He was flooded with scripts and offers, but Burton turned them down. It was a surprise hit – enough to get Burton noticed by film studios. Pee Wee's Big Adventure was a movie based on an absurd children's Saturday morning TV series. Tim Burton was an animation director who had one feature film on his resume. Pee Wee’s Big Adventure begat Beetlejuice. It was very demoralising.” In his book Burton on Burton, Tim Burton writes that the writing duo “got beaten down by the constant questioning', and that script meetings 'lasted for 24 hours over two days'. Wilson said, “Michael and I felt by the end of that process that we'd ruined the script. However, Wilson said he and McDowell were assigned an executive for about a year who had them doing constant rewrites. Why are you going to squander all that for this piece of shit', was basically what he was saying.”ĭavid Geffen got a hold of the script and loved it.Geffen Pictures, a fairly new outfit, made a deal with Michael McDowell and Larry Wilson (who was now doubling as a producer and writer), and attached Tim Burton quickly. “But I went into his office, and he literally said 'what are you doing with your career? This piece of weirdness, this is what you're going to go out into the world with? You're developing into a very good executive. He must have loved it or he wouldn't have wanted to see me so soon,” Wilson told Den of Geek. My initial reaction was wow! He'd read it. “I gave him Beetlejuice to read, and I gave it to him on a Friday, and on Monday his assistant called me and said well, he wants to meet with you. In a big way.Wilson says he’d forged a solid relationship with an exec over Universal who agreed to look it over. Larry Wilson, then a director of development for director Walter Hill, worked with the writer Michael McDowell to improve the script. It all started with a budding development executive taking notice of a script that needed work. Elmo's Fire, department store window dresser Hollywood Montrose in Mannequin and art gallerist Serge in Beverly Hills Cop.) (See Jules' interior decorator friend Ron in St. The cliché role of the gay interior decorator, though, was one of the few acceptable exceptions. It was tough to get a gay character in a movie in the ‘80s – there was actually a studio belief that audiences didn’t want to see gay main characters. The interior decorator is, of course, a gay man. Other than the Asian party guest, the film is devoid of any actors of color. The F-bomb.Again, it's PG and yes, PG-13 had been in existence for a few years. Lots of little kids saw it in the theater, on HBO, and forever after. And, he's all kinds of inappropriate with teenage Lydia, including forcing her to be his child bride. The only way to distract him is to put a whorehouse in the model town. Additionally, Otho chastises a dinner party guest that her suicide attempt was "dreary."īeetlejuice is a perv.The first time he meets Barbara, he is all over her she's slapping him away. When her parents encourage her that she can turn one of the spaces into a dark room she says "my life is a dark room" and she is dismissed as being overly dramatic. ![]() She writes a suicide note which is played for comedic effect. However, Lydia is depressed and suicidal. The suggestion to use the song came from O'Hara herself, according to co-star Jones, because she wanted to bring more energy to the scene, which had originally planned to use an old-school R&B song.Suicide is funny.The message may be that suicide is pointless: those who offed themselves are designated to be civil spirits for all of eternity - the joke is that it's a fate worse than death. A deal was made and the rest, as they say, is Hollywood history: one that showcased Belafonte's smooth baritone for "Day-O" memorably emerging from the mouth of O'Hara's Delia during a kooky dinner party set piece. The Emmy and Tony Award winner was intrigued and flattered, Pitchfork reported. "I never had a request like that before," the musician and civil rights activist told Pitchfork in 2018. ![]() ![]() Geffen reportedly called Belafonte and told him that he wanted to use the singer's original recordings of the songs for the film. ![]() Using the songs in the movie was a strange ask for the Jamaican American star, but one Belafonte didn't mind, particularly because the request came directly from music and movie magnate David Geffen. The oddball feature utilized the King of Calypso's infectious mid-century tunes - "Jump in the Line (Shake Señora)," "Man Smart, Woman Smarter" and "Sweetheart from Venezuela" - to comedic perfection that juxtaposed the film's stuffy newcomers with the quaint old guard who appeared to be Belafonte fans.
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