Well, folks, the big news this weekend was the $31 million opening for Greg Mottola's Superbad, although all the talk and praise is being showered on writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, stars Jonah Hill and Michael Cera, and most especially on exec producer Judd Apatow, who's batting a thousand lately with anything that has his name on it.
So, naturally, I want to talk about the poor $6 million opening for The Invasion.
The New York Times has a fascinating piece up about the enduring appeal of Jack Finney's original novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which has now spawned four films in five decades (the passage about how the films reflect our changing attitudes toward psychology is especially interesting). Fortunately, that's not what I want to talk about, either.
Rather, let's address Warner Bros.' decision to take the film away from German director Oliver Hirschbiegel and hand it over to the Wachowski brothers and their apprentice James McTeague. Word around the campfire is that Hirschbiegel's version did not have enough action, suspence, gore... the things studios usually complain about. They decided revisions were necessary. So Hirschbiegel was given the boot, and Andy and Larry Wachowski were brought on to rewrite roughly half the script attributed to relative newcomer David Kajganich, then had V for Vendetta director James McTeague shoot the new pages.
The Wachowski's involvement tells me that this was almost certainly the doing of uber-producer Joel Silver, and he should know better.
Film is a director's medium. Great movies have come out of scripts with dozens of credited and uncredited writers (The Fugitive, for instance). Actors can drop out mid-way through production (like Harvey Keitel in Apocalypse Now). But changing directors mid-stream? I don't think that ever works.
There may be examples where it works, which I'd love to hear about, but mostly I'm thinking of movies like Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, in which the studio cut fifty minutes out of the film (the editor doing the dirty work was none other than Robert Wise, who would go on to direct West Side Story, among many other films), and must have hired someone- who's name I can't seem to find- to reshoot the ending and a few other scenes. The result is not a bad movie, certainly better than the rest on this list, but then, they were starting with an Orson Welles film. It's almost certainly not the masterpiece it could have been (although we'll never know; RKO destroyed the fifty minutes of film Wise cut from the picture).
Example number two is Halloween II, which, rumor has it, was so botched by director Rick Rosenthal that John Carpenter came back on the reshoot several scenes and make them scarier. The result, obviously, doesn't come close to the original, and sits right behind Jaws 2 on my list of sequels that should never have been made. (Oddly enough, it only took 20 years for everyone to forget about this, as Rosenthal was again given the reins on Mike Myers eighth outing, Halloween: Resurrection. It's not very good, either, although I enjoy the opening scenes with Jaime Lee Curtis).
Finally, and perhaps most applicably, we come to the debacle that was the Exorcist prequel. What a mess that was (and Warner Bros. was behind it again, wouldn't you know). The story is well known, but I'll recap for anyone that hasn't heard. The studio brought in respected, if difficult, screenwriter and director Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Affliction) to direct the film. They complained that it wasn't violent or scary enough, wound up locking Schrader out of the editing process, and hired Renny Harlin (studio hack doesn't begin to cover this guy) to reshoot half the movie. The result: a whopping 11% rating on rottentomatoes.com and a $41 million domestic haul for a movie that cost at least $80 million to make. They were so desperate to recoup that they released Schrader's cut as Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, and while that only brought in $250k and was still not regarded as a good movie, it's generally accepted (including by yours truly) as the superior film.
Why? Because it has a voice.