Trailer
Plot summary
A totalitarian future state bans sex and reproduction and requires citizens to take mind-altering drugs that suppress their emotions and let them perform demanding work. Workers dress in the same white uniform and keep their heads shaved. Instead of names, people carry badges with three letters and four digits. THX 1138 produces android police officers in a factory and shares a home with LUH 3417, who keeps surveillance on the city from a central video control center. He stops at a confession booth, where a portrait of OMM 0000 reassures him, and complains that his sedatives no longer work. LUH secretly swaps his pills for ones she keeps hidden, and he develops nausea, anxiety and sexual desires.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about THX 1138 (1971)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The chase features a stunt in which Ronald "Duffy" Hambleton rode a police motorcycle full speed into a fallen scaffold. He flew over the handlebars, was hit by the airborne motorcycle and slammed into a crashed car; according to Lucas he was uninjured but angry at the people who came to his aid, worried they had ruined the stunt.
- Lucas chose the letters and numbers for their aesthetic qualities, especially their symmetry, and named the film after his college telephone number, 849-1138, since THX matches 8, 4 and 9 on the keypad. Walter Murch, however, always believed Lucas intended THX to be "sex", LUH "love" and SEN "sin".
- Many of the film's extras were recruited from the nearby Synanon, an addiction-recovery program that later became a violent cult.
- Studio executives disliked the film and insisted that Coppola provide the negative to an in-house editor, who cut about four minutes out of it before release.
- THX 1138 was released to theaters on March 11, 1971, and was a commercial flop, earning $945,000 in rentals for Warner Bros. and an overall loss for the studio.
- According to cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, the cars were driven at speeds of 140 mph while the chase was being filmed.
