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Everyone needs a little balance in their lives, but try telling that to the average Hollywood executive, panicked by the latest test screenings which show their sure-fire summer blockbuster is sinking faster than the Lusitania. Luckily, the Movie Doctors are here with their bag of totally legal, mood-altering movies to bring you up or down a notch, on demand. We also have a cure for the needle-phobic. Just tell us what the problem seems to be, and the Movie Doctors can fix it.
UPPERS AND DOWNERS
Movies to Lighten or Darken Your Soul
Working in the media, we see many wrecked and ruined lives. Talented men and women who started so full of hope and promise but who then got sucked into the downward spiral of Big Brother, Keeping Up with the Kardashians and The Week in Westminster.
Occasionally, however, we encounter those happy folk who are too enthusiastic, too keen to progress, too optimistic about their inevitable career path. They smile and bellow from all corners of the building about how their latest idea has been commissioned without even a budget, a presenter or a title. We all come to the reassuring conclusion that there is something very wrong here, some darkness they are dying to conceal.
Whether we are meeting the cheerful or the sad, the Movie Doctors always carry an emergency pack of mood-altering films to bring the desperate and needy back to normality. Here we share them with you so that you too can be prepared to meet life’s ups and downs with equanimity. Let’s start with gloom . . .
DOWNERS
If you suspect that you are being a little too positive at work, if your pay rise was slightly on the generous side and your colleagues admire you just a bit too much, here are some movies to take you down a peg or two. These are depressing films not because they are cheap, badly made or poorly acted, but because they are bleak. Because just reading about them fills your heart with darkness and makes you stare, along with Mr Herzog, into the abyss. Use sparingly and always in a light, airy, well-ventilated room.
ANGELA’S ASHES (1999)
A miserable, poor, wet, sick, violent, cruel Catholic childhood in Limerick becomes slightly less miserable in New York.
Measure of gloom
RING OF BRIGHT WATER (1969)
It’s a pet movie. A pet movie set on the west coast of Scotland starring the Born Free pairing of Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna. We know how this will play out. Bachelor Bill buys an otter called Mij, finds it’s too much of a handful for his small London flat and they move to an idyllic, remote cottage. Virginal Virginia who lives next door falls for them both, and the course of true love is set: man, woman and otter in perfect harmony.
This all works beautifully until Mij is chopped in two by a ditch digger with a spade. It is sudden, brutal and shocking. There has been no build-up, no hint of illness, the otter never coughs or looks depressed. One minute he’s running happily through the peaty bog, the next he’s been dispatched to that otter holt in the sky.
For a U-certificate film, this wretched vision will hit viewers hard. And with Val Doonican singing the title track, this more than deserves its place as a top downer.
Measure of gloom
THE MIST (2007)
No one does misery quite like Stephen King (indeed no one did Misery quite like Stephen King), but the real scaremonger here is screenwriter/director Frank Darabont. If it’s terror, slaughter and hopelessness you need, then The Mist is your film. Some are misled by the fact that the King/Darabont combo produced The Shawshank Redemption, concluding that while there may well be some tough scenes to endure here, ultimately there’ll be an ending to cheer. Maybe even a boat-polishing beach scene to send us home happy. Well, think again. After a storm-induced shopping trip to the local mall, the titular mist rolls in. (Meteorological NB: as the visibility is less than one kilometre, this is not a mist but a fog. But as that would make it The Fog and John Carpenter has already done that, everyone has to call it ‘a mist’. As none of our protagonists mentions a fear of ghostly lepers, we conclude none of them can have seen this 1980 horror film.) Surfing in on the wave of condensed water droplets are spiders, bugs, a many-tentacled thing – and more than a suggestion that our friends in the military are to blame.
King’s novella has an inconclusive ending, but Darabont’s movie is something else. Just when you think the final reel has got as grim as it could possibly get, he delivers a final scene so devoid of hope that you’ll pop back to The Road for some light relief (see p.305).
Measure of gloom
WINTER LIGHT (1963)
If you have worked out the meaning of life and your place in the celestial order, make an appointment to see Pastor Tomas Ericsson. He might have the church and all the right clothes, but that turns out to be misleading. Here’s a priest who, if asked to present ‘Pause For Thought’, would just tell us to end it all now. He can’t stop an anguished fisherman from committing suicide, he can’t take the affection on offer from young Marta and he can’t believe in God any more. The stunning photography and brilliant performances offer some brief consolation before we reflect on the utter meaninglessness of life.
