A ‘Brief’ Flap Over Surprise Endings : Movies: After two publications reported on a late-hour change to the conclusion of ‘The Pelican Brief,’ the perennial question of whether to reveal the endings resurfaces.

It was the kind of story destined to make a studio publicist squawk.

Just as Warner Bros.’ “The Pelican Brief” was about to open in mid-December, both Newsday and Entertainment Weekly reported on an 11th-hour decision to change the film’s ending. Both publications provided details about the thriller’s closing scene, thereby infuriating Warners.

Attacking the stories as “bad journalism,” Warners spokesman Robert G. Friedman said they could spoil moviegoers’ experience of the film based on the best-selling John Grisham novel.

“To people who are unfamiliar with the book or don’t remember it, the stories they wrote potentially diminish the suspense of the plot,” he said last week. But some critics say the studio is making too much out of what is really just a coda to the film.

Although giving away an ending or major plot twist is almost certain to irritate readers, such disclosures are not at all rare--and, according to some people, may be turning up with increasing frequency because of the heightened competition for entertainment news.

Reviewers, reporters and editors say they think twice before discussing endings and surprise developments, and would almost always refrain from doing so if writing about a plot-driven thriller. But some maintain it is sometimes impossible to intelligently analyze a film without fully telling what it’s about.

Still, as the experience with “The Crying Game” demonstrates, critics and journalists occasionally go to great lengths to remain mum for the sake of audiences’ enjoyment. Egged on by Miramax Films, the movie’s distributor, many news outlets kept Jaye Davidson’s sex a secret until after he was nominated for a supporting actor Oscar.

Some critics find the studios’ bellyaching disingenuous, given how much is revealed these days in trailers. “I wonder now why anybody complains, when the coming attractions give you all the dramatic scenes from beginning to end,” said Andrew Sarris, film critic for the New York Observer.

The trailer for the current movie “Shadowlands,” however, gives no hint to the fate of poet Joy Gresham (Debra Winger). Reviewers say this is just the type of secret they are not obliged to keep. The late-in-life romance of Gresham and writer C. S. Lewis was first dramatized as a BBC television production and then became a Broadway play.

Time magazine critic Richard Corliss draws a distinction between “Shadowlands” and “Terms of Endearment” (1983), in which “a big dramatic shift comes 90 minutes into the movie,” he said. “You don’t want to deprive people of surprises.”

Sarris, then the critic for the Village Voice, got into hot water with readers when he became one of the few reviewers to divulge that particular plot twist. But the veteran critic, who was not among that Oscar-winning film’s many fans, said talking about plot developments is frequently unavoidable.

“I, for one, think plots are very important,” Sarris said. “When a film doesn’t work, often it is because the plot goes wrong, and you have to describe how it goes wrong.” But sometimes, he added, it is also necessary to provide plot details to show just why a movie succeeds, as he did in his rave review of the recent “Flesh and Bone,” whose story hinges on several coincidences.

“To describe what it’s about I cannot get around talking about the coincidences,” Sarris said. Readers were warned not to read further if they had not seen the film. Such a warning is a device publications often use when giving away endings or surprises is unavoidable.

Time critic Richard Schickel never thought he was giving anything away when he disclosed in his review of “Presumed Innocent” (1990) that the protagonist, prosecutor Rusty Sabitch (Harrison Ford), was not the murderer. Like “The Pelican Brief,” that film was based on a best-selling novel and was directed by Alan Pakula.

Sabitch “is set up from the start as a put-upon hero who we emotionally feel is falsely accused,” Schickel said. The movie was intended as a dramatic work with complex characters, and not just a routine whodunit, he added.

Nevertheless, Warner Bros., which had urged critics in a memo to keep the film’s ending hush-hush, “made a fuss,” as Schickel recalls. Unmollified four years later, studio spokesman Friedman said recently: “I see no purpose in giving away that information.”

That type of information often crops up in reviews for more literary publications. Stanley Kauffmann, movie critic for the New Republic, frequently describes movie endings and plot points, as he did recently when writing about “The Remains of the Day.”

Kauffmann could not be reached. But commenting on the review of “The Remains of the Day,” Columbia Pictures spokesman Mark Gill said: “The only good thing about that is that it came out four weeks after the movie opened. It’s still bad; it’s just not as bad.”

In his review of “Fearless,” Terrence Rafferty of the New Yorker recounted the final scene of the movie in minute detail. “My general rule is if I think it’s a really good movie, I don’t give it away,” Rafferty said. “With a lousy movie, I don’t feel quite the same level of responsibility.”

Although Rafferty occasionally receives letters from outraged readers, his “Fearless” review did not draw a single response, the critic said.

Perhaps because of their fondness for “The Crying Game,” journalists were scrupulous about not revealing its gender-bending plot twist. Time’s Corliss chose to have a little fun with the secret--but, judging from the absence of reader response, apparently did no harm. Strung together, the first letter of each paragraph of his review spells out a message that “she is a he.”

The first publication to blow the “Crying Game” secret was Entertainment Weekly, which ran a cover story on the movie last spring. By that time, said assistant managing editor Richard Sanders, the movie had been playing for several months.

EW has a policy against revealing endings “unless it’s really germane to the story,” Sanders said, as in the article about whether “My Girl” (1991) would upset children because the character played by Macaulay Culkin dies from bee stings. Even though the piece carried a warning about its content, “We still had readers complaining,” the editor said.

The magazine was justified in running the “Pelican Brief” story, he said, because millions of Grisham fans were familiar with the original ending and “it was of interest that the ending had changed and that they had to reshoot it real close to the opening date.”

Newsday movie editor Lois Draegin, however, said that writer Jane Galbraith’s description of the ending just slipped by. “We make a real point and effort not to give away endings,” she said. “In this case it was an oversight.”

A different version of Galbraith’s story--minus a description of the ending--was subsequently published in the Los Angeles Times, which has a policy against revealing endings or plot twists. “Our aim is not to ruin the movie for people who are going to go see it,” according to Executive Calendar Editor John P. Lindsay.

But last July editors at both The Times and Newsday printed a description of the climactic scene from “A Perfect World” in a production story by free-lance writer Joe Leydon.

Lindsay took issue, however, with a reader who complained about an article about “Thelma & Louise” that was published after the 1991 movie was released on video. By then, Lindsay said, the movie had been so widely seen and discussed that it was not necessary to delete references to the ending.

Studio marketing executives say increasing competition among entertainment news outlets has made editors less loath to break their own rules. “Everybody’s looking for an extra-competitive edge,” said Columbia’s Gill.

“The whole reason that this ‘Pelican Brief’ story was written was that everybody thought they were doing some discovery piece,” Friedman said.

Schickel, however, believes that it is competition among the studios that has caused them to overreact to the EW and Newsday “Pelican Brief” stories.

“This all has to do with marketing,” Schickel said. “I don’t think (director) Pakula cares a damn about that particular revelation. But in this insanely competitive market, the marketing people get upset if they feel they’re losing even the tiniest edge--if 300 people say, ‘Oh, I know how it turns out, I’m not going to see it.’ ”