Thirty years ago, Keanu Reeves starred in Johnny Mnemonic, a film that began as a low-budget thriller before it was retooled as a would-be blockbuster.
It must take a considerable amount of willpower to go through a horrendous filmmaking experience and then pretend to journalists that everything’s fine. While moments of candour do occur in movie-making, the repercussions are seldom pretty; actor Shia LaBeouf burned several bridges when he openly criticised Indiana Jones sequel The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull ā in which he starred as Indy’s son ā at Cannes in 2010.
Artist and filmmaker Robert Longo was probably wise to keep his own counsel, then, when he began promoting his feature debut Johnny Mnemonic in 1995. What had begun as a small sci-fi indie film had blown up into a would-be summer blockbuster starring Keanu Reeves; originally, Longo wanted to make a subversive cyberpunk thriller inspired by some of his favourite genre films, including Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville and Chris Marker’s La Jettee. What the studio wanted was an action film closer to Demolition Man or Total Recall.
Although Longo dropped hints at the trouble behind the scenes in the summer of 1995 ā “It’s difficult making art by committee,” he said ā he was also quick to balance those comments out with cautious positivity. “Ultimately, I think it worked out well,” he told Starlog magazine at the time.
Longo was also remarkably polite about Dolph Lundgren, who he described as a “big cliched action star who was willing to take a big risk;” in reality, he was one of several actors added at the behest of a studio desperate to turn Johnny Mnemonic into a broad film that would go across in overseas territories.
It was only later that Longo spoke more candidly about his one experience of making a Hollywood film.
“Originally I wanted to make a [low-budget] black-and-white film like Alphaville,” the filmmaker said in 2016. “Instead I made [a movie] for $28 million. When people give you money, they think they can tell you what to do. It was fucking horrible. Johnny Mnemonic is about 65 percent of what I hoped it would be.”
Johnny Mnemonic began life as an unusual collaboration between two well-known creative forces. One side there was Longo, whose series of drawings, Men in the Cities, made him one of the most famous American artists of the 1980s. On the other, there was William Gibson, the visionary author whose best-selling 1984 novel Neuromancer gave rise to the cyberpunk literary subgenre.
Longo, who’d branched out into filmmaking by directing high-profile music videos and a Tales From The Crypt episode, initially thought about adapting Neuromancer as his feature debut, before he realised its scope was uncomfortably vast. Instead, he settled on a Johnny Mnemonic, Gibson’s much shorter story about virtual worlds and specialised ‘couriers’ who shuttle around valuable parcels of data in their heads.
When Longo rang Gibson in 1989, he was pleasantly surprised to discover that the author was familiar with his work. The two quickly made a deal which initially saw Longo adapt Gibson’s short story into a screenplay he could shoot on a budget of around $2m.
“I wrote the first couple of scripts in 1989, and we scouted locations in Seattle,” Longo told Starlog in 1995. “Due to a series of complications, things fell apart, and this project began its [six] year journey of trying to get made.”
The project was then brought up by independent production company Carolco (makers of, funnily enough, 1990ās Total Recall), where it was reinvisioned as larger-scale action thriller with a budget of $10-15m. By then, William Gibson had been brought in to rewrite the screenplay. Carolco’s financial problems in the first half of the 1990s, however, prompted its producer Peter Hoffman ā then also president of Carolco ā to sell its rights to Sony Pictures.
Even at this relatively early stage, Johnny Mnemonic had begun to drift away from the artistic, indie roots that Longo and Gibson had originally talked about a couple of years earlier. “At first we were looking for $2 million to make a black-and-white movie, but nobody was interested in funding what in effect would’ve been a giant student film,” the author told The LA Times in 1995. “We shifted from art movie to big movie because that was the kind of money we were able to get.”
With the bigger budget came bigger expectations. In an effort to endear a film with an odd-sounding name to overseas markets, studio heads began demanding they add assorted famous names to the cast. To cater to audiences in the Far East, Japanese star Takeshi Kitano was added as a yakuza boss; not long after, along came action man Dolph Lungren.
“Each week, they came back and told me I had to have a new actor,” Longo later said. āTo sell the movie in the Middle East, we have to have Dolph Lundgren… Dolph shows up with his acting coach, a guy with a cape and a cane.”
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Longo’s initial response when Lundgren’s name came up was an incredulous, “Oh fuck! No.”
As production readied for shooting in 1993, further compromises were being made behind the scenes. Longo originally chose Michael Chapman, the cinematographer of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull; because the film was being shot in Toronto, he had to opt for a Canadian cinematographer to meet the country’s tax break rules, and so he ended up with Francois Protat (“His major film credit was Weekend At Bernieās,ā Longo later observed).
Longo’s initial choice of leading man also led to problems. Initially, Val Kilmer was to play the role of Johnny, the courier whose brain full of sensitive data sees him pursued by contract killers. He soon dropped out, most likely due to being offered the title role in Batman Forever, prompting Longo to hire Keanu Reeves instead. Given Kilmer’s now-infamous on-set behaviour at the height of his 1990s fame, Longo may have had a lucky escape here; besides, the director appeared to find something of a kindred spirit in Reeves, who willingly soaked up all the classic films, art and Japanese anime Longo put in front of him.
