Hollywood’s God Complex: The Lost Art of Saying Goodbye
The final in my series on the Four Lost Arts can't help but take to task the chronic need to tamper with the long-ago complete.
The first teaser for Steven Spielberg’s 2021 West Side Story. On the basis of this snippet it can safely be assumed that it’s the version crafted for the quick-fix, time-starved TikTok generation.
Paws scamper over sand-strewn paves in Sicily: a pack of puppies spying on a septuagenarian who slumps in sunlight. Chirping birds croon at the crest of summer as the old man drops his hand and, gradually, his hat-topped head. A tail wags blissfully behind. Oblivious is the small dog until the creaky, slowly-collapsing chair alerts him to a fall: life lapsed into a corpse. Scuttling to the sample of extinction, the unwitting youngling sniffs it as he would a briny mussel washed ashore.
Scratched out of memory is such a scene: excoriated like dead tree bark gnawed by squirrels. If it has slipped out of your mind it could be due to unsolicited replacement. This original finale to The Godfather, Part III has recently been substituted by another snippet in which Michael Corleone merely puts on sunglasses. Bloom doesn’t contrast with decay and no allusion to the earlier demise of Vito – who had fallen from a heart attack whilst playing with his grandson Anthony – brings the familial saga to full circle. Instead, in Francis Ford Coppola’s 2020 restoration, The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, a title card explains: “When the Sicilians wish you ‘Cent’anni,’ it means ‘to a long life’... and a Sicilian never forgets.”
Spelled out in a font completely contrary to the beloved print type of the trilogy, these words confirm (quite needlessly) to viewers that the death of Michael’s daughter Mary is the long-awaited payback of his foe, Don Altobello.
Neither does the opening of the original third film remain. In lieu of frames that bare the olive waters of the Corleones’ lakehouse and the antihero’s voiceover (“My dear children: It is now better than several years since I moved to New York, and I haven’t seen you as much as I would like to… The only wealth in this world is children,”) we see a capture from the movie’s second act. “Don Corleone,” Archbishop Gilday implores, “I need your help – and not just to light a little candle.”
Snipping at his reels with what one critic called “auteurist anxiety disorder”, Coppola has recently re-edited both his Apocalypse Now and The Cotton Club to create Apocalypse Now: Final Cut and The Cotton Club Encore.
Proclivities of this perseverating kind are something to which some creators remain partial. Hemingway supposedly tried forty-seven different endings before landing on A Farewell To Arms’ final line.
Yet the spirited dissection of an artwork’s entrails has become a fad almost exclusive to our century: a frantic need to harvest still-fresh fragments like a surgeon setting organs of a corpse on ice.
Restless are fans who long to know what “really” happened at the end of The Sopranos – treating Tony like a real man listed in the Census. “Cut to black” is still regarded as a cryptic code. When two years ago tv critic Matt Zoller Seitz reminded its creator David Chase that he had called its sudden close a “death scene”, the executive producer wasn’t happy. “We all could be whacked in a diner.” chimed the god ruling Tony Soprano. “That was the point of the scene.”
Of late the dusty crimson curtain has been raised on long-completed works anew. Those forty-seven endings over which the literary master labored have been partly published in a set of thirty-two alternatives to A Farewell to Arms’ final words, “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.” Nothing more needs to be said.
Publisher Scribner dissents from this view.
In an age where subjectivity holds sway and sedentary spectators are comfortably held hostage by their YouTube playlists, non-art hogs the hype. Scenes sliced out of Titanic’s end trend for their tawdry awfulness while algorithms redirect our eyes from treasured classics to trite replicas like vendors by the Louvre selling pallid posters of the Mona Lisa. “THIS IS OUR PLACE”, reads the graffiti in a teaser for the upcoming new West Side Story: Steven Spielberg’s glossy update. “PUERTO RICO”, spells another scrawl. “THIS IS OUR TIME”. Neon colors fuel its garish trailer – whose fluorescent color palette lends it hues recalling teenage series Glee. Pivoting figures flicker like designs in video games while opening garage doors showcasing the Jets and Sharks suggest they’re breaking in to stage a heist.
Most motion pictures are now readily available in streaming on-demand – but none is good enough to shun the speculation of its remake. Casablanca has been subject to some half a dozen talks of plots of sequels and renewals in the past few decades, one of which included the sad tale of Rick and Ilsa’s “secret son”. Horror movies need to double down on scare tactics – for Nicolas Roeg’s chilly Don’t Look Now is set to be reborn (unlike the couple’s daughter).
A fallacy not so dissimilar to plastic surgery, these films could never reconstruct reality. Sunrays eluding Don’t Look Now’s Venetian alleys drenched the picture in a dour darkness scarcely replicable - twinning with what cinematographer Tony Richmond called the “low, weak, wintery sun” in Britain’s Hertfordshire to paint contrasting coats of the occult.
