{ "id": "ep6y984vbh", "slug": "fast-cheap-and-out-of-control", "title": "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control", "updated": "2026-11-01", "topic_path": [ { "id": "culture", "label": "Arts and culture", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture" }, { "id": "culture.performance", "label": "Screen and stage", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen", "label": "Film and television", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films", "label": "Films and standalone screen works", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.genre-form", "label": "Films by genre, form, and subject", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.genre-form" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.genre-form.documentary", "label": "Documentary and biographical films", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.genre-form.documentary" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.genre-form.documentary.documentary-feature-works", "label": "Individual documentary feature films", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.genre-form.documentary.documentary-feature-works" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.genre-form.documentary.documentary-feature-works.nature-science-and-environment-documenta", "label": "Nature, science, and environment documentaries", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.genre-form.documentary.documentary-feature-works.nature-science-and-environment-documenta" } ], "geo": [ { "id": "geo.us.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.genre-form.documentary", "label": "United States · 1946 to 2000: Documentary and biographical films", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.genre-form.documentary", "path": [ { "id": "geo.us", "label": "United States", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us" }, { "id": "geo.us.t1946", "label": "United States · 1946 to 2000", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us.t1946" }, { "id": "geo.us.t1946.culture", "label": "Arts and culture", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us.t1946.culture" }, { "id": "geo.us.t1946.culture.performance", "label": "Screen and stage", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us.t1946.culture.performance" }, { "id": "geo.us.t1946.culture.performance.screen", "label": "Film and television", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us.t1946.culture.performance.screen" }, { "id": "geo.us.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films", "label": "Films and standalone screen works", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films" }, { "id": "geo.us.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.genre-form", "label": "Films by genre, form, and subject", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.genre-form" }, { "id": "geo.us.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.genre-form.documentary", "label": "Documentary and biographical films", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.us.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.genre-form.documentary" } ] } ], "excerpt": "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control is Errol Morris's 1997 documentary interweaving a lion tamer, topiary gardener, mole-rat specialist, and MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks, whose 1989 swarm-robots paper gave the film its title.", "snippet": "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control is Errol Morris's 1997 documentary interweaving a lion tamer, topiary gardener, mole-rat specialist, and MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks, whose 1989 swarm-robots paper gave the film its title.", "node": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.genre-form.documentary.documentary-feature-works.nature-science-and-environment-documenta", "markdown": "# Fast, Cheap & Out of Control\n\n*Fast, Cheap & Out of Control* is a 1997 documentary film written and directed by [Errol Morris](https://www.edgepedia.org/errol-morris) that interweaves the stories of four obsessive men: a lion tamer, a topiary gardener, a naked mole-rat specialist, and an MIT robotics scientist. Morris himself called it \"the ultimate low-concept movie, a film that utterly resists the possibility of a one-line summary.\"[1](https://www.errolmorris.com/film/fcooc.html) The film premiered in the United States at the [New York Film Festival](https://www.edgepedia.org/new-york-film-festival) on September 30, 1997, and opened in theaters on October 3, 1997.[2](https://web.library.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Fast%20Cheap%20Notes.pdf) • [3](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119107)\n\n| Key fact | Detail |\n|---|---|\n| Director | Errol Morris, who also produced; executive producer Lindsay Law[1](https://www.errolmorris.com/film/fcooc.html) |\n| Subjects | Dave Hoover (lion tamer), George Mendonça (topiary gardener), Ray Mendez (mole-rat specialist), Rodney Brooks (MIT robot scientist)[1](https://www.errolmorris.com/film/fcooc.html) |\n| Title origin | A 1989 paper by Rodney Brooks, \"Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System\"[2](https://web.library.