A Note on Studio Meddling

I watched The Big Blue last night. I enjoyed it quite a bit, mostly for Luc Besson's great visuals, but afterwards, while looking up information about the movie, I realized I had watched the version that had been edited down for its US release. Although it was a hit in Europe, Sony Pictures assumed that we would want to see less dolphin frolicking, and cut about 40 minutes out of the movie. Judging by the reviews of both cuts of the movie, I didn't really miss much story-wise, but it would have been nice to see more of the beautiful underwater cinematography.

The biggest change, though, was the studio-mandated addition of a happy ending. In the original ending, the main character, Jacques, dives deep into the ocean, choosing to die in the place he loves the most, rather than to be with his earthbound lover (Rosanna Arquette). As he waits in the depths, his dolphin friend shows up, I guess to usher him into the aquatic underworld. This is where the original movie ends.

In the studio's happy ending, there is additional footage of Jacques playing with the dolphin on the surface of the water. This, I guess, is supposed to imply that his love of the sea was not all that great, and he chose not to die there. However, I did not get this from it at all. The credits roll over this additional footage, and so I assumed that this scene was not meant to be literal, but rather just showing us that Jacques was now happily frolicking in the Big Blue in the Sky with his angel dolphin friend. I was actually surprised when I found out that this was meant to be the ending where he didn't kill himself. That's what you get when studio executives turn a tone-deaf ear to the creator's actual vision (to mix my metaphors).

This sort of thing has been going on ever since people have been making money from movies. I am reminded of one of the most famous scenes from the 1931 Frankenstein, where the Monster encounters a little girl by a lake. She is frightened at first, but then she accepts him, and they begin to play, throwing flowers into the lake and watching them float. The Monster, wanting to play along but not understanding that little girls do not float, throws the girl into the lake.

As filmed, the scene is a tragic illustration of the Monster's fumbling attempt to be human. However, some states thought the scene was too shocking, and cut the scene down. In the edited version, the scene ends just as the Monster is reaching to pick the girl up. In the next scene, the girl's father is seen carrying her body into town. Without seeing the Monster's mistake, our imagination fills in the gaps, and we assume that he really did murder the girl intentionally, and thus changing the entire meaning of the scene.

There are even more egregious examples of this kind of studio interference out there, from Terry Gilliam's Brazil to that Holy Grail of lost endings, The Magnificent Ambersons. The thinking behind these kinds of decisions baffles me, but it is an unfortunate reality of movie business. I'm actually kind of grateful for the inept "happy" ending of The Big Blue, because it proves that sometimes the studio's obliviousness doesn't affect the movie at all.