess Anatasia of Russia.”

Rauch continued, “Whether aware of this history or not, the studio legal department – presumably Fox – asked us to change the spelling in the novelization from Shan to Xan. Since I thought at the time that Hanoi Shan had really existed, I thought it a strange request. But perhaps their crack lawyers had researched it and thought I was plagiarizing...either that, or they were afraid the real Hanoi Shan would sue for libel. Who knows.”
 

Returning to the script, “This first narrative thread in ‘SHIELDS AGAINST THE DEVIL’ concerned America’s race to finish the prototype Jet Car before The World Crime League, who had stolen all its plans, built one of their own and used it for evil purposes,” Richter said. “The melodrama played out against a second interwoven plot as Buckaroo figured out that Adolf Hitler never died in that Berlin bunker but escaped disguised as a woman and was now possibly hiding in Ecuador.”

While “Shields Against the Devil,” concluded Rauch’s initial burst of writing about Buckaroo, it did so with an eye towards future episodes. According to Richter, “In a short prose piece at the script’s conclusion, Rauch laid out his plans for the next Buckaroo episode, ‘FORBIDDEN VALLEY’ and set Buckaroo off in the Jet Car, heading for that mysterious, remote jungle locale in search of Adolf Hitler.”

The Essential Buckaroo: 1981-1984

With a completed script and a number of partially completed episodes in hand, it was time for Richter to set about selling Buckaroo to a studio. On March 25, 1981, Richter and fellow Banzai producer Neil Canton approached veteran producer Sydney Beckerman with a condensed version of all the Buckaroo Banzai material in a bound volume called “A Buckaroo Banzai Sampler”. Below is a reproduction of the text from the introductory page:
 
 
The page leaves hanging what it’s time for, but it’s a good bet it’s Buckaroo Banzai. Whatever it was, the collected adventures were enough to convince Beckerman that Buckaroo was worth showing to his good friend David Begelman, chairman of MGM. The next day, Beckerman, Canton, and Richter met with Begelman, pitched him Buckaroo Banzai, and left him with a copy of “A Buckaroo Banzai Sampler”.

On the afternoon of March 27, 1981, a day after the Buckaroo-Banzai pitch meeting, Begelman told Beckerman that MGM wanted to hire Rauch to write a work based upon Lepers From Saturn — A Buckaroo Banzai Adventure. Rauch became the writer-for-hire commissioned to write a screenplay simply titled Buckaroo Banzai on April 9, 1981. Regarding the title change, Richter commented, “Begelman deemed the episode’s original title, ‘LEPERS FROM SATURN’, in poor taste.”

And the rest is history. “Earl Mac Rauch wrote the script, which was eventually entitled “THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION”, and it became the motion picture of the same name,” said Richter.” It was released domestically by 20TH Century Fox on August 10, 1984.”

Epilogue: 2016

On a final note, Lewis Smith made the observation earlier in this issue that, “A reoccurring theme in Buckaroo Banzai is making fun movie clichés.” The history of Buckaroo’s development, as spelled out by Richter, did not directly or indirectly address the origin of this thematic motif. Was Buckaroo Banzai written as something that celebrates science fiction tropes, dismantles them, or both? Was it a directorial decision, Rauch’s design from the beginning, something people found on the set, or something else entirely?
“Hard to believe, I bet, but we never had a single discussion about any of this, either during the development of the script or the making of the movie,” Richter said. “Mac wrote what amused him, and it, in turn, amused me. We never saw it as satire or an homage or had ‘lofty’ discussions about anything. Buckaroo just was whatever it was. The process of creating Buckaroo and his world was a free-wheeling, exuberant, make-it-up-as-we-went-along joyride, but with Mac at the wheel, I always felt a certain discipline behind the high-caliber madness.”

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This page was last updated on May 25th, 2020.
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