A Strong, Clear Revision

One of the first things Sam Mendes did after he signed on as director of the movie “American Beauty” in 1998 was ask the screenwriter, Alan Ball, to read his script out loud.

An acclaimed stage director, Mendes brought with him to this, his first motion picture, the strategies and techniques of the theater. He’s always found it useful to hear the words of a play out of the playwright’s own mouth. In this way, he says, he can more fully realize the writer’s intent.

A self-described “frustrated actor,” Ball gave the reading all he had, after which the two men discussed the script at length. Through their discussions and the questions Mendes asked, Ball says he came to see shadings and meanings that he hadn’t realized were present in his work.

“I’m an intuitive writer,” says Ball. “Sam so clearly understood the script that he deepened my understanding of it.”

Thus began the transformation of what was by everyone’s agreement already a powerful and expressive screenplay into the year’s most acclaimed film, which is nominated for eight Academy Awards and is considered the favorite to win best picture.

The refining, which continued through the editing process, extended from the usual changing of bits of dialogue to cutting whole sections after they had been filmed and assembled. The result was a moodier, more tightly focused movie with a poetic ending that is shocking by studio standards.

Other movies up for Oscars this year underwent large transformations as well, including “The Cider House Rules” and “The Sixth Sense,” both highly praised films that evolved over years of rewriting to reach their final form.

Rewriting and reediting is, of course, common in Hollywood. Most famously, it’s done because of unfavorable audience testing or it’s designed solely to make supposedly unpalatable films more commercial. (“Pretty Woman,” for instance, went from a noirish movie that ended with rejection and death to a lighthearted Cinderella-flavored screwball comedy.) The result of this type of tinkering often is a blander, less ambitious movie that bears the fingerprints of marketers.

The changes that “Beauty,” “Cider House” and “Sixth Sense” all underwent, though, were different. By all accounts, they were performed by the movies’ writers and directors primarily for creative, not commercial, reasons.

“Cider House,” which received seven Oscar nominations, took on wildly varying tones during its nearly 15-year journey to the screen. At heart a tough tale about illegal abortion, one version of the screenplay was so harsh that it kept away people interested in the film; another time, a collaborator tried to turn it into a farce. After writing innumerable drafts, John Irving, the author of the 1985 book on which the film is based, didn’t hit upon the right tone until he partnered with Lasse Hallstrom, the last of four directors who had a go at it. Hallstrom brought a gentleness to the movie while preserving what Irving considered the essential elements.

Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s labors to find the right balance for “The Sixth Sense” took place at the spec stage before the film was sold to Hollywood Pictures. He previously had made two little-seen, low-budget independent movies. With “Sixth Sense” he consciously set out to write a commercial script that would attract a big star and studio backing. He says he failed miserably, again and again. It was not until he scrapped his efforts and began anew, concentrating this time on the psychological heart of the story, that he was able, after a year of further writing, to get it right.

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“American Beauty” underwent its most radical changes in the editing room.

“It almost killed me when I saw [the finished film] the first time,” says Conrad Hall, the cinematographer who received an Oscar nomination for his work on the film. “It was a terribly disturbing experience because it was so different than what we’d shot. . . . I’d say 40% of it was different.”

Hall, like everyone else involved, had loved the original script. He admits, though, that once he got over his shock at seeing the completed film, he realized the editing had made the movie “much more powerful in every sense.”

Mendes and Ball say the changes were not nearly so extensive. “It was like shedding its skin, really--like a snake,” is how Mendes described the process. “The movie kind of emerged. What was the core [of the finished film] had always been the core of the story emotionally.”

Ball, a veteran of New York’s off-off Broadway who has toiled the last four years as a television sitcom writer and producer, had spent years writing and rewriting the script by the time he sold it to DreamWorks in 1998. Each draft took it further and further away from the true story that inspired him to write: the trial and media hoopla surrounding the Amy Fisher trial, the so-called Long Island Lolita who became a celebrity after shooting her lover’s wife in the head. The movie was never about the Fisher case so much as ideas the case provoked, but traces of its origins are barely discernible in the finished movie.

Important elements of that original story remained in the screenplay DreamWorks purchased, however. The early, pre-rehearsal work that Ball and Mendes did together took the story further away from its origins and closer to full realization of the ideas embedded in the script. Still, it contained--and Mendes shot--scenes of a murder trial and of one of the main characters in prison. The scenes only came out in the cutting room during sessions with editor Tariq Anwar, who is nominated for an Oscar for his work.

It isn’t giving anything away to say that Lester Burnham, the Kevin Spacey character, dies in the movie. (He tells the audience as much in a voice-over at the beginning.) Most of what was taken out of the movie included the aftermath of Lester’s death.

“We took out the last 10 to 15 minutes,” Mendes says. “That was all that happened after Lester’s death. It was an epilogue. It was very beautifully written, as well as beautifully directed and acted, and it was fantastically shot.”

In this section, Ricky Fitts, the next-door neighbor character played by Wes Bentley, is in jail for murder and Burnham’s daughter Jane (played by Thora Birch) is on trial. The movie also takes potshots at the media. A piece of videotape, on which Jane and Ricky joke about killing Lester, surfaces on a TV tabloid show, fueling the circus-like atmosphere surrounding the case.

Mendes found, though, that when he removed the scenes that take the movie out of the Burnham household and into the world, it made the film seem more “epic-like” emotionally.

Ball agrees. “It’s much more powerful now,” he says. Under Mendes’ massaging, “the movie became for me what it was about. It revealed itself to be something completely different from what I thought it was.

“Every time I see it I see something different,” says Ball. “It’s so layered, and I credit [Mendes].”

Interestingly, when Mendes and Ball extrapolate now on what happened to the characters after the movie ends, neither of them thinks the Jane and Bentley characters stand trial for murder.

The other major change involved removing a fantasy sequence at the beginning. Lester dreams that he is flying over his neighborhood. He waves to the neighbors and then swoops into his house. Mendes estimates that this constituted three minutes of film.

All that remains of these sequences is the opening overhead shot of the neighborhood and a snippet of videotape that is attached to the beginning of the movie as a kind of enigmatic prologue.

“If we’d been forced to cut 10 minutes at the script stage, neither of us would even have considered cutting what eventually came out,” Mendes says. They were among everyone’s favorite portions of the film.

Mendes says the changes didn’t alter what the movie is about. Instead, they tighten the focus on themes already there.

“Alan’s script was so skillfully, immaculately plotted,” Mendes says. “It was so effective in the way the story unfolds.”

The way that Ball articulated his themes was “almost subliminal,” Mendes says. For instance, the script specifies that the color red be repeated throughout the movie--the Burnham’s red front door, Carolyn Burnham’s (Annette Bening’s) red roses, Lester’s red filing cabinet, a red kitchen stove mitt. “It’s all a sign of unfettered passion,” Mendes says. “And it leads up to the blood” that’s spilled. Also, the script continually describes characters as being imprisoned--Lester in his office cubicle, behind the window blinds, in the shower.

“The layers were already there,” he says. “The job of the director is to find them and articulate them.”

“American Beauty’s” journey to the screen illustrates the evolutionary process of movie-making. Weeks or months--or in the case of some scripts, years--of reworking are not necessarily signs of insurmountable trouble. It could just be that the filmmakers are finding out what they have to say, and how best to say it. And only the end result can reveal whether the effort was worth it.