WARNING: May contain traces of SPOILERS...
There's a famous story, one of the most famous film stories ever, about the time George Lucas, still recovering from a shoot so arduous he didn't direct another movie for 20 years, invited a bunch of his favourite movie friends over for an early screening of Star Wars at his home in San Anselmo. Whether the story's true or not is not really that important in the scheme of things. Truths and untruths about the gestation of Star Wars have long since merged into one, overriding any sense of proportion about what is, in the cold light of day, an entirely pleasant piece of sci-fi fluff but little more. Anyway, to be fair, this really was a long, long time ago. Back in March 1977, in fact, before midichlorians, before Jar Jar Binks, before Boss Nass and the soggy swamp monsters of Naboo and all the other junk that came to represent the worst of the Lucasfilm pomp and excess derided by fanboys everywhere.
The screening was nothing short of a disaster. The editing was rough, the sound effects shoddy and the performances functional to say the least. Perhaps most crushing of all, there was just no sense of the scale of the thing. At this point in post-production, the ultimately groundbreaking visual effects by a fledgling Industrial Light & Magic were still nowhere near completion, so in addition to flogging a hokey B-movie narrative and showcasing some of the most chin-grindingly mundane dialogue ever committed to celluloid, the movie just looked cheap and incomplete, its visual spectacle a twinkle in the eye of its troubled creator. Lucas even had to resort to splicing B-roll footage of WWII dogfights into key action sequences in an attempt to replicate the unfinished shots and convey on-screen the very real, very intimate human drama of intergalactic warfare in a galaxy far, far away.
None of this went down particularly well with the cine-literate audience gathered in San Anselmo. The screening was so calamitous that George Lucas's wife Marcia allegedly burst into tears, declaring the entire project a write-off. "It's the At Long Last Love of science-fiction, it's awful," she said. Let's be honest, when your own wife hates your movie, you might as well just take taking a running jump off the end of the Hollywood sign and hope for a swift and merciful death at the hands of Pauline Kael. Brian De Palma famously didn't get it at all (but then again, Brian De Palma directed The Black Dahlia & Femme Fatale, so perhaps his scepticism shouldn't be taken too seriously.)
There was, however, one lone dissenting voice in the crowd and that belonged to Steven Spielberg, himself deep into post on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which even at the time was seen as the more serious, thoughtful rival to Lucas's indulgent space western. Spielberg fell in love with the movie straight away. It's no secret that Spielberg admired Lucas's simple, direct style of film-making, albeit begrudgingly. He's since gone on record as saying, "I was most jealous of George," he says, "because I thought and still do to this day, I just thought American Graffiti was the best American film I'd seen." There and then, he predicted that Star Wars would make over $100 million, and later that year he was proven right when Star Wars went on to join Spielberg's own monster hit Jaws as one of the biggest box-office bonanzas of all time.
The point is that when it comes to telling the difference between a hit and a flop, no one knows anything. Unless they're Steven Spielberg. For years now, Spielberg has been Hollywood's harbinger of box-office success. The guy simply knows what audiences want to see. Not niche, discerning, audiences, the kind of people who would rather eat a rat's ass than watch the latest Michael Bay. But mainstream, Saturday-night audiences, folk who only see a handful of movies every year at the multiplex and almost always with a massive bucket of popcorn resting on their lap.
Just ask Oren Peli, the writer/director of last year's breakout horror hit Paranormal Activity. According to reports, a screener of the movie made its way to Spielberg while Paramount were negotiating terms with Peli, specifically whether the movie should be remade on a bigger budget or put on general release in its existing cheap and cheerful form. Allegedly, shortly after watching the film, Spielberg noticed that the door to an empty bedroom had inexplicably locked, convincing him that the movie itself was haunted. Just to be sure, the screener DVD was returned to the studio in a large bin bag. Because we all know plastic bin bags are anathema to the supernatural, right?
Sure, Spielberg's reaction was nothing compared to Billy Graham's accusation that real life demons were living inside the reels of The Exorcist back in 1974. Even so, his close encounter not only convinced Paramount to take the movie to theatres without being reshot from scratch, it allowed him to pitch an entirely different, more cinematic ending to Peli for inclusion in the final edit. Several closing scenes were shot but after pretty extensive testing, it's Spielberg's ending that ultimately wowed cinema audiences over the world on the film's eventual release at the back-end of 2009. Why? Because it was better.
There are two "original" endings to Paranormal Activity apparently in existence. In the first, which downplays the "ghost story" aspects and pitches the film as a "real-life" slasher tale, a deranged Kate kills her husband Micah following an off-camera fight in the living room of the house and then gets shot when the police storm the house in the closing moments. The second ending shows Kate actually slashing her own throat on-screen after killing Micah, thus injecting some genuine gore into something that had, up to that point, been more about suspense than blood and guts. It's Spielberg's finale, however, in which there's no doubt whatsoever about Kate's possession, that delivers on the paranormal expectations of the title and allows the film to create its own new horror mythology i.e launch a franchise. And it worked. To the tune of $178 million worldwide. That's a lot of money when the initial cut of the film cost just $15 thousand.
Peli's next effort will be another low-budget "found footage" movie, this time telling the story of three teenagers who undertake their own investigation of Area 51...Maybe he heard that Spielberg knows a few things about alien movies...
(Incidentally, if want a completely different take on The Beard i.e. not the usual puffery you'll read in the mainstream film press, go and purchase the sensational Julia Phillips autobiography/bitchfest You'll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again with immediate haste. Phillips produced some of the biggest movies ever, including The Sting, Taxi Driver and Spielberg's own Close Encounters of the Third Kind and her memoir is a massively entertaining, no-holds-barred portrait of the coke-stained world of 70s Hollywood. Phillips died of cancer in 2002 but not before slinging an admirable amount bile and of ire in the general direction of the industry that made her. She was amazing, if a little cuckoo. I think she may have even been a Republican, which everyone held against her.)
No comments:
Post a Comment