Measure of gloom
WHEN THE WIND BLOWS (1986)
Just because it’s a cartoon doesn’t mean it won’t fill you with despair. Raymond Briggs produced this story when we were still (just about) worried about the pesky Soviets and the cowboy in the White House. Jim and Hilda Bloggs are preparing for the coming nuclear attack with the guidance of leaflets from the government. The voices of John Mills and Peggy Ashcroft reassure us briefly before they both die of radiation poisoning. The only consolation for the modern viewer is that this was all a long time ago, when Russia was thought of as a dangerous country with a crazed leader who had designs on its neighbours. So that’s all right, then . . .
Measure of gloom
UPPERS
Yes, please. The combined effect of all those downers has made the Movie Doctors look more pasty-faced than ever. It is time to prescribe some films that will brighten your life. Films that we are sure will make you feel better about yourself, your neighbour and the world in general (see also ‘Patient Transport’, p.308). Unlike the downers, you may watch as many as you like, as often as you like.
OIL CITY CONFIDENTIAL (2009)
It’s time for some feel-good movies. And for our first choice, an actual, real-life feel-good movie. This Julian Temple documentary about Dr Feelgood has been unfairly pigeonholed as being only for yearning, nostalgic men in their fifties who wish they could still fit the shiny suits they wore in the seventies. Not so. This movie we prescribe for everyone. There is something irresistibly joyous about OCC which demands its inclusion.
It is the story of four guys from Canvey Island, Essex, making music that will lift your soul. The joke was always that a storm had blown through Canvey Island causing millions of pounds’ worth of improvements, but here Temple runs with the gag that the Thames Estuary is linked with the Mississippi Delta. Thus we have the Thames Delta – our very own swampland. This is an upper for all because it is a proper film. Even if you’ve never heard of Dr Feelgood, never been to Canvey Island and never worn a shiny suit, you will leave this movie dancing your way to the nearest oil terminal.
Feel-good factor ALL THE FEELGOODS
THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (1994)
And this, Mr Darabont, is the sort of Stephen King story that we like you working on. Topping endless lists of ‘Best Movie Evs!’ (Dr K wrote a book, made a documentary, and still whinges on endlessly about the ‘tacked-on ending’), The Shawshank Redemption had to make our uppers list. For much of this prison drama you may be wondering why we are prescribing it; as we have observed before, you have to get through a lot of Shawshank before you get any redemption. But there is something so noble about Andy Dufresne and Red (Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman) that even when the baton-wielding, Bible-preaching redneck guards are a-clubbin’ and a-beatin’, we are so warmed by this story of hope that we stay with it. When justice finally rains down on the vile prison warden Norton (Bob Gunton) we are more than ready to whoop and holler.
Red says, ‘You either get busy livin’ or you get busy dyin’,’ and whether you get grumpy at the ending or you just love it as it is, you’ll finish this movie with hope in your heart and the desire to go varnish someone’s boat (not a euphemism).
Feel-good factor
THE COLLECTED WORKS OF RICHARD CURTIS APART FROM THE BOAT THAT ROCKED
If you are walking through town and something lovely happens, that’s Richard Curtis. If your partner says, it’s OK, he forgives you, that’s Richard Curtis. And if as you drive along the A303 you notice a wavy-haired man on his knees proposing to his flaxen-haired girlfriend in the middle of Stonehenge while a boy band mime an Elvis Costello song, that too is Richard Curtis. There is not a single writer, producer or director anywhere who has devoted more time to warm-heartedness than Richard Whalley Anthony Curtis.
This does not mean soppy. This does not mean sugar-coated pap with horrible characters who make you vomit with their nauseating sincerity and po-faced moralising. It just means that he wants to make films about love (yes, actually). Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, About Time, Bridget Jones and even Trash are all movies that will make the world a brighter, less threatening place. Charles gets Carrie and Anna gets William, though Harry messes things up with Karen (careful with that elaborately wrapped necklace).
Feel-good factor
MAMMA MIA! (2008)
My, my, how can we resist you? Is it the best movie in the world? Er, no. Is it the best musical movie in the world? No again. Do any of the cast (Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Amanda Seyfried, Colin Firth et al) get to deliver career-best performances? We think not. However, this film – made in 2008 when the Greeks still had money (even if, as we learned later, it was all ours) – is so bad it is strangely wonderful.
