Flying turkeys

According to film-industry rumour, other imminent films which have recently had to be reshot include The Village, the latest atmospheric psycho-thriller from M. Night Shamalayan, creator of The Sixth Sense, and the new Steven Spielberg/Tom Hanks collaboration, The Terminal. And no one will deny that the longgestating horror sequel Exorcist IV, now on its third director and second cast, has already become a PR disaster.

With the slam-bang action specialist Renny Harlin currently re-shooting the arthouse auteur Paul Schrader’s version almost from scratch, the studio backers Morgan Creek are talking about a novel way of recouping their $100 million investment — by releasing both films on DVD simultaneously.

Meanwhile, the director Kevin Smith has been forced to issue angry denials that his sentimental family comedy Jersey Girl, with Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, has not been hastily reshot in the desperate manner that helped sink last year’s Ben’n’Jen über-turkey, Gigli. In Affleck’s words, Gigli went from being “dark and weird and kind of surreal” to being a stunningly cack-handed comic romance in which “they had to, metaphorically, build new sets for our affair”.

An affair which, of course, subsequently went the same way as the movie.

The impetus behind most reshoots is generally poor test screenings. This kind of populist market research is much derided by film critics, but audience testing has been a Hollywood staple since Mack Sennett honed his much-tweaked, endlessly re-edited Keystone Kops comedies in the silent era.

The difference today is that movie audiences are much more cine-literate, instinctively deconstructing blandly positive studio press statements and dishing online dirt about any production that seems even mildly troubled. Perhaps unfairly, the word “reshoot” has become synonymous with “disaster”.

In truth, some genres are more resistent to reshoot-driven panic than others. Action blockbusters, even surefire hits such as the latest Star Wars and Lord of the Rings trilogies, routinely include footage added later. But romances and comedies — especially dark comedies like The Stepford Wives — are considered much more sensitive animals, with their dependence on screen chemistry, word-of-mouth recommendation and highly personal tastes in humour.

No wonder the Farrelly brothers, the duo behind such gross-out hits as There’s Something About Mary, ruthlessly test and re-cut their work before release. Indeed, entire characters and subplots were excised from their Jim Carrey vehicle Me, Myself and Irene.

Online gossips often interpret reshoots as signifying backstage friction, spiralling budgets and emergency studio intervention. In the case of Warren Beatty’s notorious comedy Town & Country (2001), directed by Peter Chelsom, it was a poisonous cocktail of all three.

While its release was delayed 13 times over three years, the low-key farce ballooned into a $90 million catastrophe. Scenes expensively shot with artificial snow had to be re-created after a real snowfall days later. More reshoots were required when ten reels of film went missing, and again after test audiences balked at the 62-year-old Beatty’s love scenes with a female co-star half his age.

Damned even before it opened, Chelsom’s modestly amusing little comedy eventually recouped a paltry $6.7 million — and became a legendary flop to rank alongside Beatty’s former money-losing benchmark, Ishtar.

Of course, some reshoots are decided more by external forces than studio interference. RKO hacked 50 minutes from Orson Welles’s sombre 1942 family drama The Magnificent Ambersons, defying the absent director by imposing an incongruously happy ending in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Francis Ford Coppola was obliged to reshoot the opening of Apocalypse Now after Harvey Keitel was sacked and replaced by Martin Sheen.

Werner Herzog scrapped initial footage from his own insane jungle adventure, Fitzcarraldo, when Jason Robards fell ill and was replaced by the far more appropriately bonkers Klaus Kinski.

David Lynch reworked a rejected TV series pilot into his surreal 2001 thriller Mulholland Drive, in the process scoring his biggest critical and commercial hit for years.

Indeed, extra footage sometimes proves to be an inspired addition that enhances a film’s success. Steven Spielberg shot two endings for Jaws; test audiences voted for the shark’s explosive demise rather than a more plausible but less dramatic death. The memorable shock-shot in which Ben Gardner’s head rolls out of his wrecked boat was also added later, with scant regard for plot continuity. In the blockbuster world, pure sensation is paramount, logic comes second.

In the 1980s, the producer-driven golden age of brainless blockbusters, reshoots were elevated to the level of science. The original ending of Risky Business saw Tom Cruise’s teenage capitalist punished for his lawless excesses, but the producer David Geffen imposed a fantasy, greed-is-good finale, and a toothy superstar was born. Test audiences also demanded a romantic subplot between Cruise and Kelly McGillis to enhance the sexless first draft of Top Gun.

Likewise, a last-minute reshoot helped to turn Fatal Attraction into an epochal money-spinner. Bloodthirsty test audiences objected to Glenn Close’s adulterous femme fatale remorsefully committing suicide, so the vengeful bathroom showdown was added — although, in an interesting cultural twist, the hara-kiri ending remained intact for Japanese audiences.

But reshoots are not purely the resort of cynical, profit-driven studio chiefs. Woody Allen has been known to recast and remake entire films — his Chekhovian chamber piece, September, still flopped despite being shot twice in 1987. And yet, two years later, Crimes and Misdemeanours became one of Allen’s best-loved comedy classics, partly thanks to being substantially rewritten and reshot mid-production.

More recently, a newly sunny conclusion to Reese Witherspoon’s collegiate comedy Legally Blonde helped to secure box-office success.

Even The Blair Witch Project contains a crucial extra shot — when the directors sold their film to Artisan, the studio suggested a short insert during the early mock-documentary interviews that smartly planted the seed for the hair-raising final scene.

In other words, whatever film you watch this summer, it will almost certainly have been surgically reshaped somewhere between debut screening and final cut. Whether this tinkering will sink or salvage troubled comedies like The Stepford Wives is a moot point. In the end, only one test audience truly calls the shots — you.