“This is my art and it is dangerous! Do you think I want to die like this?”
(Catherine O’Hara as Deila Deetz)
You could almost hear Tim Burton utter those words when he’s speaking about his movies. He caught the attention of a lot of key players in Hollywood after he made the hilarious Peewee’s Big Adventure. Among those key players was David Geffen’s company. Basically an independent with a lot of greenbacks and connection to heaven (or hell depending on the corporation).
Tim Burton’s classic Beetlejuice (1988) was many things. It was a lighthearted comedy, looked kid friendly, and very of its time, a foray into the hip 1980’s. Those are just the exterior and possibly the big lie to get it sold to execs and audiences who could give a rat’s ass about film. The real Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice is a black comedy with horror/fantasy nuances. Yes, it begins as a lighthearted (possibly the dreaded romantic comedy category) and shows Barbara Geena Davis - Cronenberg’s The Fly) and Adam (Alec Baldwin - The Shadow) Maitland living a very happy and adjusted life in a picturesque white picket fence town.
After a car accident, the two of them find it hard to understand why they aren’t allowed to leave their house. When they did try, a whole other world interfered, and they were lost in a desert-like void with a huge sandworm roaming the area. This was the perfect excuse for Burton to use stop-motion, an art form he would come back to from time to time.
They find the handbook for the recently deceased. It reads like stereo instructions and Barbara and Adam never fully grasp the life after death routine. The Deetz’s move in and their world is turned upside down.
Charles Deetz (Jeffery Jones - Sleepyhollw, Ferris Bueller's Day Off) and Deila Deetz (Catherine 0’Hara - SCTV, Home alone) move in the Maitlands’ house with their daughter, the gloomy Lydia (Wynona Ryder - Edward Scissorhands, Girl interrupted) and proceed to be annoying house mates. Deila wants to remodel, Charles wants to relax (after having a breakdown in his old job of buying and selling realty), and Lydia just wants to mope around and take pictures. Adam and Barbara hate these intruders and want to scare them out of their home. It’s no easy task for these Ozzy and Harriet types. Even cutting holes in sheets and moaning doesn’t do a thing to the Deetz’s, nor does the hilarious dinner scene, where everyone is made to sing the calypso song “The banana boat song”, can get rid of their unwanted house mates.
So Adam and Barbara turn to the Bio-Exorcist extraordinaire, Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton - Batman, Jackie Brown). He’s crass, rude, disgusting, and obnoxious; not to mention the closest thing to a perv. Tim Burton could get away with and keep a PG rating, but Beetlejuice makes his attempt (even when Adam and Barbara wiggle out of hiring him) to get these people out of their house, and Beetlejuice sees what he really wants - Lydia!
This was an odd script for Geffen to own to begin with. What was it that they saw in Michael McDowell’s (Tales from the darkside, Nightmare before Christmas) original idea that looked like a hit film to them? The development of the script is as wacky and interesting a story as the any in Hollywood. McDowell was the first writer on it. When Burton came along, he didn’t like the very serious horror and extreme violence. So he had writer Larry Wilson help out. Later on Michael McDowell came back along with Warren Skaaren. McDowell’s first script was much more violent. The car crash of Adam and Barbara was depicted graphically, with Barbara’s arm being crushed. There is reference to it in the final film when Adam asks her, “How’s your arm?” and she replies, “I can’t feel anything.” The Beetlejuice character actually was a winged demon who takes on the form of a Middle Eastern man and is intent on killing the family instead of scaring them away, and he wants to rape Lydia instead of marrying her.
Beetlejuice only needs to be exhumed from his grave, not summoned like in the final film. In this script there was a second Deetz child, a nine year old girl named Cathy, who is the only one that can see Adam and Barbara. In the climax of this film, Beetlejuice goes on a homicidal rage and mutilates Cathy while he’s in the form of a rabid squirrel. One of the dinner guests does an exorcism ritual that destroys Beetlejuice – then forcing Adam and Barbara to move into the model of their home.
Again, what was it about this script that attracted David Geffen to it? If, indeed, it was the first draft, and I love the idea of it, the weirdness of McDowell (who had proven time after time how good he was with the episodes he wrote for Tales from the Darkside) , but a rabid squirrel killing a child doesn’t spell blockbuster to me.
In the end, Tim Burton came on board. He changed the script to have more comedy and the rest is history. Beetlejuice went on to be one of highest grossing films of 1988 and Burton made Batman with Michael Keaton. Yeah, we know the story of that film.
Beetlejuice has a sequel in the works. Actually that idea has been in development since 1993. Now in 2014, it seems everyone wants to do the film, including Wynona Ryder, Tim Burton, and Michael Keaton. We’ll see if it gets made, and let’s hope it will be worth seeing.
Mark Slade, HMS
Read the previous installment.