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Fast%20Cheap%20Notes.pdf) |\n| Release | U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival, September 30, 1997; theatrical release October 3, 1997[2](https://web.library.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Fast%20Cheap%20Notes.pdf) • [3](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119107) |\n| Runtime and rating | About 80 minutes; rated PG[3](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119107) |\n| Key crew | Cinematography Robert Richardson; music Caleb Sampson; editors Shondra Merrill and Karen Schmeer[1](https://www.errolmorris.com/film/fcooc.html) |\n| Reception | 91% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (32 reviews); gross of $878,960 in the U.S. and Canada[4](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/fast_cheap_and_out_of_control) • [3](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119107) |\n\n## Spoilers\n\n### Plot\n\nThere is no plot in the usual sense. Morris interviews four men at length and braids the results, so that a sentence from one answers a question another was never asked. The men appear in an order that is itself an argument: gardener first, then lion tamer, then mole-rat man, then robot scientist, a progression from the oldest forms of shaping life to the newest.[11](https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/280508/an-auteur-in-search-of-four-characters/)\n\nGeorge Mendonça (himself) has spent more than twenty years as a topiary artist at Green Animals, a [Rhode Island](https://www.edgepedia.org/rhode-island) estate, turning privet and boxwood into bears, giraffes, and birds.[12](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-oct-03-ca-38619-story.html) He talks about the work with a gardener's plainness: a shape takes years, you cut a little at a time, and at some point you know the animal is finished. He cannot quite articulate the knowing, and the film does not help him, because the not-quite-articulable is the point. No one else alive can tend these particular creatures the way he can; when he stops, they stop.[13](https://www.avclub.com/the-new-cult-canon-fast-cheap-out-of-control-1798214019)\n\nDave Hoover (himself) is a wild-animal trainer in the Clyde Beatty tradition, and he is the film's beating heart. He explains the chair trick, talks about reading his lions and tigers, and speaks with a mixture of pride and fatalism about a profession that kills its practitioners. He names trainers who died in the ring, people he knew, and a young apprentice he tried to warn away from the life. His honesty about the limits of mastery, that the act is a negotiation with animals that never agreed to the plan, gives the film its emotional center.\n\nRay Mendez (himself) is fascinated by naked mole rats: nearly hairless, buck-toothed, cold-blooded mammals that live in colonies organized like insects, with a queen, workers, and a division of labor nobody commanded. He keeps them, studies them, and builds museum environments for them, at one point living with mole rats in his office and asking, seriously, what makes a mole rat happy.[14](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/fast-cheap-and-out-of-control-1997) He shapes his colony's existence hoping to learn something about himself.[15](https://preview.reelviews.net/movies/f/fast.html)\n\n[Rodney Brooks](https://www.edgepedia.org/rodney-brooks) (himself) is one of MIT's top robot scientists, building machines that are unnervingly lifelike.[12](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-oct-03-ca-38619-story.html) His robots crawl like bugs and need no central controller and no human instructions.[16](https://www.sonyclassics.com/fastcheap/synopsis.html) He argues, cheerfully, that intelligence does not need a plan, only many fast, cheap, dumb systems bumping into the world, which is where the title comes from. He speaks of his robots as forerunners of a silicon-based life form that may eventually render our species extinct.[15](https://preview.reelviews.net/movies/f/fast.html)\n\n**The film's most quoted moment is Brooks's riff on stability.** He explains that watching insect locomotion taught him a walking machine does not need to be stable at all; his robots were designed to walk by constantly falling over, and they were more successful for it, because they were more like life. Over images of his stumbling machines, he delivers the line the whole film has been circling: \"The whole concept of stability is a concept of death.\"[17](https://www.the-solute.com/geek-out-fast-cheap-out-of-control-1997/) It retroactively reframes everything around it: Mendonça's topiary is decades of small cuts with no blueprint, the mole-rat colony is nature running Brooks's algorithm with no planner, and Hoover's act is a man pretending to plan while his animals quietly decline to. Morris shoots almost everything except the straight-on interviews on a [Dutch angle](https://www.edgepedia.org/dutch-angle) (camera tilted so the horizon looks slanted) with no stable horizon line, so the film itself refuses stability as a matter of style.