The Lawnmower Man (film)

The Lawnmower Man
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Brett Leonard
Screenplay by	Brett Leonard Gimel Everett
Produced by	Gimel Everett
Starring	Jeff Fahey Pierce Brosnan Jenny Wright Mark Bringleson Geoffrey Lewis Jeremy Slate Dean Norris
Cinematography	Russell Carpenter
Edited by	Alan Baumgarten Lisa Bromwell (unrated director's cut)
Music by	Dan Wyman
Distributed by	New Line Cinema
Release date	March 6, 1992 (1992-03-06)
Running time	108 minutes 140 minutes (unrated director's cut)
Country	USA
Language	English
Budget	$10,000,000
Box office	$32,100,816 (domestic)

The Lawnmower Man is a 1992 American science fiction film written by Brett Leonard and Gimel Everett. The film is very loosely based on the Stephen King short story of the same title. The film stars Jeff Fahey as Jobe Smith, a simple-minded gardener, and Pierce Brosnan as Dr. Lawrence Angelo, the scientist who decides to experiment on him.

Despite the fact that the film was originally titled Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man, the film bears very little resemblance to the short story. King successfully sued the producers for attaching his name to the film and stated in court documents that the film "bore no meaningful resemblance" to his story.^[1]

An earlier short film also titled The Lawnmower Man, a more faithful adaptation of the short story, was directed by Jim Gonis in 1987.^[2]

Dr. Lawrence Angelo (Pierce Brosnan) works for Virtual Space Industries. His part in "Project 5" involves increasing the intelligence of chimpanzees using drugs and virtual reality. One of the experiment's chimps escapes using the warfare technology that he was being trained to use. Angelo is revealed as generally a pacifist, who would much rather explore the intelligence-enhancing potential of his research without having to apply it for military purposes.

Jobe Smith (Jeff Fahey), the "lawnmower man" of the title, has an unspecified learning disability; he lives in the garden shed owned by the local priest, Father Francis McKeen (Jeremy Slate). McKeen's brother, Terry (Geoffrey Lewis), is a local landscape gardener and employs Jobe to help him with odd jobs. Father McKeen, who is apparently Jobe's guardian, takes to punishing the challenged Jobe with a belt when he apparently fails to complete his chores. Their interaction suggests that the abuse is habitual as Jobe requires little prompting from McKeen to remove his shirt to receive lashings on his back.

While Dr. Angelo records audio notes about needing a human subject, Jobe is mowing his lawn. It turns out that Peter, the young son of Dr. Angelo's neighbors, is friends with Jobe. Dr. Angelo invites them to play some virtual reality games and persuades Jobe to participate in his experiments, telling him that it will make him smarter. Jobe agrees and begins a program of accelerated learning, using nootropic drugs, virtual reality input, and cortex stimulation. Dr. Angelo makes it a special point to redesign all the intelligence-boosting treatments without the "aggression factors" used in the chimpanzee experiments.

Jobe soon becomes smarter, and Dr. Angelo starts taking Jobe to his lab at work to use the technology there. Jobe begins having sex with a young rich widow, Marnie (Jenny Wright), during his daytime job; he learns Latin in an hour-and-a-half at the lab at night.

Jobe starts to have telepathic and hallucinatory experiences, but continues with the experiments at the lab, until an accident makes Angelo call a halt. The project director, employed by a mysterious agency known as The Shop, keeps a secret watch on the progress of the experiment, and soon swaps Angelo's new medications for the old Project 5 "aggression factors".

Jobe acquires telekinetic and pyrokinetic powers and takes Marnie to the lab to have sexual intercourse with her in virtual reality; but something goes wrong in the simulation, and Marnie is so traumatized that she is driven insane, laughing endlessly at nothing.

Jobe's powers and abilities continue to grow, although the treatments also affect his mental stability, and soon he takes revenge on those who abused him when he was "dumb"; Father McKeen is engulfed in flames, a bully named Jake is put into a catatonic state by a mental "lawnmower man" continually mowing his brain, and Jobe directs a real lawnmower to run down Harold, Peter's abusive father. Jobe makes the investigating police officers attribute it all to "bizarre accidents".