In summary: on a Greek island, Meryl Streep sings the Abba catalogue like it’s Ibsen, Colin Firth can’t dance, Pierce Brosnan can’t sing and Stellan Skarsgård looks like he’s accidentally wandered in from a completely different movie. Fortunately for us, the songs are bombproof and somehow turn this sow’s ear into a celluloid silk purse. Before you know it you are dancing in the aisles and giving money to tramps. Don’t argue, just surrender to your inner dancing queen. Couldn’t escape if you wanted to.
Feel-good factor
SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS (1941)
If you want an ‘upper’ that will impress passing film students, then start here. Written and directed by Preston Sturges, it tells the story of a successful, if shallow, film director John Sullivan (Joel McCrae) who wants to make a film that means something. He worries that maybe all that froth and silliness (Hey Hey in the Hayloft) won’t count for much when the final tally is being calculated. So, much to the horror of his studio bosses who don’t think such a spoiled lightweight like Sullivan can make an ‘issues’ picture, he sets off dressed as a tramp to ‘get real’ (as they never said in 1941). He finds The Girl (Veronica Lake), and together they set off to understand what poor folk are really like.
He is robbed, beaten up, arrested and sentenced to a labour camp. This, as you might realise, is the downer section of the film. But while in the camp he watches a screening of Walt Disney’s Playful Pluto, a 1934 animation noted for a sequence where Pluto gets stuck on some flypaper. The crowd around Sullivan lap it up and he realises that comedy does, after all, have a purpose. He ditches his planned social epic O Brother, Where Art Thou? (yes, this is where it all started) and promises to stick to comedy. He also gets The Girl. As one of the best satires on the morals of Hollywood, your laughs are righteous, intellectual laughs, and so count double. Your recovery is assured.
Feel-good factor
GROUNDHOG DAY (1993)
The Movie Doctors believe that being what some people call ‘grumpy’ is actually just having standards. You’re no longer a child, you barely remember teenage angst and now, with a certain maturity, you find that standards, everywhere, are slipping. You might have put up with it once – when you knew no better – but not now.
The Danes invented the word (grum means cruel) but it’s an American who leads the field here. Few movie stars do ‘grumpy’ better than Bill Murray. He doesn’t even have to say anything, his face is grumpy. One stare at the camera and you know that he’s just very disappointed. With everything. And he has a lot to be disappointed about. He’s a bored weatherman stuck repeating the same day over and over again; a day that starts with the clock radio playing ‘I Got You Babe’ by Sonny and Cher (a trick repeated hilariously by Dr Mayo one fab Radio 1 morn). He’s in love with Andie MacDowell. She thinks he’s a jerk. But as the groundhog in question – ‘Punxsutawney Phil’ – works his magic, Murray uses his time to do good works and compile a list of MacDowell’s favourite things: poems, ice cream flavours, songs etc. She falls for this stuff completely, he toasts world peace and they ‘retire’ for the evening.
You’ll wake up tomorrow happy with your lot, keen to do good deeds and to avoid rodent-based weather forecasting.
Feel-good factor
DIE HARD (1988)
A man in a vest takes on not just mercenaries with mullets (studios take note: that’s a new franchise right there) but a snarling German anarchist (is there any other kind?). There is no doubt that this action movie is a hoot – a feel-good film full of jokes and memorable one-liners. True, there are a quite few deaths, falling bodies, explosions and scenes of general peril, but we never for one second doubt that Bruce Willis’s moral compass is pointed firmly at Righteous North.
Plus! You can luxuriate in an era of outdated terrorists. This is a time where the threat came from the ‘New Provo Front’, ‘Liberté de Quebec’ and ‘Asian Dawn’, who Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber has just read about in Time magazine (he’s only pretending to be a terrorist in order to get the FBI to cut off the power). One viewing of Die Hard and you’ll be bouncing from your bed, hiding your detonators and yelling ‘Yippie-ki-yay, melon farmers!’ You’ll be back at work by morning.
Feel-good factor
KEEP TAKING THE HAPPY PILLS
A Clinical Examination
There’s an old showbiz adage which states that the key to success is to leave an audience wanting more. In movie circles, this has been refined to read ‘leave the audience wanting nothing more’ – to satiate their desires so thoroughly that viewers will leave the cinema on a euphoric high, ready to tell all their friends how fabulous the movie they just saw made them feel. In practical terms, this means ‘leave ’em smiling’ – no matter how grim or downbeat the preceding drama may have been, all will be well if the final reel closes with a life-affirming hug or a pulse-quickening freeze-frame.
