Mister D: Some may not want to read this, but it is news and provides a glimpse behind the movie-making business…fascinating read
June 6, 2004
New York Times
By NANCY GRIFFIN
LOS ANGELES
EVERYONE in Hollywood knows that drama is difficult but comedy is harder. And dark comedy is hardest of all.
Ask anyone at Paramount Pictures — just don’t expect them to speak on the record. Paramount’s bucolic lot this spring felt a bit like an expensive sanitarium, with employees and visitors speculating in hushed tones on the progress of a high-profile patient.
The patient was “The Stepford Wives,” the studio’s $90 million remake of the 1975 cult thriller about suburban husbands who turn their wives into sexy robots. Scott Rudin, the producer, and Frank Oz, the director, hired Nicole Kidman, Bette Midler, Matthew Broderick, Christopher Walken and Glenn Close to star in a comic reinvention of the original tale, based on Ira Levin’s novel. But according to interviews with several people connected with the production, the film has been one of the most troubled projects in years. Not wishing to jeopardize their relationships with the studio, they all insisted on speaking off the record. Neither the director, the producer nor the stars were made available for interviews about “The Stepford Wives.” And even a Paramount spokesman refused to be quoted by name when he insisted, “We are very, very happy with this movie.” Such official distancing is extraordinary for a studio with a big summer release to promote.
Playing the role of chief doctor has been Paramount’s chairwoman, Sherry Lansing, who once envisioned “The Stepford Wives” as a key part of her plan to reinvigorate the studio. Last year Ms. Lansing kept close tabs on the movie’s Connecticut-based shoot, which went over schedule by two months and was plagued by contention between Mr. Oz and the actors.
Since then, the movie has been in Hollywood’s version of intensive care, undergoing a protracted series of test screenings interspersed with editing-room surgeries. A month before Friday’s opening, Mr. Oz and Mr. Rudin were shooting new scenes — inserts and an epilogue — in New York.
While the prognosis may be uncertain, history suggests that “The Stepford Wives” isn’t necessarily a lost cause. A surprising number of movies have been saved in the editing room. Exposed film is merely raw material; stories are shaped and brought to life after the cameras stop rolling. Directors have many tools to work with: characters can be deleted or enhanced, subplots can be dropped or expanded, endings changed, special effects added or taken out. This is especially true with comedies, whose delicate alchemy is often achieved only after multiple revisions. “Annie Hall,” one of the most beloved of American romantic comedies, was originally shot as a murder mystery. In the editing room, Woody Allen decided to drop the murder and concentrate on the romance between his character and Diane Keaton’s.
Veteran Hollywood comedy makers say they rely on a variety of remedies — from cosmetic tweaking to amputation — in the editing room. The results range widely, too, from sublime classics to bizarre salvage jobs. While the makers of “The Stepford Wives” are working to rescue their film in strict secrecy, here is a guide to the techniques they have at their disposal:
TWEAK EVERY JOKE Comedy is the only movie genre with a reliable formula for success: roughly, more laughs, more box office. Comedies are test-screened early and often so that their timing can be micro-massaged to accentuate every laugh and minimize the dead spots. “You can’t judge a comedy without an audience,” says the producer Polly Platt (“Broadcast News”).
The months of “Stepford Wives” test screenings may seem at first to be another symptom of a poll-driven culture. But comedy makers have been recasting, reshooting and re-editing based on research screenings since Mack Sennett churned out his silent shorts in the 20’s. The difference is that in the old days, the process was private. Now, to their horror, directors and producers can leave a test screening, drive home and log on to Internet sites like aintitcoolnews.com or imdb.com to read a scathing instant review of their work-in-progress. “It has a `Death Becomes Her’ feel to it,” wrote one participant in a “Stepford” screening, “but the performances don’t measure up. If you really want to laugh a lot, look elsewhere.”
The director Jerry Zucker says that he was depressed by the first test screening of “Airplane” even without the presence of aintitcoolnews. “We did it at Paramount with a recruited audience, and it was terrible. It was the first movie we’d directed and it was over two hours long. The executives were saying `Well, you’ve got your work cut out for you.’ ”
But the potential rewards more than justify the temporary humiliation. According to the producer Tom Pollock (“Old School”), audiences will forgive weak characters or plotting if a comedy delivers several belly laughs, including one at the beginning. Those can best be arrived at through testing. “There’s Something About Mary” was extensively test-screened, and, Mr. Pollock says, “Each big laugh translated into about $20 million.”
CHANGE THE ENDING When Mr. Rudin and his screenwriter, Paul Rudnick, revamped “The Stepford Wives” as a dark comedy, they knew the movie’s original horror ending would have to be changed. But what would it be? The filmmakers aimed at something both startling and hilarious. Two possibilities were written, shot, edited and screened; special effects were added that didn’t play well and were yanked out.