Jobe believes his final stage of evolution is to become "pure energy" in the VSI computer mainframe. He plans to enter the VSI computer and from there reach into all the systems of the world, and he promises his "birth" will be signaled by every telephone on the planet ringing simultaneously.

The Shop sends a team to capture Jobe, but they are ineffective against Jobe's abilities (he scatters their molecules). Jobe returns to VSI, where he creates millions of virtual insects to attack the guards, and drives straight in. He tortures the director of the project before using the lab equipment to enter the mainframe computer. Inside the mainframe Jobe abandons his body to become a wholly virtual being, in the process his body becomes a wizened husk as Jobe becomes pure information.

While inside the computer, the network connections are disabled due to a virus that Dr. Angelo had planted earlier, and Jobe is trapped in the diseased mainframe, looking for an escape code. Dr. Angelo primes bombs to destroy the building and joins Jobe in virtual reality to argue with him. Jobe easily overpowers him and proceeds to crucify him, then continues to search for a network connection. Peter runs into the building; Jobe still cares for him and allows Dr. Angelo to go free in order to rescue Peter. Jobe finally escapes through a Maintenance Line as the building is destroyed in multiple explosions.

Back at home with Peter, Dr. Angelo and Carla, Peter's mother, who has implicitly become a romantic interest, are about to leave when their telephone rings, followed by the noise of a second, and then hundreds, all around the globe.

The plot of Stephen King's 1975 short story "The Lawnmower Man" concerns Harold Parkette, who hires "Pastoral Greenery and Outdoor Services Inc." to cut his lawn. The serviceman who arrives to do the job has a lawnmower that mows the lawn by itself while he crawls, naked, behind the mower, eating the grass. The serviceman himself is actually a satyr who worships the Greek god Pan. When Parkette tries to call the police, the mower and its owner ritually kill him as a sacrifice to Pan.

The film's original script, written by director Brett Leonard and producer Gimel Everett, was titled Cyber God and had nothing to do with King's short story. New Line Cinema held the film rights to King's story, and decided to combine Cyber God with some minor elements of King's "The Lawnmower Man". The resulting film, originally titled Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man, differed so much from the source material that King sued the filmmakers to remove his name from the title.

After two court rulings in King's favor, New Line still did not comply and initially released the home video version as Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man. A third ruling granted the author $10,000 per day in compensation and all profits derived from sales until his name was removed.^[3] On King's official website, the film is not listed among the films based on his work. The Lawnmower Man was released in Japan under the title Virtual Wars; Fuji Creative's Masao Takiyama is also credited as a co-producer.

The references to the short story include the scene where Jobe kills Peter's father with the lawnmower "Big Red" and the aftermath where the police state that they found part of his remains in the birdbath, as well as the company Terry McKeen works for, Pastoral Greenery.

Aside from using elements of King's "The Lawnmower Man", the film has several elements in common with the 1959 Daniel Keyes novel Flowers for Algernon, which also deals with a mentally disabled man whose intelligence is technologically boosted to genius levels.^[4]

The revolutionary computer generated imagery (CGI) created for the film originated from the American developer Angel Studios, later renamed Rockstar San Diego, later known for the Midnight Club series of video games. Though the images were not filmed in real time, they established a perception of virtual reality that worked toward expressing the achievements of actual technology. The supervising sound editor was Frank Serafine, who was hired as a result of his sound creation work in 1982 film Tron.^[5]

Some of the computer-generated scenes were used in Beyond the Mind's Eye, a video in the Mind's Eye series.

The movie debuted at No.2 at the box office.^{[6] [7]}

Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace was released in 1996, and was retitled Lawnmower Man 2: Jobe's War for the video release.

Comic book writer Grant Morrison said in an interview ^[8] that he was contacted by the owners of the Lawnmower Man franchise in 1995 and asked to write treatments for Lawnmower Man 2 and Lawnmower Man 3. Morrison claims he was asked to "bend the Lawnmower Man series in an X-Men superhero-type direction." Neither of Morrison's script treatments were used and Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace was produced without his involvement.

The DVD, released in December 1997, contains only the theatrical cut, with scenes from the unrated edition, being presented on the DVD as merely deleted scenes.

The director's cut only released on VHS.

• The Lawnmower Man at IMDb
• The Lawnmower Man at Rotten Tomatoes