The idea that what audiences really want from movies is to make them feel happy, positive, and upbeat is as old as the hills. There’s also nothing new about film-makers giving their audiences exactly what they think they want; as the racy compendium The Good Old Naughty Days (2002) proves, the birth of moving pictures predates the birth of moving pornography by about five minutes – a clear example of early ‘market driven’ movie-making. Yet the idea that the only guarantee of success is to leave viewers ‘feeling good’ has long been a bone of contention, with directors and producers regularly butting heads over the benefits (or otherwise) of ensuring that everything ends happily ever after.
As a case study, let’s look at Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), now widely considered to be one of the most important and innovative science fiction movies of the late twentieth century. Based on a short novel by Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) Blade Runner portrays a dystopian future in which ‘replicants’ rebel against their human creators and demand ‘more life’ when faced with inbuilt obsolescence. The screenplay, written (separately, initially) by Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples, casts android-hunter Rick Deckard as a noirish assassin despatched to track down and eliminate rogue replicants, one of whom he falls in love with. In a classic Romeo and Juliet-style twist, Deckard becomes besotted with the android Rachael, despite knowing that her existence is terminal, and her future finite. As an associate tauntingly tells him, ‘It’s too bad she won’t live, but then again, who does?’
As originally conceived by director Scott, who had previously scored both critical and financial success with his stylish sci-fi shocker Alien (1979), the film was a dark parable about forthcoming ‘dangerous days’ – a discussion of the nature of so-called ‘artificial’ intelligence, and a foreboding look at the potential obsolescence of humanity itself. Unsurprisingly, the story was low on feel-good laughs; set in a desolate near-future besieged by acid rain and advertisements for ‘Off-World’ colonies (an alternative to the misery of Earth), Blade Runner was designed to unsettle its audience, to leave them pondering the mysteries of their humanity while dazzling them with all-too-believable snapshots of a disturbingly plausible future.
For the title role of Deckard, Scott cast Harrison Ford, still hot from the sci-fi success of Star Wars (1977), which had introduced a new generation of viewers to the crowd-pleasing thrills of a Buck Rogers serial. From the outset, Scott and Ford were at loggerheads, the actor believing that his director was more interested in lighting a shot than in engaging with his cast. In 2000, Scott explained to Dr Kermode that ‘I was not given then to spending a lot of time on explanation and stroking. I’ve got too much to do to get what I want, because I have a performance as well.’ Indeed, it wasn’t until the days of Thelma & Louise (1991) that Scott would begin to be considered an ‘actor’s director’, the visual style of his early films apparently taking precedence over his interaction with the performers.
One of the key disagreements between Scott and Ford was the true nature of Deckard’s character. Although it was never made explicit in the original script, Scott had become obsessed with the idea that Deckard was himself an android, a replicant hunting his own kind, with no knowledge of his own artificial nature.
This tantalising idea is not quite as groundbreaking as it sounds. A robot hater turns out to be a robot himself at the end of The Creation of the Humanoids (1962), and many other stories, films and TV episodes have the same twist – including ‘Demon With a Glass Hand’ (The Outer Limits, 1964), which was filmed in the Bradbury Building, just like Blade Runner. In fact, the theme of Deckard’s artificiality (which is not present in Dick’s source) had been introduced accidentally by the screenwriters, who had misunderstood each other’s rewrites – both have credited the other with coming up with the idea, as is evidenced in Dr Kermode’s 2000 documentary, On the Edge of Blade Runner. For Scott, this was a eureka moment, a way to crack the enigma of Dick’s source and cut to the heart of the story’s central man-vs.-machine dichotomy. Indeed, it proved a talismanic riddle in his original cut of Blade Runner, which ended with Deckard and Rachael (Sean Young) exiting into the darkness of an uncertain future, her death assured, his implied . . .
Artistically, this ending made perfect sense. But having spent tens of millions of dollars funding Scott’s ever-expanding epic, financiers wanted to be certain that the finished film would go down well with the same audiences who had whooped and cheered at Harrison’s Han Solo role in Star Wars. Test cards from early preview screenings, however, revealed that viewers were both depressed and confused; depressed by the downbeat nature of the story, and confused by the twists and turns of the plot, which seemed to them utterly incomprehensible.
Worried that the movie was going to sink, the film-makers embarked upon hasty recuts, adding an explanatory voice-over (a generic concession which had its roots in early script drafts), removing Deckard’s inhuman origins, and – most ridiculously – concocting an utterly stupid happy ending in which Rachael is granted a new lease of life and the lovers escape into unpolluted nature to live happily ever after. Calling upon the assistance of Stanley Kubrick, Scott used out-take footage from the opening sequence of The Shining (1980) to conjure up an entirely new finale featuring shots of rolling hills, over which Deckard and Rachael’s triumph over all odds could be played. In this new version, Blade Runner ends on an unambiguously upbeat note, the lovers united for ever despite the previous action which had made absolutely clear that no such resolution could ever be reached.
