The Lawnmower Man (film) - Production

Production

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. 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.

The revolutionary computer-generated imagery (CGI) created for the film originated from the American developer Angel Studios (later becoming Rockstar San Diego) who would go on to be 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 the 1982 film Tron.

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