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