The new ending was utter baloney, but as far as the test cards were concerned it was what the audience wanted, and that was that.
As it turned out, most audiences didn’t want Blade Runner, with or without its new happy ending. During its first-run theatrical release the movie spectacularly failed to recoup its extravagant costs, leaving its financiers in the red, and leaving Scott with the stigma of having helmed an expensive flop.
It wasn’t until some years later, when an earlier cut of Blade Runner was screened (almost by accident) to an adoring audience, that Scott’s prophetic instincts were proved right. Reissued in variously recut forms (the ‘Director’s Cut’ and so-called ‘Final Cut’) Blade Runner became a belated cult hit, praised by fans for its bleak, uncompromising tone and hailed by critics as one of the most important genre movies of the decade. Today, it is almost impossible to watch a big-budget sci-fi movie without seeing Scott’s trademark fingerprints everywhere you look. Just as 2001 changed the look and feel of sci-fi for a generation, so Blade Runner became the creative font from which all future fantasies would draw.
The fact that giving Blade Runner a happy ending didn’t make it a hit would seem to prove once and for all that Hollywood’s infatuation with an upbeat finale is at best misplaced, and at worst plain bonkers. Yet the history of modern cinema is littered with examples of producers attempting to make movies ‘better’ (and in the process making them much, much worse) by slapping a happy face onto the end of the final reel.
Take the case of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985). A tragicomic vision of an Orwellian future (the film was once saddled with the potential alternative title Nineteen Eighty-Four and a Half), Gilliam’s masterpiece was centrally concerned with the triumph of imagination over reality. Its anti-hero Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) is a near-future office worker who falls in love with the rebellious Jill Layton (Kim Greist) only to be crushed by the forces of a faceless totalitarian authority which tramples individual human emotion under a mountain of bureaucratic red tape. While the script boasted a celebration of the liberating power of artifice and invention, the plot follows an inexorable path toward physical imprisonment; the body suffering while the mind is set free.
A graduate of the hugely successful Monty Python team, Gilliam had already racked up directing credits on Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Jabberwocky (1977) and Time Bandits (1981), the last of which had taken over $40 million in the US – a handsome return on its $5 million budget. Viewed by executives at Universal as a maverick talent with crossover potential, Gilliam had received the green light to go ahead with Brazil despite the dark undertones of its uncompromising script. But when production was completed, executive Sid Sheinberg declared that Brazil required savage re-editing and (most importantly) a new, happy ending.
As per Gilliam’s version (released internationally by Fox), Brazil ends with the bound and tortured Sam Lowry escaping the horrors of the real world by drifting into a fantastical reverie. Imagining an action-packed jailbreak led by Robert De Niro’s anarchic heating engineer Harry Tuttle, the film’s final movement sees Sam and Jill break out of the stifling confines of the city into the lush greenery of the countryside – only to cut back suddenly to Sam still in the clutches of the authorities, a catatonic smile on his face, humming the film’s recurrent theme ‘Aquarela do Brasil’. ‘He’s got away from us,’ observes Deputy Minister Mr Helpmann (Peter Vaughan), the camera pulling back to show Sam in the vast and terrifying surroundings of the ‘Information Retrieval’ room (Croydon B Power Station providing an ominous location), his body bound, his mind . . . broken?
Dear Sid Sheinberg
When are you going to release my film, ‘BRAZIL’?
Terry Gilliam
It’s an extremely powerful ending, which can be read either as a stark celebration of the liberating power of imagination, or as a bleak admission that the forces of evil will always prevail in the ‘real’ world. In this version of the film, Jill has in fact been ‘killed resisting arrest’ (‘the odd thing is it appears to have happened twice . . .’) and Sam is once again alone in a cold and uncaring world, defeated by bureaucracy, corruption and incompetence. Only in his dreams can he prevail over the forces of darkness, while on Earth chaos reigns.
Sheinberg, who had problems with the whole film, absolutely hated this ending. As far as he was concerned, no audience would want to watch a movie which concluded that the real world was a nightmare in which lovers are crushed by jackbooted authoritarianism. For Sheinberg, it was essential that Sam and Jill wind up together, that their ‘happy ending’ be real rather than imaginary.