In Casablanca it was World War II and mammoths of inimitable stars. Aljean Harmetz’s 2002 book, The Making of Casablanca cites Ingrid Bergman’s insistence on simple and scarcely styled hair; studio Warner Bros. was obliged according to the epoch’s rules to transport cast and crew on buses on account of shrinking funds. Best boys and gaffers squeezing in between the hips of Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains most likely made the democratic stance of comrades singing hymn “La Marseillaise” at Rick’s Café more realistic.
Rousing General Franco’s troops one night in 1964 as David Lean arranged Dr. Zhivago in Canillas, Spain, “The Internationale” – an anthem of the Bolsheviks – shocked locals. Suspecting insurrection was astir against the dictator, the steadfast militants stayed put and spooked the cast of the disastrous war epic.
2019 saw the creator of both Vikings and The Tudors, Michael Hirst, announce his plan for a new Dr. Zhivago - one even further from the sweep of history still savorable in the sixties: a decade in which Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey grew infamous when stoners swamped its screens.
Reviving history is an endeavor scarcely hideous: Sergio Leone’s 1984 Once Upon a Time in America tapped into America’s thirties; The Last Metro by François Truffaut portrayed Occupied Paris with deft over four decades after the war. But the fabric of a film does not consist of merely script and reels (or megabytes). Sunlight can figure – or its absence; shots can flaunt the cigarette flutes fashionable in the forties – or be set in years that stigmatized them; seas aglow in golden summer can be laid bare just because they were available for shooting... or eschewed if they were not.
The Twin Towers featured in the credits for both Sex and the City and The Sopranos. Until they didn’t.
Variables that form the strokes of fate in instances like these are hardly incidental. When director Krzysztof Kieślowski began work on Dekalog – his serialized symbolic treatment of The Ten Commandments – Poland was plunged into civil unrest and unslackening strikes. By the time the series aired on television communism was a toppled ideology.
A decrepit relic of the Cold War stopped the ten installments being screened in the U.S. – where no distributor obtained the rights until 2000. By then Kieślowski had been dead for just over four years.
In 2015 American channel NBC announced plans to produce a new Decalogue.
Stretching like the sea’s tenacious talons, art survives thanks to a lifespan limitless and doubtlessly exclusive to it. Nearly two decades after Czech composer Dvořák’s death his lost first symphony – which had eluded the scribe’s eyes upon completion – turned up in a thrift store at the hands of Rudolf Dvořák: a completely unrelated namesake. Thirteen years would pass until its public outing.
Two centuries had to endure before Vivaldi’s foray into the same fate. Rummaging in a Salesian Monastery not far from Turin in the 1920s, a discerning rector came across some undiscovered manuscripts that featured The Four Seasons. With their sale in mind he hurriedly requested an appraisal at the city’s library. There its director Luigi Torri wrote to Alberto Gentili, Professor of Music History at the University of Turin, to obtain an estimate. Crates that conveyed this copious collection would expose the world to music not heard since the middle of the eighteenth century.
Today it sounds in Pretty Woman, Indecent Proposal, Frasier, Flubber, Being John Malkovich, The West Wing, Six Feet Under, Fantastic Four and at least once in every figure skating championship.
“There are a lot of accidental events.” Kieślowski proclaimed. “I believe in chance as a certain cause or force.” Judges’ rulings are notoriously said to be more lenient if sentencing takes place post-prandially. Newly antiquated eras used to prompt us to make purchases through window-shopping.
Now Google has a tendency to fill that role. And we despoil ourselves of serendipity.
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has not spoken out in the search engine’s favor.
“I’m just old-fashioned about this… I’m ‘get off my lawn’ about this…” He told Joe Rogan in a 2019 podcast. “My ‘old man’ sensibility is, if you track what I shop at a store, and then… send me coupons based on what you think I’m gonna buy next… you have denied me the chance of stumbling upon something that I never thought of buying. And that takes away my freedoms, and I don’t want that.”
Stumbling can sometimes be an asset. So fixated was Al Pacino as he played a blind man that he tripped over a trash can whilst filming Scent of a Woman (1992). The scene remained unedited since it was something that his character would likely do. Actor Christopher McDonald sketched the portrait of his role in Thelma and Louise – the former’s bully-husband Darryl – after spotting his droll doppelgänger at a real-life airport. “Running for a plane. He had a mustache, a comb-over – he thinks he’s a player.” McDonald remembered. “You’d see his picture on a supermarket wall: ‘Employee of the Month.’” The thespian showed up to his audition clad in polyester, shining in the midst of tacky jewelry.
