‘War Games’ Turns 25

Wouldn’t you prefer a nice game of chess?

A quarter century ago, that was the tagline of a little teen movie that launched the careers of Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy.

Director John Badham recalls the experience:

“The best thing in the world, character,” Badham recalled. “You fall in love with a boy, 15-6 years old, who is over his head and you know it. Even he doesn’t realize how deep he’s in. I got caught up in his adventure. I couldn’t help but be charmed and fall in love with him. That’s what attracted me to it. Our hero could have been in many other kinds of dilemmas.

“The whole thing about hacking and computers, to me, was what Hitchcock used to call the McGuffin. I didn’t know much about them at the time. In fact, virtually nothing. I was spending a lot of time scrambling just to understand what a lot of our tech guys were doing. It got to the point where I almost knew too much about computers.”

Another interesting thing about the movie was Badham wasn’t even the original director on the project.

“If you look into it, you’d learn I replaced another wonderful director, Martin Brest (Beverly Hills Cop, Scent of a Woman, Meet Joe Black). He had actually shot for a couple of weeks. He just got into huge fights with the producers. They didn’t like the tact he was taking with it. They wanted something that was lighter and funnier while he was pushing towards the dark side. I think that’s the difference between what Marty envisioned and what I and the producers envisioned.”

There were other considerations as well, Broderick and Sheedy were already on the film, and some scenes were already in the can. If that wasn’t enough, Broderick was having some very difficult problems of his own.

“He was a really nice kid. He was so confident for a guy his age,” says Badham. “He was funny, but never arrogant. Now I’ve worked with 20 year-olds who thought they were God’s gift. Matthew was a kid who was the son of a famous and respected actor, James Broderick, who was dying during the course of our movie. Matthew spent as much time in New York by his father’s bedside as he did on location with us. Every day he had off from us, he was flying back to New York. Then he’d come back. I’d say he had inherited the discipline and work ethic of his dad. It made him a true pleasure to work with.”

In spite of these obstacles, when Badham completed the film even the studio knew it had something real good in its hands.  “I always thought it would do very good,” said Badham. “The good thing was MGM/United Artists always believed in it. They actually spent a lot of money to fly us out to Cannes. We were actually the last movie on the schedule that year. That was a very expensive deal for them. I wasn’t complaining. I was going to Cannes!”

The end result was for an investment of $14 million, MGM/UA got a return of $84 million at the box office. Yes, that seems like chump change compared to the likes of Dark Knight or Spidey III, but in 1983 a film making back six times its investment and nearly hitting $100 million was nothing to sneeze at.

“[Wargames talked about a subject] which nobody believed at that time, except for kids,” says Badham. “The attitude at the studio was this is a kids’ movie. They thought of it as a huge cartoon. Nowadays it’s just the opposite. What the studios also didn’t know is these kids were all over the place, and they didn’t know it. Computer crime was still in bedrooms and things like that. Even the FBI and organizations like that were only starting to get into the damage that could be done.”

I was starting my senior year in high school at the time and, like 99 percent of the kids of that time, had never used a computer.