What followed is now known in popular movie parlance as The Battle of Brazil, the title of an utterly engrossing tome by Jack Matthews documenting in forensic detail Gilliam’s fight to get his version of the film released in America. Breaking the movie business code of ‘omertà’ which decrees that disagreements between film-makers and financiers shall be kept behind closed doors (for fear of damaging a movie’s potential profitability), Gilliam organised unauthorised screenings of his cut of Brazil for critics, causing the influential Los Angeles Film Critics Association to honour it with their award for Best Picture, even as Universal dithered about its US opening. While Sheinberg continued to fiddle away with his own cut of Brazil (now known as the ‘Love Conquers All’ cut), Gilliam took out a full-page advert in the influential trade publication Variety which read simply:
Dear Sid Sheinberg
When are you going to release my film, ‘BRAZIL’?
Terry Gilliam
In the end, Sheinberg was forced to back down, and Brazil went on to become one of the most enduring cult movies of the late twentieth century (although it performed poorly at the US box office on initial release). As for Sheinberg’s ‘Love Conquers All’ cut, it finally found its way onto US TV before becoming something of a curio amongst Gilliam completists, an ‘additional feature’ on laserdisc, DVD and Blu-ray releases, interesting primarily for its wide-eyed awfulness.
Of course, there’s nothing new about studios’ desire to give their movies a happy ending. Back in 1942, the makers of Casablanca tied themselves up in knots trying to figure out a way in which Rick and Ilsa could end up together, rather than have Humphrey Bogart put Ingrid Bergman on a plane with the assurance that ‘we’ll always have Paris’. Throughout the production, the writers wrestled with possible solutions, which ranged from Ilsa’s husband Victor being conveniently killed in the third act, to Ilsa simply declaring, ‘Ah to hell with it, I’m staying’ and running back down the runway into Rick’s waiting arms. The problem back in the censorious forties was that the idea of an adulterous woman deciding to leave her husband and shack up with a seedy bar owner was simply intolerable. So, despite the fact that everyone wanted the lovers to end up together, decorum decreed that they had to part. Today, no such moral squeamishness exists; if someone remade Casablanca in the twenty-first century, the final shot would probably be Rick and Ilsa sharing a post-coital cigarette while Victor made goo-goo eyes at the stewardess on his departing plane.
Fast-forward to 1990, and the rewards of keeping the audience happy, happy, happy are perfectly demonstrated by the case of Pretty Woman. In its original inception, this feel-good hit (which took close to half a billion dollars in cinemas worldwide on a production budget of $14 million) was a rather darker tale of drugs and prostitution. J.F. Lawton’s screenplay was written under the working title 3000 – the amount of money rich businessman Edward Lewis pays hooker Vivian Ward to pose as his girlfriend for a week – and ended with the couple going their separate ways, each back to their own very different worlds.
Rising star Julia Roberts was famously unimpressed by Lawton’s original script. According to her, it was ‘a really dark and depressing, horrible, terrible story about two horrible people, and my character was this drug addict, a bad-tempered, foulmouthed, ill-humored, poorly educated hooker who had this weeklong experience with a foulmouthed, ill-tempered, bad-humored, very wealthy, handsome but horrible man, and it was just a grisly, ugly story about these two people.’
Sounds like fun, huh?
It was movie mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg who insisted that Lawton’s script be rewritten as a romantic comedy, a modern retelling of the Pygmalion myth which had inspired George Bernard Shaw’s play, and in turn the hit musical (both stage and screen) My Fair Lady (1964). Out-takes from the shoot suggest that Vivian’s character was sweetened ever further in the edit (a scene in which she tells Edward, ‘I could just pop ya good and be on my way’ hit the floor), producer Laura Ziskin pushing for both protagonists to be made more sympathetic, more likeable, more . . . fun! As for the ending, while Lawton had written a bittersweet pay-off which found Vivian taking the bus to Disneyland with her sex-worker best friend, the laws of profitability demanded something altogether more upbeat. Thus, the movie now ends with Richard Gere climbing up a fire escape (significantly overcoming his fear of heights – see ‘Phobias’, p.84) to wrap Vivian in his arms and sweep her off to a new life of wealth, privilege and everlasting love.
This fairy-tale ending makes no dramatic sense whatsoever, but audiences swooned to its ‘Love Conquers All’ message, turning the movie into a global phenomenon. In the wake of Pretty Woman’s extraordinary box office success, studios suddenly started throwing money at the romcom genre in the hope of repeating its magical winning formula. Indeed, it’s arguable that the resurgence of romcoms as one of the most reliably lucrative staples of modern cinema was down to Pretty Woman – and its happy, sappy ending.
