The ’90s Flop That Billed Itself as “the First Interactive Movie”

Long before Netflix turned the streaming age interactive with Black Mirror’s “Bandersnatch,” American theatergoers got the chance to choose their own adventure with a pioneering mix of Robocop-style vigilantism, teenage wish fulfillment, and enough puerile humor to make South Park’s creators blush. 

Released in February 1995, Mr. Payback: An Interactive Movie starred former Baywatch hunk Billy Warlock as an android dishing out his unorthodox brand of justice on those who’d wronged society—all as chosen by the audience. The film was the brainchild of the future Corporate Vice President of Global Events at Microsoft and written by Back to the Future’s Bob Gale, who also made his directorial debut. And it required 44 specially kitted-out cinemas across the United States to bring their vision to life.

1. “A Cinematic Game”
2. Going High Tech
3. “The Sleaziest Common Denominator”

“A Cinematic Game”

Mr. Payback wasn’t technically the first of its kind. The screening of Czech satire Kinoautomat at Montreal’s Expo 67 was regularly interrupted by a moderator asking the audience to decide between two narrative developments. And six years before that, marketing genius William Castle gave viewers the illusion they’d determined the ending of horror Mr. Sardonicus via glow-in-the-dark thumbs.

Then, in 1993, Interfilm Inc. released I’m Your Man, an interactive 20-minute short in which the audience controlled the outcome of scenes using a joystick. Bob Bejan, the president of the company, wrote and directed the film. I’m Your Man played in just two theaters (one in New York, one in LA), and though it had a rather underwhelming effect, Bejan still believed in the technology; he likened the experience to “a cinematic game” rather than a movie.

“Our goal is to put a piece of software in the theaters every 12 weeks,” he told The New York Times. Interfilm signed a contract with Sony to produce more interactive films, the first of which was Mr. Payback.

Gale, a self-professed tech buff, was approached by Sony and Interfilm to work on the film. He took the job because “I thought to myself, ‘How many chances in life are there to be a pioneer at something and try something that’s really never been done before?’ and said, ‘What the hell, let’s do this.’ ”

To pull the project off, Gale eschewed traditional storyboards for flow charts—“I had to draw diagrams that looked like the New York City subway map”—and shot the film over 23 days, cutting 240 segments from two hours of footage. Each screening of the film lasted between 20 and 24 minutes, and according to Entertainment Weekly, there were nearly 27,648 segment combinations.

Mr. Payback didn’t exactly have a huge budget; it was made for around $1.6 million. “Everybody took a lot less money than they normally do,” Gale told Entertainment Weekly. “And I called in some favors from friends of mine.” Presumably, among those he called were Christopher Lloyd, who plays racist boss Ed Jarvis, and composer Michael Tavera, who had previously scored Back to the Future’s animated adaptation.

It’s a pedigree that makes the film’s obsession with bodily fluids, genitals, and general vulgarity all the more surprising, but to Gale, it made perfect sense: “It’s geared toward kids and teens, absolutely, and that’s intentional,” he said. “We’ve got two generations now that have grown up with interactive media ... They're obviously going to be the first people that are going to be interested in this, because they take it for granted. They don’t have to have how it works explained to them. They sit down, they see it, they get it—boom!”

There was a general sense among those who made Mr. Payback that it could kickstart an entertainment revolution—the film was even billed as “the best of video games meeting the best of movies.”

“Imagine how cool it would be to do an interactive soap opera,” Gale mused. “Audiences could vote on the plotlines for All My Children ... You could do a time-travel movie as an interactive movie, because time-travel is definitely about cause and effect and what if. Those are elements that interactive storytelling is great at.”

But, he noted, “Everybody in Hollywood is going to be watching what happens to this film. If it does well, other studios will be jumping on the bandwagon. But if it bombs, you can bet people will be jumping off the bandwagon as if it was a garbage truck.” 

Going High Tech

Putting Mr. Payback in theaters required serious technological upgrades. Interfilm Inc. installed each participating screen with state-of-the-art laser disc projection systems along with seat-side, color-coordinated joystick. (The price tag: an estimate $85,000 to $100,000 per theater, or nearly $255,000 to $300,000 today.) Whenever the movie presented three options—typically every 90 seconds—audiences needed to press the corresponding button to keep the story moving: each voting tally showed up on screen in real time, too.

As you’d expect from a crowd specifically encouraged to “feel free to whisper, talk, yell, scream, and generally behave as if you were raised in a barn” during the introduction, the most politically-incorrect course of action typically won out. Hence, the “car jerk” who selfishly takes a disabled parking space is punished via a paralyzing dart. A headmistress who’s been sexually harassing her students is required to walk like a dog while dressed in bondage leather. And in a scene which would rightfully get the film canceled in today’s climate, the racist boss played by Lloyd is forced to learn the error of his ways by donning blackface.

For all its immature and problematic parts, the movie is not entirely without wit. In a rather satisfying meta move, a bonus scene finds Mr. Payback and his human sidekick Gwen (Holly Fields) seeking vengeance on the unruly crowd ruining their moviegoing experience. Who hasn’t wished they could do the same to whoever’s kicking the back of their chair or repeatedly using their phone? 

But the visual quality of the film—which was shot on 35mm and transferred to laser discs—left something to be desired. It was essentially akin to that of a CD-ROM, bringing to mind 1992’s Night Trap, the voyeuristic SEGA video game movie that asked players to defend a bunch of scantily-clad teens from an army of vampires. And although Gale claimed that viewers—who paid between $3 and $5 to screen the movie twice in one sitting—would have to watch the film 24 times before things got repetitive, the apparent wealth of decisions always led to a version of the “Payback Time” game show finale. (Here, audience members had their choice of celebrity cameo: rapper Ice T, or—perhaps in a concession to older folks who might be watching—crooner Paul Anka.)

“The Sleaziest Common Denominator”

Some kids may have enjoyed Mr. Payback, but it’s fair to say critics didn’t agree. “It is mass psychology run wild, with the mob zealously pummeling their buttons, careening downhill toward the sleaziest common denominator,” noted Roger Ebert. His regular sidekick Gene Siskel was just as scathing, quipping that he “would have paid twice as much to see Mr. Payback only once.”

As it turns out, the great American public’s response wasn’t much more enthusiastic, either. The movie grossed only $145,000 at the box office. And when Ride for Your Life, a bizarre mish-mash of alien invasions and world-saving bike couriers, failed to salvage the concept later that same year, interactive cinema went the way of Illusion-o, Smell-o-vision, and every other fad that promised to change the cinematic game. Interfilm’s fourth movie, a Joker-esque thriller about a clown-cosplaying terrorist titled Bombmeister, didn’t even make it to the screen at all. 

Of course, the interactive movie did enjoy something of a mini-renaissance on DVD (see 2003 Danish relationship drama Switching and 2007’s restorative justice tale Late Fragment), a format far more conducive to button-pressing. In 2016, Tobias Weber’s Late Shift—a crime thriller which invited audiences to make real-time decisions—screened at film festivals. And in addition to “Bandersnatch,” Netflix has continued to play around with the gimmick on the likes of Bear Grylls adventure You vs. Wild, kids series Puss in Book, and a special episode of kooky sitcom Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. 

Gale is seemingly still holding out hope that at some point in the near future, Mr. Payback will be paid its dues. “I’ve got a DVD where I recorded a couple plays of the show,” he told Media Mikes in 2015. “And I periodically take it around and show it to people and say, ‘Hey, we can do this. We can do this now.’ But people still don’t get it. Eventually I think that they will. I do hope so. We were definitely ahead of our time with that thing.”

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