{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "I had a very interesting discussion about theater and film the other day. My parents and I were talking about Little Shop of...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/165703360018/", "html": "

h3lldalg0:

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fireleaptfromhousetohouse:

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andreaszchen:

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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:

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I learned a lesson: in a stage play, you kill the leads and they come out for a bow \u2014 in a movie, they don\u2019t come out for a bow, they\u2019re dead. They\u2019re 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.

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That\u2019s 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\u2019t. A stage play always ends with a tangible reminder that it\u2019s all just fiction, just a performance, and this serves to gently return the audience to the real world. Movies don\u2019t have that, which really changes the way you\u2019re affected by the story\u2019s conclusion. Neat!

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But here\u2019s what\u2019s 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\u2019s 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!?

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Now I\u2019m really fascinated by the possibility of using bloopers to lessen the impact of a tragic ending in a tragicomedy\u2026

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While it wasn\u2019t a tragicomedy, Monsters, Inc.\u00a0featured 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.

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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\u2019s name came up, they\u2019d 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.

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I watched Monsters, Inc. when I was about seven and didn\u2019t 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

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