[17](https://www.the-solute.com/geek-out-fast-cheap-out-of-control-1997/)\n\nThe braid tightens through rhymes rather than events. A match cut about eight and a half minutes in, from Brooks's robot crossing a landscape to Clyde Beatty and an African boy crossing toward a lost city in old footage, quietly confirms that Morris has imposed a narrative on four unrelated lives, and that he knows he has.[18](https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2024/09/the-power-of-suggestion/) Each subject gets his own musical rhythm: Mendonça in stately slow motion, Mendez in a frenetic scherzo, Brooks's robots in a broken lumbering tempo, Hoover in the cage alternating staccato flurries with nervous stillness.[18](https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2024/09/the-power-of-suggestion/)\n\nThe ending belongs to Hoover. Intercut with images of fire, with Caleb Sampson's score at its most aching, he speaks about the trainers who died doing what he does and about the apprentice he tried to turn away. The film closes on the man whose relationship with his animals is least controllable, because he is the one who admits most honestly that mastery is a story trainers tell themselves. Morris has called the ending an elegy, dedicated to his mother and stepfather, who died during production, and describes the film as a story of creating a perfect world that fails in some important respect, an elegy for carbon-based life set against Brooks's silicon-based future.[11](https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/280508/an-auteur-in-search-of-four-characters/)\n\n### Characters\n\n- **Dave Hoover** (himself) is a lion and tiger trainer in the Clyde Beatty tradition, proud, fatalistic, and tender about his animals, and the film's emotional center.\n- **George Mendonça** (himself) is the topiary gardener of Green Animals in Rhode Island, a patient craftsman whose art operates on a decades-long timescale.[12](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-oct-03-ca-38619-story.html)\n- **Ray Mendez** (himself) is a naked mole-rat specialist who lives with his colony and builds museum environments for it, looking at eusocial insects in mammal form and finding a mirror.[14](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/fast-cheap-and-out-of-control-1997)\n- **Rodney Brooks** (himself) is the MIT roboticist whose fast, cheap, controller-free machines argue that intelligence emerges from the bottom up, and that humanity may be a draft version.[15](https://preview.reelviews.net/movies/f/fast.html)\n\n### Interpretations and controversies\n\nThe ending is the film's most argued-over choice, and it has grown darker outside the film: Hoover was killed by a tiger in 2001, four years after release, which retroactively turns the closing elegy almost unbearable to watch. Critics have also read the film as a meditation on death and on what it means to be human, and Morris himself has said the documentary is honest enough to include itself in its own joke, arranging four lives into a pattern they never consented to, itself fast, cheap, and out of control.[13](https://www.avclub.com/the-new-cult-canon-fast-cheap-out-of-control-1798214019) Some viewers find the connective tissue thinner than the editing implies, admiring the craft more than feeling moved by it; others consider it Morris's masterpiece.\n\n## The four subjects\n\nThe film is built almost entirely from interviews with four men who never meet on screen but whose stories are connected through Morris's editing of images, words, and music.[2](https://web.library.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Fast%20Cheap%20Notes.pdf)\n\n**Dave Hoover** is a wild animal trainer who idolized the late circus trainer Clyde Beatty and shares his theories on the mind of wild animals. Morris has said he knew Hoover from years before, and that some of the footage in the film was shot even before he made *The Thin Blue Line*.[1](https://www.errolmorris.com/film/fcooc.html) • [5](https://www.thestickingplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Errol-Morris.pdf)\n\n**George Mendonça** is a topiary gardener who has devoted a lifetime to shaping bears and giraffes out of hedges and trees, working, as he says in the film, entirely from memory: \"You know what an animal looks like, and so you just start making the animal.\"[1](https://www.errolmorris.com/film/fcooc.html) • [2](https://web.library.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Fast%20Cheap%20Notes.pdf)\n\n**Ray Mendez** studies hairless mole-rats, tiny buck-toothed mammals that behave like insects and, in Todd McCarthy's Variety review, can chew through concrete.[1](https://www.errolmorris.com/film/fcooc.html) • [6](https://www.errolmorris.com/content/review/fcooc_mccarthy.html)\n\n**Rodney Brooks** is an MIT scientist who designed complex autonomous robots that crawl like bugs without specific instructions from a human controller.