Charles Austin Miller

Trivia: Robocop nearly murders Clarence Boddicker at the cocaine factory but delivers the badly-beaten Boddicker to the police station and turns him in at the booking desk. Robocop says, "He's a cop killer," and all eyes in the station turn on Boddicker menacingly. At this point in the production, Director Paul Verhoeven and actor Kurtwood Smith discussed what to do next to show Boddicker's utter contempt for the police, even when he was in custody. The line "Just give me my fuckin' phone call" was added to the end of the scene, but Verhoeven and Smith still didn't think it was forceful enough, and they were at an impasse. So, on the last take, unbeknownst to the rest of the cast, Kurtwood Smith slipped a readily-available blood capsule into his mouth and unexpectedly spat the bloody mess onto the booking desk, right in front of the camera. The startled reaction of everyone on the set was genuine; even actor Robert DoQui, who played the sergeant at the booking desk, involuntarily recoiled in disgust and exclaimed, "Shit!" (which was kept in the movie). Clarence Boddicker thus ended up realistically intimidating the police, and Kurtwood Smith's improvisation made it an iconic scene.

Charles Austin Miller