5 Times The Studio Actually Knew What Was Best For The Movie

More specifically, Back To The Future used a nuclear explosion to move Marty McFly around in time. To get back to 1985, Marty was actually supposed to move forward in time from a real life historical 1952 atomic test ... in a lead-lined refrigerator. It's an idea that still causes Steven Spielberg to wake up in cold sweats.

Paramount Pictures
"Oh my god. I had a terrible nightmare. I put Harrison Ford in a fridge and then I ... oh no."

Recognizing the lunacy of showing how cool it was to climb in refrigerators in a movie targeted at least in part to children, as well as the absurd cost of mocking up an atomic test, the studio suggested they make the time machine more mobile and, well, not a giant radioactive explosion. Also, cruising in a magic science car is a little more charming than being propelled into your journey by nuclear horror. Boom (heh), instant icon.

Oh, and because it isn't just about the money: Doc Brown also had a pet chimpanzee as a buddy in the original script. The movie, one of the most famous comedies in American history, just didn't have enough ape reaction shots. How would people know that they were supposed to laugh if they didn't cut to a trained chimp comically slapping his forehead after each of Christopher Lloyd's hijinks?

Universal Pictures
"And then, because my life is forfeit, we should have the chimpanzee laugh at Doc! It can't go wrong!"

Luckily, the studios didn't even try to work with Zemeckis and Gale on the idea, and the finished film had the perfect number of chimpanzees: 0.

Except, Good Will Hunting isn't so much the story of up-and-coming writers making good as it is a great demonstration of how studio productions spit shine half-decent ideas into cultural moments. The original screenplay was written about a brilliant math prodigy who gets recruited by the CIA and gets involved in a conspiracy, which I'm sure would be a very nice movie to watch on a plane. It also would've been considered a great story for 2003 Ben Affleck.

20th Century Fox
"I'M PLAYING BATMAN NOW. JUST GET OVER IT ALREADY."

The head of Castle Rock, Princess Bride director Rob Reiner, personally shot that down, and it became the examination of trauma and personal experience that we eventually saw released. Basically, the suits could see what the writers couldn't: the emotional core of the story, not the flash surrounding it.

Not only that, but a ringer was brought in to fix the ending: one Terrence Malick, famed director of Badlands and The Thin Red Line. Reportedly, he didn't even bother to read the script, but just pitched an idea for an ambiguous finale over a dinner meeting and then walked out, presumably dropping a mic while fitting rap music played in the background.

Miramax Films
"Script? Who needs a script when we're being subtle?"

It's also rumored that famed script doctor William Goldman, Oscar-winning writer of Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, was brought in to polish the screenplay. So, it's not so much a case of "who are these unknowns who wrote this?" as "who in Hollywood DIDN'T help write this?"

In reality, Hopper's edit of the film was over three goddamn hours long and some claim it was close to five. To even get to that point, he had spent 22 weeks of editing time cutting it down. For comparison, the film had been shot in twelve weeks. I'm not saying that a five-hour Easy Rider would've been the worst thing in the world. I'm just saying that there would be a lot of fluff around scenes with 1969's most precious commodity: 1969 Jack Nicholson.

Columbia Pictures
Priceless.

Henry Jaglom was the man with the unfortunate task of taking Hopper's monstrosity and turning it into something remotely palatable. It might have helped that, according to him, he was the only one there who wasn't stoned.

Jaglom pared the film down to a lean 95 minutes, removed extensive usage of "flash-forward" scenes and basically formed raw footage into the film we know now. Hopper hated it. That is, until it became a success. Then he was more than happy to take credit for the edited film that he'd called a "TV movie" before release. Later, he claimed that Jaglom had merely guided it into his original version, but what that really translates into is "I love LSD and I love making movies, and sometimes, one doesn't end when the other begins."

Columbia Pictures
"Are we still rolling? What? A whole hour? SHIT."

In conjunction with a studio man, Norton edited the film into its existing state. Kaye claimed that Norton's main contribution was to add more of himself into the film cut, but you know what? He was already the main character. The movie necessitated more of him, especially if the director had no idea what to do. It may make the studio look like the bad guy, but they simply put a guy with actual ideas in charge, and not the guy who once showed up to set dressed as Osama Bin Laden.

In Alien, Ash is the point man (robot? android?) for the company conspiracy to capture an alien, with the human crew being considered expendable. It's a major plot point that recurs throughout the series, with the specter of the evil Weyland-Yutani Corporation essentially being the main villain. And despite their prominence on the BluRay covers, the aliens are just pawns.

Without the robots to facilitate this, Alien is just a slasher film, set in space. And those robots were put in the script by two producers of the film, not the writers (who thought it a terrible idea). Of course, those writers also thought Starbeast was a good name for the movie. Don't get me wrong, I'd see a movie that's called Starbeast, but Starbeast sounds less like a title for Alien and more like the title of a movie that someone who just slept through half of Alien would think of.

20th Century Fox
"It was pretty good. There was, like, a monster in the stars. Nah, that was about it."

So maybe what do writers know? It turns out, if you actually listen to what a studio has to say, you might actually get the credit for a classic film, while the studio just fades back into being an evil corporation.

Nathan Kamal lives in Oregon and writes there. He co-founded Asymmetry Fiction for all your fiction needs..

For more check out 8 Absurdly Bad Ideas Studios Almost Forced Into Great Movies and The 5 Most Ridiculous Ways Studios Spoiled Their Own Movies.

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