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As they await repairs, Val Com 17485 (Andy Kaufman), a robot valet with a specialty in lumber commodities, falls in love with Aqua Com 89045 (Bernadette Peters), a hostess companion robot who is made for poolside parties. They assemble a robot named Phil (Jerry Garcia) who they treat as their child and take with them a comedian robot, Catskil-55602 (Jack Carter).

They are pursued by Crimebuster (Ron Gans), a broken police drone that wants to bring them into to be erased. They are and yet they keep reverting back to their new programing as the love between them has become too strong.

The story sounds good but the actual movie, well…

In his book Andy Kaufman: Revealed, Bob Zmuda wrote that Kaufman and Zmuda had “pitched” the The Tony Clifton Story to Universal Studios. They were concerned that Kaufman had not acted in films except for a small role in God Told Me To, so they arranged for him to star in this movie as a test. It was a disaster and Kaufman even apologized on Late Night With David Letterman for making it.

When I spoke with director Alan Arkush about this movie, he was very honest about it.

B&S: Can you tell me about Heartbeeps?

ALLAN: I got offered this big studio movie. And I really have to say that I totally misread the situation. I didn’t really understand the script or maybe it didn’t indicate that it could be a wacky comedy. I seized on the idea that it could be this big story about robots falling in love and making it a Frank Borzage movie (a bizarre idea and nothing like what the studio wanted). He was big on love conquers death, love is a spiritual thing and I thought that’s what the situation was with these robots. Maybe that’s an intellectually good solution but it’s not the movie they wanted.

I made so many bad choices like a pace that was WAY too slow for comedy. I should have just turned Andy Kaufman loose, used many many more special effects and taken more advantage of the genius of my FX team Stan Winston and Albert Whitlock. We recently did a commentary for the Kino Lorber rerelease and that was both eye opening and painful, but useful to me as an artist, not unlike when I critique a film at the AFI.

B&S: But you had a great cast! I mean, Jerry Garcia is in it.

ALLAN: Yes, Jerry was someone I knew really well. And I asked him to do one of the robot voices on the guitar. I was trying to borrow stuff from other parts of my life to shoehorn in. The studio cut ALL of Jerry’s work out.

At least Arkush was able to get Paul Bartel, Mary Woronov and Dick Miller in the movie, as well as Kenneth McMillan and Randy Quaid as repairmen. But otherwise, this movie seems like it’s going somewhere at first and then just sits there forever, despite being only around 75 minutes. I’ve put off watching it for years because I’ve heard just how bad it is and I’d hoped that it would surprise me.

It was written by John Hill, who also wrote Quigley Down Under, Little Nikita and episodes of Quantum Leap and L.A. Law. He also scripted Steel Justice, a TV movie in which monster truck robot Robosaurus teams with a police officer. Do you think he told people, “I did Heartbeeps so I am a natural to write this movie about a child who brings back his dead cop dad as a fire-breathing transforming dinosaur?”

What is great is the makeup by Stan Winston.

The artist had been sought after he created the makeup for the Tin Man in The Wiz. Winston said, “I hadn’t been all that happy with the final results of the Tin Man makeup, which was made up of foam rubber appliances, painted to look like metal. I wanted to see if I could come up with something better for Heartbeeps, appliances that would have an intrinsic metallic quality, rather than one that was just painted on.”

He used gelatin appliances that were painted with metallic colors. However, the heat of shooting meant that the makeup needed near-constant touch-ups. This almost ruined Winston’s sanity.

“I had created the look I wanted and I had done something that no one had ever seen before. The downside was that, on a daily basis, I didn’t know whether or not we were going to get through the shoot! These were very difficult makeups to maintain, very labor-intensive. Every day at lunch we had to replace the lip appliances, for example, because they were starting to melt on us. Vince Prentice and Zoltan Elek, the makeup artists who actually applied the prosthetics, constantly had to stay on top of the problems with the gelatin. I was a wreck through the entire shoot.”

It did teach him an essential lesson.

“I was in a stressed-out state, which was fairly typical of me at that time, and Bernadette Peters said to me, “Relax, Stan. It’s just a movie.” Here she was, going through this grueling process of having these prosthetics applied to her, and she had to calm me down. It should have been just the opposite. To this day, I thank Bernadette Peters for putting my attitude in perspective. In this work, there are always going to be very real responsibilities and pressures — but it’s just a movie, and there’s nothing to be gained by being a walking stress factory. Ever since that time, I’ve tried to bring positive energy and lightheartedness to the set.”

Resources

Stan Winston School. Heartbeeps: Behind the Scenes at Stan Winston Studio.