I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a change made to a film as a result of previews that improved the film. Oh, I think those changes might have sold more tickets. But they have never improved the film artistically.
Case in point: “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”. You know the scene: Ferris Beuller has hijacked a German parade and sings “Twist and Shout” and just blows everyone away. It’s a clever, hallucinogenic scene, and the high point of the movie before it gets bogged down with the embarrassing and deadening Cameron’s-awful-relationship-with-his-insensitive-uncaring-father subplot. Hughes needed something to lend some gravitas to this otherwise slight but amusing story. He stepped in it.
As Ferris is clowning around on the float, Cameron and Sloane are talking about relationships and how difficult it is for men, and Sloane says it’s easier for girls because, “a girl can always bail out and have a baby and find some guy to support her”. Cameron then says, “that sounds depressing” and Sloane says, “it is depressing, but it’s always an option”.
Don’t remember that piece of acerbic dialogue? Of course not. It’s a powerful, creatively striking, evocative moment. So it must be excised from this entertainment lest audiences are provoked into reflecting on their own little lives and forced to arrive at unpleasant conclusions.
Yes, test audiences– especially girls– hated this line.
Especially, I imagine, pregnant girls sitting right next to their boyfriends.
I would suggest they would not have hated this line at all if it had really been harmless or innocuous or false. They hated this line because it was true, and it revealed too much about how they thought about relationships, and dispelled the adorable little escapist fantasy that so much of the movie provided to them. Just imagine those girls in the audience, sitting next to their boyfriends, and both of them considering that line. And the boy emits a knowing guffaw.
And John Hughes– a disturbingly interesting but always compromised director– caved immediately. And that’s why his movies are never great and never a lasting achievement. They are always entertaining, and often interesting, and often “good”, but never artistically great.
Did you also know that earlier in the movie Ferris Bueller robbed his father? Yes, he removed some mutual fund certificates from a shoe box in his father’s room and took them to the bank and cashed them in, in order to pay for the “day off”. Don’t remember that part of the film? Of course not: it too was filmed, and then removed, because it would have revealed to the audience that Bueller’s “day off” wasn’t free– someone paid for admission to the ball game, and the meal at the French Restaurant, and admission to the Art Institute of Chicago, and it wasn’t Cameron, and, god help us, it wasn’t Sloane.
It might even have suggested to the audience that the people in this world who get to enjoy those thrills are the dishonest, the bankers, the hedge fund managers: Ferris Beuller went to college, got a degree in business administration, and got rich. No wonder Ben Stein, who played the math teacher, and is a well-known conservative Republican pundit, loved the film and thought it was a work of genius. A lot of other people in the cast did not. At least, not until they were told it was great by the media and the audience.
It is a crime that the Cameron subplot was left in– the biggest artistic weakness in the film– and that the strongest pieces of dialogue were excised so we could all feel better about ourselves and the world.
That’s entertainment.
[whohit]John Hughes Caves to the Audience[/whohit]