Even as pressure on Longo and his collaborators soared, they remained committed to creating a piece of mischievous 1990s pop art. With his sharp suit and slicked back hair, Reeves’ hero looked both like an incarnation of Longo’s famous drawings and an early ancestor of his personas in The Matrix and John Wick. There were also odd humorous touches slipped in here and there, including Johnny’s strange disguise in one scene and Udo Kier’s typically outre performance as the hero’s underworld contact.
When Lundgren was insistently added to the cast, Longo and Gibson turned his bounty hunter, named Street Preacher, into a “Germanic version of Jesus” complete with ill-fitting blonde wig and white robe. This in turn led to what might be one of the most bizarre sequences in mainstream 90s cinema, in which Lundgrenās evil Christ is electrocuted by a scientifically-enhanced dolphin until he spontaneously combusts.
“I wanted to make a clunky movie, I didn’t want to make an overtly stylish movie,” Longo told Sight & Sound. “I didn’t want to make an MTV movie.”
Unfortunately, Sony had other ideas. In 1994, Speed became an unexpectedly huge hit, in turn boosting Keanu Reeves’ stock as a Hollywood star. It was then, as Johnny Mnemonic was still filming, that what was originally thought of as a mid-tier thriller with an unpronounceable name began to be refashioned into something ready for summer multiplexes.
“When Keanu blew up with Speed, they got really excited about [Johnny Mnemonic],” Longo later told Screenslate. “And meanwhile, their summer movie that was supposed to be released, which was called Mary Reilly, was in a disastrous state and they couldnāt release it. So, they thought, ‘Well, letās make Johnny the summer release.’”
Determined to boost the film’s earning potential, Sony upped the budget further, funnelling money into having additional action sequences shot by a second unit director, and later hiring a new editor to re-cut everything to a new dynamic.
“It was a difficult time, because the guy that was editing the film with me was Ron Sanders, [David] Cronenbergās editor,” Longo recalled. “It had a very different pace to it. And then the studio brought in another editor, and he didnāt get it at all. It was a difficult situation. I mean, Iād say half the movie is what I want.”
“It was taken away and re-cut by the American distributor in the last month of its prerelease life,” Gibson concurred in 1998. “It went from being a very funny, very alternative piece of work to being something that had been very unsuccessfully chopped and cut into something more mainstream.”
The result was a film visibly at odds with itself. On one hand, it has the goofiness of a low-budget B-movie, but on the other, it’s filled with expensive stars and what were at the time quite pricey CGI sequences. At the same time, $26m wasn’t really enough to deliver the technical wizardry of the films its studio wanted to ape, Total Recall (made for around $70m) or Demolition Man ($57m). By his own admission, Longo also had little interest in shooting elaborate action sequences; “The action stuff ultimately seemed the most boring to shoot, because it was so tedious,” he told Starlog.
The irony is that, had Johnny Mnemonic been kept as a mid-budget thriller and released in a cold February, it might have ridden on the back of Keanu Reeves’ fame and become a sleeper hit. Instead, Johnny Mnemonic’s summer 1995 release placed it in competition with Die Hard With A Vengeance and Batman Forever ā two of the highest-grossing films of the year. Even with an innovative (for its time) internet promotional campaign behind it, Johnny Mnemonic failed to make its $26m budget back in US cinemas.
Johnny Mnemonic’s financial failure effectively ended Longo’s Hollywood career.
“I basically got thrown into the garbage heap for a while,” he later said. “My career tanked after that, for sure. Basically, I had to redo the 90s. I kind of missed the 90s in a weird way. It was a difficult period of time for me, for sure. I donāt want to blame it on the movie, but the movie set me back quite a way.”
In the decades since, however, the film has become reassessed as something of a cult item. Emerging at a similar time as other tech thrillers, such as The Lawnmower Man, Hackers and The Net, Johnny Mnemonic also serves as an intriguing dry run for the thematically similar The Matrix ā its fascination with virtual worlds, anime and Hong Kong cinema can also be seen in Longo’s film, though the latter filmās directors, the Wachowskis, undoubtedly had a fascination with action that Longo lacked.
It’s a wonder how Johnny Mnemonic might have turned out had Longo had the chance to make the film as he originally saw it. Twenty-five years on from its release, though, the filmmaker at least realised his ambition to bring a black-and-white version of the film to the big screen.
In 2021, Johnny Mnemonic: In Black And White had its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. It’s still the stylistically awkward film it was when it was made, but the monochrome visuals suddenly bring it more closely in line with the arthouse genre films Longo had in mind all those years ago.
“For me, for William, and for Keanu, this is a bit of redemption,” Longo told Screenslate after the premiere. “They really love this new black-and-white conversion. And it looks like a shitty, million-dollar movie. It has a bit of a grunge to it and an attitude to it, which I think is really great.”
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