[1](https://www.errolmorris.com/film/fcooc.html)\n\nAs the film proceeds, thematic connections emerge. The lion tamer and the topiary gardener look back at ways of life that are slowly disappearing; the mole-rat specialist and the robot scientist look toward the future, envisioning creatures that may someday replace the human race.[1](https://www.errolmorris.com/film/fcooc.html) McCarthy, reviewing the film at its Sundance premiere, described the same structure: comic notes at first, then a wistfulness as the obsessive devotion of Hoover and Mendonça emerges as a passing kind of idiosyncratic creativity, while Brooks and Mendez suggest an eerie future of programmed, insect-like behavior.[6](https://www.errolmorris.com/content/review/fcooc_mccarthy.html)\n\n## The title\n\nThe film takes its name from a 1989 paper in which Rodney Brooks argued that dispatching 100 small robots to Mars would work better than sending a single large one, reasoning that even if a number of the robots failed, plenty would survive to carry on the mission. The paper was titled \"Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System.\"[2](https://web.library.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Fast%20Cheap%20Notes.pdf) In the film, Brooks explains the idea in his own words: instead of one 1,000-kilogram robot, send a hundred 1-kilogram robots, so that losing one rover is not the end of the mission; robots that find what they are looking for stop and turn up a corner reflector to the sky, producing an automatic map of the find.[7](https://www.errolmorris.com/film/fcooc_transcript.html)\n\n## Style and technique\n\nMorris uses a wide range of film formats and resolutions, including black and white, color, 35mm, 16mm, Super 8, and video, along with stock footage, old movies, and cartoons, to build what his site calls a singularly impressionistic collage of images.[1](https://www.errolmorris.com/film/fcooc.html) The Yale Film Archive notes add canted camera angles, slow motion, and fast motion, and clips from B-movies such as *King of Junglemad*, *The Deadly Mantis*, and *Zombies of the Stratosphere*.[2](https://web.library.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Fast%20Cheap%20Notes.pdf) There is no omniscient narration; each man tells his own story.[2](https://web.library.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Fast%20Cheap%20Notes.pdf)\n\nThe interviews were shot with the Interrotron, a teleprompter-like apparatus of cameras and mirrors that Morris patented and that debuted with this film. It lets subjects look directly into the camera lens while maintaining eye contact with Morris through his live image projected on a monitor, making the relationships seem intimate even though the director never appears on screen and is heard only once, speaking five words.[1](https://www.errolmorris.com/film/fcooc.html) • [2](https://web.library.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Fast%20Cheap%20Notes.pdf) Morris explained the device to Wired as a way of reducing what he called the Heisenberg influence of the camera, breaking down the sense of the camera as an independent observer standing apart from the conversation.[8](https://www.wired.com/1997/08/filmmaker-probes-millennial-change-of-life/)\n\nCaleb Sampson's score supplies what Morris's site calls a haunting and powerful echo of the film's vision.[1](https://www.errolmorris.com/film/fcooc.html)\n\n## Reception and awards\n\nThe film won Best Documentary honors in 1997 from the National Society of Film Critics, the [National Board of Review](https://www.edgepedia.org/national-board-of-review), the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Florida Film Critics Circle, and the Society of Texas Film Critics, along with an Independent Spirit Award, and was named Best Non-Fiction Film of 1997 by the New York Film Critics Circle. The IFP Gotham Award's Filmmaker Award went to the film, the first time that award was given to a documentary.[1](https://www.errolmorris.com/film/fcooc.html) Roger Ebert gave it four out of four stars, writing that its images lodge in the memory.[4](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/fast_cheap_and_out_of_control) On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 91% Tomatometer from 32 reviews and an 84% audience score.[4](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/fast_cheap_and_out_of_control)\n\nCommercially the film was modest: IMDb records a gross of $878,960 in the United States and Canada, with an opening weekend of $23,665.[3](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119107) Morris acknowledged in a later interview that he had never attracted as large an audience as he would like, and joked about the question of whether the film was a commercial calculation: \"mole rats, topiary animals, lion taming, and the robotic scientist. Yeah.\"[9](https://transom.org/wp-content/uploads/2003/01/200301.review.morris.pdf)\n\nThe film was included in *1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die*, edited by [Steven Schneider](https://www.edgepedia.org/steven-schneider), and Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment released it on DVD in 2002 in a widescreen edition preserving the original 1.85:1 aspect ratio.