“Here’s looking at you, kid” was lacking in the Casablanca script. It flared most unexpectedly as Bogart taught his co-star Bergman – who was not his favorite person – poker tricks. Dustin Hoffman almost slammed himself into a car whilst filming Midnight Cowboy – pulling out the improvised invective, “I’m walkin’ here - I’m walkin’ here – get outta here, you son of bitch!” as much to roil the driver as for the scene’s sake.
Terror is impromptu in its guise. After days of striving to complete the torture segment in A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick asked his lead Malcolm McDowell to sing and dance. The actor’s petrifying paradox of belting out the ditty “Singin’ in the Rain” as Alex beats a screaming woman was spontaneous.
So was the choice of Laura Palmer’s first suspected slaughterer in Twin Peaks. Set dresser and hapless actor Frank Silva was adjusting the bedspread in the character’s bedroom when director David Lynch saw his shadowy face in the mirror. “Frank, stay there and look up at the camera!” He bellowed. Killer Bob became this member of the art department. His career would be cut short just five years later when he died of AIDS aged forty-four.
Sequels are once again the craze of Hollywood these days. Far more disturbingly, so are robotic replicas of artists long corporeally gone. Roy Orbison and Whitney Houston are performing through the specters of their “holograms”.
Apparently some fans just can’t make do with YouTube.
Bowing before cherished classics, certain filmmakers begin to fetishize their version of a film or series the way other followers fill webpages of fanfiction. The difference most unfortunately is that their impoverished paradigms are authorized. “‘Scarface’ Remake Director Luca Guadagnino Wants a ‘Big R-Rating’ on His ‘Shocking’ Film,” reads a 2018 Collider headline.
What the title doesn’t tell you is that risks of massive magnitude were taken to secure a wide release for the original in 1983. After cutting frames and frames out of the motion picture to avoid the X rating then only used for pornographic ventures, auteur Brian de Palma snapped. Instead of slicing more takes from the reel he reinserted the scrapped footage and decided to appeal the MPAA’s judgment. “We’re gonna put the movie exactly the way I originally cut it.” was his stance. Although the cinematic masterpiece was ultimately labeled “R”, the picture would have likely never seen the light of day if the reverse had happened: mentions of X-rated exploits were religiously avoided in the print and broadcast media.
Guadagnino’s superficially bold statement appears timid in comparison.
Such is the deference now damaging most remakes: a self-consciousness perennially palpable in characters’ pale silhouettes. The recent sequel Coming 2 America sees teenagers Lavelle and Mirembe chiding today’s “sequels to old movies nobody asked for”. A critique of The CW’s Dynasty reboot describes how [Elizabeth] “Gillies seems to have prepped for the role [of Fallon Carrington] by watching a lot of Kardashian shows and learning how to pout, look askance, glare and, in general, speak dialogue as though it were written in all-capitals.”
Ghosts rear their ugly heads for all participants of projects feasting on the leftovers of juggernauts. Now Dangerous Liaisons – captured exquisitely onscreen in Stephen Frears’ 1988 film starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich; dramatized in Christopher Hampton’s Broadway play; rebranded in the Sarah Michelle Gellar-governed Cruel Intentions and its sequels – is being readapted yet again for Starz. Sex and the City desires to tackle the Carrie and Aidan relationship one more time in the sequel And Just Like That… which was apparently a common saying on the show.
Fans likely couldn’t help but wonder… why it isn’t named “I couldn’t help but wonder.”
And why it has to have a name at all when it omits one of its integral four leading ladies.
Frasier, How I Met Your Mother, Clueless, Bewitched, Dexter and the rather recently departed Gossip Girl have been or are set to be resumed in what has fast become a fevered foraging of remnants unforgotten. Not names etched into headstones or a rain-smacked housebound plaque; not statues tilting in the fog of misty parks but constellations visible in daylight.
Galileo was alleged to have discovered Jupiter’s four largest moons – but so was Simon Marius. Oxygen was first identified by Michael Sendivogius in the early 1600s – prior to Carl Wilhelm Scheele’s subsequent discovery of it late in the eighteenth century - which was when Joseph Priestley stumbled on the sustenance. 1949’s Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was granted to António Egas Moniz for a newly approved neurological treatment: the lobotomy. The one that rendered Rosemary Kennedy - sister of John and Robert F. - completely incapacitated and beyond the realm of human contact.
Medicines meander into disrepute. Discoveries in astrophysics are attributed then redirected. Sins formerly taboo fly swiftly to the cultural forefront.
Art resists. “The only thing that ever survives from a culture is its arts,” declared pedagogical scribe Camille Paglia. “Political power is transient.”
So is saying goodbye to a tome or a celluloid treasure. Fond farewells are never permanent - and parting seeks not to persist. Resting in peace, an artwork does not gather dust but merely waits until its reappraisal by another generation; sitting out its turn in an unending cycle of redundant salutations.
The Ferris wheel is never full. Art is not dead. But empty seats are there for new additions – leaving little room for resurrections of the living.