h3lldalg0:

fireleaptfromhousetohouse:

andreaszchen:

I had a very interesting discussion about theater and film the other day. My parents and I were talking about Little Shop of Horrors and, specifically, about the ending of the musical versus the ending of the (1986) movie. In the musical, the story ends with the main characters getting eaten by the plant and everybody dying. The movie was originally going to end the same way, but audience reactions were so negative that they were forced to shoot a happy ending where the plant is destroyed and the main characters survive. Frank Oz, who directed the movie, later said something I think is very interesting:

I learned a lesson: in a stage play, you kill the leads and they come out for a bow — in a movie, they don’t come out for a bow, they’re dead. They’re gone and so the audience lost the people they loved, as opposed to the theater audience where they knew the two people who played Audrey and Seymour were still alive. They loved those people, and they hated us for it.

That’s a real gem of a thought in and of itself, a really interesting consequence of the fact that theater is alive in a way that film isn’t. A stage play always ends with a tangible reminder that it’s all just fiction, just a performance, and this serves to gently return the audience to the real world. Movies don’t have that, which really changes the way you’re affected by the story’s conclusion. Neat!

But here’s what’s really cool: I asked my dad (who is a dramaturge) what he had to say about it, and he pointed out that there is actually an equivalent technique in film: the blooper reel. When a movie plays bloopers while the credits are rolling, it’s accomplishing the exact same thing: it reminds you that the characters are actually just played by actors, who are alive and well and probably having a lot of fun, even if the fictional characters suffered. How cool is that!?

Now I’m really fascinated by the possibility of using bloopers to lessen the impact of a tragic ending in a tragicomedy…

While it wasn’t a tragicomedy, Monsters, Inc. featured a blooper reel - despite the fact that it was entirely CG, and as such the bloopers would have been created deliberately rather than accumulating naturally over the course of filming. In its way, it ties in very well with the main narrative - reassuring for the tiny tots it was aimed at - that the monsters are just working stiffs and not so different from you or me. Come the bloopers, they remain working stiffs but up a meta-level.

The original Predator, on the other had, had no blooper reel but did have the closest cinematic equivalent to the bows I can think of - over the end credits, as each actor’s name came up, they’d each get a spotlight shot, giving the camera a nod or friendly wave. Given that most of those people had previously been shown dying in hilariously gory ways, this is edging towards the idea of bloopers counteracting tragic endings.

I watched Monsters, Inc. when I was about seven and didn’t realize that the movie was animated. I thought it was actors in costume, and I used that blooper reel as evidence for my position until I was about nine years old. :P