Leaving her options open is something Ms. Lansing has been known for ever since she produced “Fatal Attraction” and shot a new ending after test audiences expressed a craving for revenge. When the first, three-hour cut of “The First Wives Club” played poorly, new scenes were written and shot and a voice-over narration by Diane Keaton added. The movie grossed more than $100 million, cementing Ms. Lansing’s reputation as a savvy purveyor of mainstream “zeitgeist” movies for women.
Comedy audiences can be surprisingly moralistic, demanding justice when they disapprove of a character’s behavior. The original ending of “My Best Friend’s Wedding” was repugnant to screening recruits, who felt that the Julia Roberts character did not adequately repent for her selfishness. “They didn’t think Julia had gotten her just comeuppance,” says Mr. Zucker, who produced the film. “They felt she was still lying. So we changed it. It made a huge difference.” Ms. Roberts’s teary-eyed redemption scene translated into $126 million.
FIX THE TONE When satire turns into caricature, or dark comedy becomes too horrific, audiences are perplexed. One of a director’s most important functions is to maintain tonal consistency. Stanley Kubrick originally intended “Dr. Strangelove,” the apotheosis of cinematic satire, to end with a giant food fight in the war room. But when he screened the scene, he felt it tipped the movie from satire into farce, and he cut it.
As a dark comedy, “The Stepford Wives” falls into the most bedeviling category of all — trying to make death, destruction and dismemberment funny. One person close to “Stepford Wives” says the movie is reaching for a “Douglas Sirk meets David Lynch” feeling — lush, hip visuals with melodramatic resonance combined with absurdist black humor. Robert Zemeckis attempted a similar balancing act with his wildly uneven “Death Becomes Her.” Mr. Zemeckis extensively reworked his send-up of the quest for eternal youth, starring Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn, in post-production. He excised a subplot featuring Tracey Ullman and reshot the ending after audiences couldn’t understand what was so bad about living forever. Mr. Zemeckis marshaled all his skill with special effects to stage a ghoulish new conclusion. But “Death Becomes Her” didn’t connect with a large audience; it is one of Mr. Zemeckis’s least successful films commercially.
Harry Knowles, the creator of aintitcoolnews, points out that black comedy tends to appeal to connoisseurs rather than mass audiences. ” ‘The War of the Roses” did not test well, but the people who love it really love it,” he says of the comic film about avicious divorce. No dark comedy has ever reached the status of blockbuster.
Ms. Platt, who was one of that film’s producers, recalls that in test screenings, “people found the deaths of the two main characters hard to swallow. But instead of changing the ending, shooting something where they meet in heaven or something, we kept in anything that got a laugh. We attempted to make them as likable as possible, to work against the darkness, because the balance was crucial.”
The test audience did wrest one concession from the filmmakers. After the husband accidentally kills the wife’s cat, she gets her revenge by serving him a plate of paté with crackers. “This is delicious,” he says, “what is it?” “Woof,” she replies, letting him know that he is snacking on his beloved mutt. Research audiences were so appalled by the scene that the filmmakers added a shot of the still-living dog later in the film.
RESHOOT Last month, Paramount made an unpleasant decision about “Stepford Wives” — new footage was necessary to smooth out transitions and add a comic coda. Ms. Kidman, then making another film, was obliged to put on her “Stepford” wigs again. Such reshoots can be costly, and are inevitably construed as a sign that a movie is in trouble. But studios prefer to see the costs as necessary expenses to protect their investment. Mr. Pollock says that nearly every comedy directed by his partner, Ivan Reitman (“Meatballs,” “Twins”), required reshoots. “We budget for reshoots,” says Mr. Pollock.
SHIFT THE GENRE On occasion, a movie has been so drastically altered after testing that it jumped genres. Recruits walked out of screenings of James L. Brooks’s “I’ll Do Anything,” his musical comedy about Hollywood, when Albert Brooks and Julie Kavner burst into song. The director agonized, but eventually cut the songs out. “I’ll Do Anything” was released as a romantic comedy; despite many charming moments, it remains a fascinating failure.
While Mr. Brooks, a comedy virtuoso, was unable to save his movie, some filmmakers have been lucky simply to save their shirts. The producer Jerry Bruckheimer devised a clever way to rescue his sexy mob caper set in the Australian outback, “Down and Under,” after it tested poorly. He took the movie’s most appealing character, an animatronic kangaroo, and spent another $10 million enhancing it with computer imagery and making it talk. Released last year as “Kangaroo Jack,” the PG-rated picture drew complaints from parents who objected to its violence and off-color jokes — not to mention Estella Warren in a wet T-shirt. “Kangaroo Jack” will never be seen as a great children’s entertainment. But Mr. Bruckheimer made his money back.
Nancy Griffin wrote HIT AND RUN with Kim Masters.