[3](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119107) • [10](https://www.kpl.gov/catalog/item/?i=ent%3A%2F%2FSD_ILS%2F0%2FSD_ILS%3A1126867)\n\n## References\n\n1. [Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, Errol Morris official film page](https://www.errolmorris.com/film/fcooc.html)\n2. [Treasures from the Yale Film Archive program notes, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control](https://web.library.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Fast%20Cheap%20Notes.pdf)\n3. [Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997), IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119107)\n4. [Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, Rotten Tomatoes](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/fast_cheap_and_out_of_control)\n5. [Errol Morris interview, The Sticking Place](https://www.thestickingplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Errol-Morris.pdf)\n6. [Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, review by Todd McCarthy, Daily Variety, January 27, 1997](https://www.errolmorris.com/content/review/fcooc_mccarthy.html)\n7. [Fast, Cheap & Out of Control: Transcript, Errol Morris](https://www.errolmorris.com/film/fcooc_transcript.html)\n8. [Filmmaker Probes Millennial Change of Life, Wired, August 29, 1997](https://www.wired.com/1997/08/filmmaker-probes-millennial-change-of-life/)\n9. [Transom review of Errol Morris (2003)](https://transom.org/wp-content/uploads/2003/01/200301.review.morris.pdf)\n10. [Fast, cheap & out of control, Kalamazoo Public Library catalog](https://www.kpl.gov/catalog/item/?i=ent%3A%2F%2FSD_ILS%2F0%2FSD_ILS%3A1126867)\n11. [https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/280508/an-auteur-in-search-of-four-characters/](https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/280508/an-auteur-in-search-of-four-characters/)\n12. [https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-oct-03-ca-38619-story.html](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-oct-03-ca-38619-story.html)\n13. [https://www.avclub.com/the-new-cult-canon-fast-cheap-out-of-control-1798214019](https://www.avclub.com/the-new-cult-canon-fast-cheap-out-of-control-1798214019)\n14. [https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/fast-cheap-and-out-of-control-1997](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/fast-cheap-and-out-of-control-1997)\n15. [https://preview.reelviews.net/movies/f/fast.html](https://preview.reelviews.net/movies/f/fast.html)\n16. [https://www.sonyclassics.com/fastcheap/synopsis.html](https://www.sonyclassics.com/fastcheap/synopsis.html)\n17. [https://www.the-solute.com/geek-out-fast-cheap-out-of-control-1997/](https://www.the-solute.com/geek-out-fast-cheap-out-of-control-1997/)\n18. [https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2024/09/the-power-of-suggestion/](https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2024/09/the-power-of-suggestion/)\n\n---\n*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Films by genre, form, and subject › Documentary and biographical films › Individual documentary feature films › Nature, science, and environment documentaries*\n\n*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*\n\n*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*\n\nLicense: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license\n", "same_as": [], "url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/fast-cheap-and-out-of-control", "markdown_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/fast-cheap-and-out-of-control.md", "license": { "name": "Edgepedia Community License 1.0", "url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license", "summary": "Free with credit, commercial use included. AI training is open to everyone. For other uses, organizations over USD 100M in revenue or 100M monthly users license separately.", "spdx": "LicenseRef-Edgepedia-Community-1.0" }, "credit": "\"Fast, Cheap & Out of Control\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), https://www.edgepedia.org/fast-cheap-and-out-of-control. Edgepedia Community License 1.0.", "credit_md": "\"[Fast, Cheap & Out of Control](https://www.edgepedia.org/fast-cheap-and-out-of-control)\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), [https://www.edgepedia.org/fast-cheap-and-out-of-control](https://www.edgepedia.org/fast-cheap-and-out-of-control). [Edgepedia Community License 1.0](https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license).", "credit_html": "\"Fast, Cheap & Out of Control\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), https://www.edgepedia.org/fast-cheap-and-out-of-control. Edgepedia Community License 1.0.", "speakable": "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control is Errol Morris's 1997 documentary interweaving a lion tamer, topiary gardener, mole-rat specialist, and MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks, whose 1989 swarm-robots paper gave the film its title." }