Other examples of producers wanting to leave the audience smiling are rather more subtle. In 1997, British director Iain Softley filmed a brilliant adaptation of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove which drew critical plaudits for its strong performances, insightful screenwriting and outstanding production values. The film follows an increasingly embittered early twentieth-century love triangle between the scheming Kate Croy (Helena Bonham Carter), the terminally ill Milly Theale (Alison Elliott) and the morally wavering Merton Densher (Linus Roache). Holidaying together in a ravishingly picturesque Venice, Kate persuades long-time suitor Merton to seduce Milly in order to secure a place in her will. But when left alone with the goodhearted Milly, Merton finds his affections unexpectedly engaged. By the time Kate and Merton finally get what they thought they wanted, their dreams have melted into dust.
Intelligently scripted by Hossein Amini, Softley’s film finished on a boldly nihilistic note: a scene of lovemaking notable for its sense of desperation and darkness, a daring and provocative finale to a richly insightful adaptation. Miramax mainstay Harvey Weinstein loved the film, and thought it had Oscar potential. But he was also anxious about the whole ‘desperation and darkness’ thing – particularly since it was the film’s parting shot. Working on the basis that audiences leaving a theatre can only remember the very last thing they saw (a maxim which has proved surprisingly enduring in Hollywood), Weinstein thought that it would be a good idea to remind viewers what a lovely, scenic time they had had in Venice before everything turned to moral torpor and desolation back in Blighty; to get them talking about the ravishing costumes and eye-catchingly romantic settings which he believed to be one of the film’s major selling points.
Thus, Hands-on Harvey ‘suggested’ to Softley that instead of the final fade to black which currently ended his movie, the screen should return once more to an image of Venice, leaving the audience with a vision of the beautiful Milly in a shimmering gondola while an out-of-context voice-over spoke of love from beyond the grave. Softley resisted, knowing that such a coda was hardly in keeping with his carefully constructed vision. But Weinstein pushed the matter, insisting that unless moviegoers left the theatre with thoughts of upbeat romance (rather than downbeat moral squalor) the all-important ‘word of mouth’ would suffer. Eventually, Softley relented and devised a way of including the Venetian footage without spoiling his otherwise flawless film. Duly appeased, Weinstein threw his far-from-inconsiderable weight behind The Wings of the Dove, which went on to bag four Oscar nominations and five BAFTA nods.
Of course, the problem with artificially enhancing a film’s happy-quotient is that, like antidepressants, the effects can be short lived. Would Love Story (1970) have stood the weepy test of time if Ali McGraw’s Jenny had been miraculously cured of her illness at the end? Would teenage girls have flocked to see Titanic (1997) time and time again if Kate Winslet’s Rose had found a piece of wood big enough for two, and Leo hadn’t sunk like a stone to the bottom of the ocean? Would Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) have achieved its classic status if our heroes had managed to give the Bolivians the slip? (In fact, the famous freeze-frame ending of George Roy Hill’s much-loved Western was already a concession to positivity, replacing the brutal, bloody death scenes which were originally planned.)
Perhaps the most celebrated case of a nonsensically changed ending is that of Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction (1987), which got a whole new third act after preview audiences decided that they couldn’t be doing with Glenn Close’s bunny-boiler taking her own life and then framing Michael Douglas’s philandering husband from beyond the grave – which is what happened in James Dearden’s original script. Already tweaked prior to filming (he’s arrested, but then his wife finds evidence proving his innocence), Fatal Attraction dismayed test viewers who wanted to see Anne Archer ‘Kill the bitch!’ before closing on a reassuring close-up of a happy family photo (group hug, everyone!). The revised ending is terrible, but proved horribly effective, helping Fatal Attraction to become a box office smash around the world. Except in Japan, where they got the original (and better) ending, on the grounds of enhanced ‘cultural compatibility’ . . .
Really.
In the end, we are left with the question of whether it’s always better to be happy, or whether there is a time and a place for good honest misery. Should movie doctors prescribe antidepressants willy-nilly just because they may improve a film’s box office potential, even if doing so means effectively lobotomising the movie? Do we really want our entertainment to arrive with the rictus grin of enforced jollity, or should directors be able to claim that it’s their party and they’ll cry if they want to?
Frankly, when it comes to cinema, happiness is overrated.
