Playing the End Game

In many films, the editor's indecision is final

The film long ago became his obsession, and less than a month before its official premiere, Francis Coppola has only now stopped agonizing over how it will all turn out. After three years, $30 million, a typhoon named Olga and a shared Cannes Film Festival's Golden Palm for Best Picture, Director Coppola still struggled to find an ending for his Viet Nam epic, Apocalypse Now. Should Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) hack Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) to death and then emerge from the colonel's hideout? Or should Willard kill Kurtz, sail down the river and then order the site bombed into the Stone Age, or at least until the credits roll? Each finish was filmed, and each had its supporters, with the movie's distributor, United Artists, rather partial to the more pulverizing--and just possibly more profitable--version. The director, however, began to favor a calmer conclusion and will close his film without the fireworks. At least for now. "Francis just loves to fiddle," explains one of his aides. "It's in his makeup."

Apocalypse Now becomes one more film afflicted with the disease of the terminal. Movies with two endings, or no endings, or three endings, or appended endings are as much a part of Hollywood history as Schwab's Drugstore or Hedda's hats. New closings tend to be happier than old ones, with boy getting girl after all, or star surviving rather than perishing. In Apache (1954), Burt Lancaster was first killed, then allowed to live on. What's Up Doc? (1972) initially ended with a bittersweet goodbye between Ryan O'Neal and Barbra Streisand at an airport, but by the time the film was released Barbra was on the plane and cuddling with Ryan. Irene Dunne died heroically in A Guy Named Joe (1943) and joined Spencer Tracy in heaven, but came back to life after MGM ordered a new finish. Tracy stayed dead.

When the ending of a film is altered late in production, the change--Coppola notwithstanding--is usually made in the hope of raising box office receipts. Alterations often come after a preview audience has seen the movie and filled out questionnaires, which are studied by Hollywood executives with the same kind of eager dread White House aides must feel when they pore over the latest Gallup. Even the best and most independent directors find audience reaction helpful: Stanley Kubrick first filmed a wild custard-pie fight between the Americans and the Soviets as a final scene for Dr. Strangelove, but after several previews, he changed his mind and ended the movie with Major "King" Kong (Slim Pickens) riding bronco on the bomb.

After sneak showings of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Steven Spielberg cut only the background song, When You Wish Upon a Star, from the final spacecraft scene, but that small snip changed the mood of the story. "I felt the song was going to be perceived as wistful thinking," says the director today. "The audience perceived the film as a current event." Spielberg may return the song to the soundtrack in what must surely be the most extraordinary case of film tinkering ever: he is readying a revised version of Close Encounters, one of the top ten grossers of all time, for release next spring. Besides trimming sequences and adding scenes, Spielberg plans to add new footage to, yes, the ending.

Many directors, of course, do not have the right of final cut, or editing, that most crucial of Hollywood privileges. If it belongs to the producer or the studio head, the director is outclimaxed. William Wyler, for example, directed Wuthering Heights for Samuel Goldwyn in 1939, closing the film with both main characters, Heathcliff (Laurence Olivier) and Catherine (Merle Oberon), dead. Such a somber ending greatly disturbed Goldwyn, and he asked Wyler to insert a brief clip of the two lovers in heaven. The director firmly refused. Thus it was a stunned Wyler who attended the premiere and watched Heathcliff and Catherine strolling amid cottony clouds just before the lights went up.

Certainly a contender, if not the outright champ, for terminal indecision is Frank Capra's Meet John Doe (1941), starring Gary Cooper. Five endings were shot; at one point, three were previewing simultaneously in different towns. Another classic case was Casablanca. Until the very end, the script remained refreshingly free of any ending whatever. No one knew whether lisa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) would stay in Casablanca with Rick (Humphrey Bogart) or leave with her husband (Paul Henreid). The production took on a kind of war-zone chaos, with scenes filmed as fast as writers typed them. When one of the cast inquired politely about the plot, Director Michael Curtiz shouted, "Actors! Actors! They want to know everything." Ingrid Bergman complained that she did not know how to act toward the two men because she didn't know her fate. Screenwriter Julius Epstein told her simply, "As soon as we know, we'll let you know." Finally, the director decided to shoot both endings. The first exit--Bergman flying off with Henreid--left Bogart looking so good and noble and selfless that the second ending was never filmed. Though Bogart lost the girl, he did win Claude Rains and one of the most famous fadeout lines in cinema: "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

The end game as played by directors, producers and studios is neither good nor bad; as Epstein observes, previewing and then fixing a film is "like taking a play out of town for a tryout." All's well that ends well as long as the picture does well at the box office. Epstein, for one, boasts that he would rewrite Shakespeare: "I think the worst ending in the world is Hamlet. There is too much blood. There should have been a few less corpses." It looks as if Coppola has been won over to that less-is-more outlook.

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