Someone posted here that when Roddenberry was pitching the first Star Trek movie to Paramount an exec requested they put some Mayans in the movie, I recall James Cameron saying an exec wanted a cyborg dog to accompany Reese in The Terminator(he fought this change and won). I’ve seen so, so many stories of this from film makers, often the requested thing is so random or bizarre it boggles your mind. I remember reading that for YEARS a particular exec was obsessed with seeing a giant robot spider on screen, he finally got it put into Wild Wild West after trying on many films.
Whats the story with this stuff? Are execs really given so much free reign they start thinking they are creative geniuses whose mind’s every thought is gold? Do they just request random strange things to show they have power?
The (great, and hilarious) Twilight Zone episode, “Uncle Simon,” featured a woman who was driven crazy by her uncle’s boorish behavior - most chiefly, his habit of constant pipe smoking. There was also a robot modeled after the uncle, that also smoked pipes, The show was sponsored by a tobacco company, and they didn’t like that at all. They wanted the uncle/robot’s annoying habit changed to something else (which wound up being hot chocolate.)
According to a story I read on the Internet (which means it has to be true!), Kevin Smith turned in his script for a new Superman film and the head of Paramount at the time (I forget his name but I remember in the story Kevin Smith said he got his foot into the door at Paramount because he was the hair dresser of a former executive there) handed it back and insisted he add a Giant Spider to the script because he had just been at Class function at his kid’s school and sat in on a lesson on spiders and thought they were just awesome.
Kevin said no and was kicked off the project but he is convinced the reason Wild Wild West, which was produced around the same time, ended with a mechanical giant spider is that that screen writer said yes.
Jon Peters. He was Barbra Streisand’s hairdresser (and boyfriend) before starting to produce her albums and films.
Executives are the ones paying the bills. It’s their money, so if they like a particular concept, it gives them a lot of clout. There probably are only a small percentage of executives who do this – most are smart enough to let the creative types do their thing – but they do make good stories.
I.e., the Bogart/Bacall chemistry. The saving grace of a film with such a muddled, convoluted plot that even the actors were notoriously baffled as to what story they were supposed to be telling. (It doesn’t help that certain essential plot points from the book – the mysterious bookshop that is actually a porn-rental business, the bisexuality of Arthur Geiger – could only be hinted at in a film of the time.)
Here is a run-down of Kevin Smith’s side of the story. This page is just one link to a larger series of articles about the debacle that was Hollywood’s attempt to restart the “Superman” franchise in the early 90s.
How about a story about bizarre demands from a record executive? Another story I read about many years ago (and don’t have a ready cite, sorry) - It was the late 60s, and the band Jefferson Airplane were pretty well-known as hippie types who would make very blatant references to drugs, sex & psychedelia. While working on the '67 album “After Bathing at Baxter’s”, the band members decided to all doodle little cartoons and goofy messages that would be printed on the dust jacket sleeve. Paul Kantner, who happened to have a cupcake in hand, placed it on the paper and traced the outline of it, thinking nothing more about it.
Anyway, time passes. The album is packaged and being checked out by the executives at RCA. One of them saw the outline of the cupcake on the dust jacket and went on a rampage, swearing that “that “hole” looks like a psychedelic cnt" (!!!) Singer Grace Slick said something like "I’m not really sure what a psychedelic cnt is, let alone what it’s supposed to look like.” The album was with-held for a few weeks as executives demanded that the “offensive doodle” was removed. Finally, Kantner wrote a little caption on the sleeve pointing out that “this is the shape of the cupcake that I ate”, and the western world survived for another day.
What’s even more amazing about this story is that apparently the same record exec who was so worried about the dust jacket doodle never grasped the meaning of the lyrics to a particular song from the album “Watch Her Ride.”
Kevin Smith gives tells a hilarious version of the story it on the first “Evening With” DVD (and I’m sure someone has posted it on that newfangled YouTube thing, but of course I would never dream of posting a link…)
Somewhere on the Annotated Pratchett file/ L-space, there’s a quote where Pratchett talks about his dealings with US movie producers who wanted to film Mort, but, just as the deal was about to be signed (that is, after weeks or months of deliberations) “You know, we like the story, but can we loose Death? The viewers find that too dark”, and the Brits were “Did you read the book?” “yeah, sure, great book, let’s just do it without death and move the story to America.”
There’s a guy on another forum I frequent who was trying to make a film adaptation of a comic called Bloodquest. Apparently one of the reasons the movie didn’t get made was because the studio executives wanted to add a love story.
Did I mention that the comic is called “Bloodquest”?