THIS WON’T HURT A BIT
We Need to Talk About Needles
Come in. Nice to see you. Do sit down. Roll up your sleeve. It’s just a brief exchange in your local surgery, but you know what’s coming next. You’ll just feel a little prick . . . And that’s precisely the point at which you run kicking and screaming through the waiting room. Or you stamp on the hypodermic needle, breaking it in two. Or maybe fight the nurse for the syringe before plunging it deep into her neck . . .
This is why we need to talk about needles. We know you aren’t one of those crazed anti-vaxxers – that would be ridiculous. There are many who suffer from trypanophobia and have no one to turn to for comfort and treatment; you have the Movie Doctors. We have hit upon a rather extreme treatment which may well not be to everyone’s taste, but we believe it works. We have found three of the most extreme needle-related movie scenes. If you can survive these, then the next time you need a vaccination you won’t be so weedy. Watch with the lights on, the sound low and holding hands with your honey.
PULP FICTION (1994)
You’ve just snorted something that wasn’t a nasal spray (you being Uma Thurman, by the way). Turns out it wasn’t cocaine either, but heroin. You are a class A chump. When your friend realises what you’ve done (he’s John Travolta, obviously), he whips out a syringe and (after an excruciating delay while he indulges in some typical Tarantino dialogue) stabs you in the heart. He then injects you with Adrenalin and you instantly recover. The science here is dodgy to say the least, but the fact that you’d actually be dead is not our main concern (you weren’t really in any shape to point out that there is no treatment in modern medicine that requires a medic to stick a needle in your heart). What you need to focus on here is the lingering, loving close-ups of the super-sized, 6-inch needle dripping with ‘Adrenalin’ (it’s actually Epinephrine, but could be 7 Up for all you care).
Lesson learned When you are next in the surgery, your experience will not be like this. You won’t be on the floor unconscious, you won’t be stabbed in the chest, you won’t come round with the hypodermic still deep in your rib cage. Time to move on.
DEAD AND BURIED (1981)
So you’ve survived the heartache of Pulp Fiction, now you’re ready for the next step in your desensitising. Keeping the lights on (actually turn them up, maybe plug in some more), let’s try the 1981 horror film Dead and Buried. A number of gruesome murders have taken place in a small town called Potters Bluff. General nastiness is the order of the day as a series of grisly scenes play out (stabbing, poking, very large rocks) but the scene we need is (inevitably) in the hospital. Our poor patient has suffered terribly and is covered with bandages. The only part of them exposed is the left eye. When a sweet-looking nurse arrives, momentarily we think all will be well. But when she says ‘Just lie still. I’m going to give you something to make you feel even better’ and produces the mega-syringe, we know what’s about to happen.
Lesson learned Being stabbed in the eye by a crazed nurse with a 9cm needle is a rare occurrence these days. The American healthcare reforms have largely eliminated homicidal maniacs pretending to be medics. Rest easy.
FIRE IN THE SKY (1993)
Last one. You’ve done so well. The final test comes with the last fifteen minutes of this 1993 science fiction horror yarn based on an alleged true story. It’s Arizona, there are loggers and there’s a UFO. Main logger guy is abducted but released after apparently undergoing a session with the aliens that makes Potters Bluff look like Notting Hill. Abattoir-loving spacemen with tortoise heads cover him with a membrane, then reach for their handyman selection of clamps, drills and chisels. Just as logger guy is thinking he might get away with a little extra-terrestrial Botox, the galaxy’s biggest drill descends from the ceiling. It is mounted with – you guessed it – an enormous needle, and it is heading straight for his right eye. There’s a deafening clanging that fills the room and logger guy gets his Gloucester-in-King-Lear moment.
Lesson learned All things considered, it isn’t that different to flying Ryanair.
LAUGHING GAS
Movies to Tickle the Funny Bone
Downbeat endings may be ‘artistically valid’, but there are times when an audience just wants to laugh. On those occasions when only Dr Giggles will do (though not Dr Giggles, the terrible slasher movie), Doctors Kermode and Mayo prescribe . . .
LAUREL AND HARDY IN THE MUSIC BOX (1932)
‘Get that piano out of that box!’
BUSTER KEATON IN THE GENERAL (1926)
Keaton loads a cannon which promptly takes aim at him in one of silent cinema’s most celebrated runaway train gags.
GENE WILDER’S ‘FRONKENSTEEN’ AND MARTY FELDMAN’S IGOR IN YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)
‘Tonight we shall ascend into the heavens, we shall mock the earthquake, we shall command the thunders, and penetrate into the very womb of impervious nature herself!’
WOODY ALLEN AND DIANE KEATON IN ANNIE HALL (1977)
‘I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.’
