Max Headroom (titular character from "Max Headroom")

Max Headroom is a fictional character played by actor Matt Frewer. Advertised as "the first computer-generated TV presenter", Max was known for his biting commentary on a variety of topical issues, arrogant wit, stuttering, and pitch-shifting voice. The character was created by British video directors and artists George Stone, Annabel Jankel, and Rocky Morton. Max was advertised as "computer-generated", and some believed this, but he was actually Frewer wearing prosthetic makeup, contact lenses, and a plastic moulded suit, and sitting in front of a blue screen. Harsh lighting and other editing and recording effects heighten the illusion of a CGI character. According to his creators, Max's personality was meant to be a satirical exaggeration of the worst tendencies of American television hosts in the 1980s who wanted to appeal to youth culture, yet were not a part of it. Frewer proposed that Max reflected an innocence, largely influenced not by mentors and life experience but by information absorbed from television. Max Headroom debuted in April 1985 on Channel 4 in the British cyberpunk TV movie Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future, his origin story. In the movie, Edison Carter (portrayed by Frewer) is a journalist fleeing enemies into a parking garage, crashing his motorcycle through the entrance barrier reading "Max. headroom 2.3 metres" – UK vehicle clearance signs use the phrase "Max headroom". While Carter is unconscious, an AI program based on his mind is created. The AI develops a personality identified as "Max Headroom", and becomes a TV host who exists only on broadcast signals and computer systems. Like Carter, Max openly challenges the corporations that run his world, but using commentary and sarcastic wit rather than journalism. Two days after the TV movie was broadcast, Max hosted Channel 4's The Max Headroom Show, a TV programme where he introduces music videos, comments on various topics, and eventually interviews guests before a live studio audience. During its second and third year, it also aired in the US on Cinemax. Max Headroom became a global spokesperson for New Coke, appearing on many TV commercials with the catchphrase "Catch the wave!". After the cancellation of The Max Headroom Show, Matt Frewer portrayed Max and Carter in the 1987 American TV drama series Max Headroom on ABC. The series returns to Carter and Max challenging the status quo of a cyberpunk world, now portraying them as allies and providing a slightly altered version of Max's origin. The series was cancelled during its second year. Max's appearance and style of speech has influenced and been referenced by different media, such as Ron Headrest, a fictional character in the comic strip Doonesbury who was a political parody of Ronald Reagan, and Eminem's 2013 "Rap God" video, in which the rapper resembles Max. Max Headroom was emulated by an unknown person in a Headroom mask while hijacking an American local television broadcast signal in 1987, later referred to as the "Max Headroom incident". To advertise and promote Channel 4 and its subsidiary channels shifting from broadcast to digital signal, an aged Max Headroom (again portrayed by Frewer) appeared in new commercials in 2007 and 2008. Max has a cameo in the 2015 film Pixels. With the rising popularity of music videos with youth culture, and stations such as MTV, Channel 4 hosted a music video programme. Rocky Morton was tasked to develop a graphic to play before and after the videos, clarifying to audiences these were features of a special show and not just random music videos between TV advertisements. Taking inspiration from MTV video jockeys (VJs) and American TV hosts, Morton decided a graphic or "bumper video" would not appeal to youth nearly as much as a host with a loud personality. He thought British youth would be suspicious of a youthful personality attempting to appeal to them and might instead appreciate the cynical irony of a host who appeared to be a conservative American man in a simple suit and tie attempting to appeal to youth but lacking a true understanding of their culture. He saw the host as "the most boring thing that I could think of to do... a talking head: a middle-class white male in a suit, talking to them in a really boring way about music videos". Morton thought the host should be computer-generated or animated. When this proved impractical, an actor was cast with the illusion of a computer-generated host. Channel 4 executives enjoyed Morton's pitch and introduced Max as a character in an hour-long TV movie before presenting him as a programme host. Producer Peter Wagg hired writers David Hansen and Paul Owen to construct Max's "whole persona", which Morton described as the "very sterile, arrogant, Western personification of the middle-class, male TV host". The background story provided for the Max Headroom character in Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future was rooted in a dystopian near-future dominated by television and large corporations, devised by George Stone and eventual script writer Steve Roberts. The character's name came from the last thing Carter saw during a motorcycle accident that put him into a coma: a traffic warning sign marked "MAX. HEADROOM: 2.3 M" (an overhead clearance of 2.3 metres) suspended across a car park entrance. The name originated well before other character aspects from George Stone, who remarked "[the phrase] 'max headroom' was over the entranceway of every car park in the UK. Instant branding, instant recognition." It was decided "Max Headroom" was a comically ironic name for a host who implied he knew and understood everything, as the name indicated his head was actually empty of true knowledge and wisdom. Canadian-American actor Matt Frewer tested for the role after a friend of his had already auditioned and then suggested him instead. Producer and character co-creator Annabel Jankel thought Frewer would be a good choice to masquerade as a person whose appearance was designed by a computer, seeing from his casting Polaroid photo that he had "unbelievably well-defined features". Frewer was given "a few lines" of dialogue and then encouraged to improvise. His comedic improvisation of more than ten minutes impressed the production crew. He was inspired by character Ted Baxter of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, recalling in 1987, "I particularly wanted to get that phony bonhomie of Baxter ... Max always assumes a decade-long friendship on the first meeting. At first sight, he'll ask about that blackhead on your nose." While Hansen and Owen continued writing Max's lines in the TV movie and music video programme episodes, Frewer always improvised more dialogue during filming and was encouraged to do so. Hansen and Owen later wrote the 1985 book Max Headroom's Guide to Life from Max's personal perspective. In discussing Max's fictional origin story, it was first proposed that he could be a computer-generated figure created to stand in for a human TV host who was late for his own show. The backstory would be revealed through different five-minute segments during the first season of The Max Headroom Show. When Channel 4 decided Max's origin would be featured in an hour-long TV movie instead, an expanded story was developed and the origin was altered to now involve a crusading journalist named Edison Carter. On 4 April 1985, the TV movie Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into the Future introduced Max to television audiences. On 6 April 1985, Channel 4 aired the first episode of The Max Headroom Show. The character's classic look is a shiny dark suit often paired with Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses. (The sunglasses look was adopted when the special bright contacts Matt Frewer used became painful to wear.) Other than the publicity for the character, the real image of Max was not computer-generated. Computing technology in the mid-1980s was not sufficiently advanced yet for a full-motion, voice-synchronised human head to be practical for a television series.