The archetypical rendition of this is Terry Gilliam’s brilliant satire Brazil, the story of which can be found in Jack Matthew’s The Battle of Brazil, which details the battle between Gilliam and a no-talent Universal Pictures exec named Sidney Sheinberg. Although Gilliam trimmed his original 142 minute cut to the contractually-required length, Sheinberg cut it further to 94 minutes and used cutting floor footage to turn the theme from a nightmarish dystopic satire to an action-romance film, complete with an inexplicably happy ending. This “Love Conquerors All” version was shown once on the ABC Network, while Gilliam’s cut version was filmed once for movie critics and USC students at the campus, and then distributed in Europe. Later Criterion editions on laserdisc and DVD have presented all versions, including the truly awful Sheinberg edit so that the viewer can compare.
This also happened, in less dramatic form, to Blade Runner (the American cinematic “Happy Ending” cut versus the European cinematic, “Director’s Cut”, and “Final Cut”), The Wages of Fear (the American version cut out much of the dialogue concerning the greedy oil company), and nearly every decent film that Sam Peckinpah ever made, starting with Ride the High Country, Major Dundee, and The Wild Bunch. Studio interference is less prominant today because of the breakdown of the studio system (most non-blockbuster pictures are made by independent production companies with the studios only providing partial finance or bidding for the already-produced film) but obviously still occurs, particulary in response to pre-screenings, as with the craptastic tacked on happy ending to the otherwise much improved remake of The Thomas Crown Affair. On the other hand, we also get better and more honest films like the 2002 version of The Quiet American versus the propaganda mid-'Fifites version. So you win some and you lose some.
There are lots of these stories. Heinlein, writing about filming Destination Moon, says that there was studio pressure to put in singing cowboys, hootenanies, and lounge scenes. Harlan Ellison – always good for a few rants about the stupidities of studio executives – once complained about one who wanted him to put Apes into a story, because Planet of the Apes was big. In the 1950s anything that went on television was subject to being nixed by advertisers – that Twilight Zone cocoa-for-cigarettes stories is only the tip of the iceberg.
the truth is that studio executives aren’t interested in your entertainment, except as that translates into your spoending money to see their movies or watch their television shows (so they can collect ad revenue by proving high ratings). I don’t entirely blame them for this – it’s their business, after all, and it’s an incredibly expensive, volatile, and cutthroat one. It’s no wonder it shapes them that way.
But it also means that they will absolutely insist on some stupid irrelevant gimmick that makes no sense in the context of the show, aif they think it wil bump up their ratings, or draw in a few more moviegoers, or avoid offending a dependable and frree-spending advertiser. That’s the reason we’re burdened with zillions of cut-rate low-quality ripoffs, obvious pandering like the movie Mac and Me (or the T.G.I.Fridays scenes in Zookeeper), and the irrelevant propagation of ape movies and giant spider robots and people ripping off rubber masks to show that, howevere absurd, they were someone else all along.
And it’s why you have to applaud the artisting integrity of some artist or show that suddenly shoves a pie in the face of this twaddle.
I’ve seen both versions of the film. The plot of the original was far less convoluted and explained many things that were not explained in the recut version. Bogart and Bacall were still great together, but the additional two or three scenes turned the film from a well-plotted mediocre film to a great film with a complicated plot (though not as convoluted as people say it is – there are loose ends, but overall it makes sense if you pay attention).
I can’t remember who it was that put it in but on a commentary track for “Armageddon” they say the reason why the vehicle they use to travel on the meteorite had guns was because research shows toy vehicles with guns sell better.
The original pilot for “lost in Space” didn’t have the evil Dr Smith and the programmed to destroy the Robinsons robot on it. Some CBS executive may have suggested it. In the end, once Allen and Jonathan Harris turned the two into a comedy putdown/repartee act, it became the only worthwhile thing about the series.
On the Kate Mulgrew website there is an article from the late 1970s on one of her early roles: Lt Columbo’s wife. Essentially NBC honcho Fred Silverman (who made ABC number one with deep thought provoking classics like “Three’s Company” and “Charlie’s Angels”) was fed up with Peter Falk’s salary demands and the time he insisted on filming it. Deciding to do a series on his Columbo’s never-seen wife being a detective in her spare time (despite the good Lt telling people that she couldn’t solve mysteries on TV), he hires people who have veteran, possibly ethnic actresses like Maureen Stapleton or Zohra Lampert. Silverman sends the likes of large breasted young blondes like Carol Wayne to be interviewed. Mulgrew wasn’t that but she was clearly too young to make anyone think she was married to Columbo.
Tom Clancy had a lot of problems with the filming of “Patriot Games” The studio wanted things like a boat chase ending with one of the boats running into a coral reef. Clancy told them that everyone knows that liberals like you Hollywood guys are retarded but even you have to know there are no coral reefs in the Chesapeake Bay.
