{The End Game}

When I was 13, I persuaded my mother to let me see “The Last Picture Show,” the Peter Bogdanovich movie about a dead-end Texas town in the 1950s. It was rated R, so she had to accompany me to the box office and tell the ticket-taker that I could go in by myself, something she couldn’t have been too happy about, but I begged and pleaded until she agreed. I don’t remember why I wanted to see it--maybe I’d heard it had plenty of sex--but I do know the experience helped start me on a lifetime of movie watching. With its grown-up themes of loss and betrayal, its black-and-white cinematography (something by then unusual in a feature film) and its ironic use of country music, it clearly aspired to more than the movies and TV programs I was used to, even if I didn’t understand exactly what it was.

And there was the final scene, taken from the Larry McMurtry book that the movie was based on, in which Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) goes back to see his married lover Ruth (Cloris Leachman), whom he had dropped for someone younger and prettier. Ruth is shy and polite at first, but she has taken the breakup hard and her anger quickly overwhelms her. Suddenly she’s throwing a coffee pot against the wall and venting her fury at him in a way she’s probably never done with anyone. Then, her anger spent, she notices the misery in his face, and a wave of compassion washes back over her. “Never you mind, honey,” she says, touching his collar. “Never you mind.”

Even at 13, I appreciated how different that ending was. It doesn’t wrap up the characters’ lives neatly. Sonny doesn’t strike oil or get a scholarship to college. He doesn’t triumph over Ruth’s abusive husband in a climactic rodeo scene. Nor is there any suggestion that Sonny and Ruth will have a life together--after all, what future was possible between a small-town teenager and a coach’s wife who was decades his senior? Still, there’s tenderness and affection between them, and in the bleak terrain where they live that means a lot.

It was the kind of emotionally complex ending Hollywood has never liked much, one that says much but leaves a lot unresolved, and so I wasn’t really surprised when Bogdanovich told me recently that it was less than completely popular. I had called him to discuss RKO Pictures’ infamous mauling of the last third of Orson Welles’ “The Magnificent Ambersons,” something he’d written about, and Hollywood’s abiding belief in the happy ending. Bogdanovich told me that one of the producers of “The Last Picture Show” had argued for deleting the last scene.

“He said, ‘Do you have to have that last scene?’ He thought it was too sad. I said, ‘Geez, I made that movie because of the last scene.’ ” I can almost hear Bogdanovich shudder over the phone line. “It was a horrifying thought.”

*

FOR SOMEONE LIKE ME, WHO STARTED GOING TO THE MOVIES in the early 1970s, the past three decades have been a gradual process of disillusionment with Hollywood. I simply don’t go to mainstream movies as much as I used to. Sometimes I think about it--some nights I even go so far as to check out what’s playing--but I can almost always find something better to do.

Understand, I’m a person who used to see just about every film that came out. I loved movies. For me, going to theaters as often as I liked was one of the rewards of adulthood. I even saw movies when the reviews were bad and no one would go with me. I saw “Speed 2” and “Hook.” I went to Woody Allen movies that not even the French could stand. I knew that an honest stinker might have a redeeming moment or two, and I wanted to be there for it.

Over time, though, the excitement I felt when I walked into a theater began to wane. Why did that happen?

Perhaps movies are a young person’s medium. Once you hit middle age, you start to think about spending your time more prudently, which means it no longer seems very wise to throw away two hours on “Runaway Bride.” I’ve been around long enough to know that Hollywood produces no more than two or three really memorable movies in any given year, and that the latest over-hyped Tom Cruise action thriller isn’t likely to be one of them. What once seemed fresh and exciting about the movies seems stale and derivative. I’ve seen the tricks in the magician’s bag, and I’m no longer impressed.

But maybe something else has happened, too. Perhaps the movies themselves have changed.

As a fan, I can’t help but feel that mainstream American movies are at some low ebb, and so much of the product Hollywood turns out is as empty and formulaic as it has been in years. I am not saying all Hollywood movies stink. I recognize that lots of people are out there trying to do work that’s personal and different, and sometimes they succeed. But their voices are lost in a din of mediocrity. American movies seem as calculated and pretty as an ad campaign for the Jamaican Tourism Board, with just as much emotion. Too often these days I walk out of the theater feeling manipulated and bored.

And for me, the worst thing about today’s movies, by far, are the endings.

Too many recent films end in a swoon of manufactured good feeling. Filmmakers lay on the fake feelings with a garden shovel. It’s no longer enough for the boy to end up getting the girl. He has to get the corporate job and the corner office as well. Any hint of disease, death or conflict must be pushed into the background.

Hollywood took Susanna Kaysen’s spare, searching memoir of her stint in a private mental hospital, “Girl, Interrupted,” and gave it a life-affirming ending, in which the departing main character (Winona Ryder) walks around relentlessly hugging everybody in sight. She even makes up with the horrid Lisa (Angelina Jolie), a fellow patient who has threatened her with a syringe, driven another woman to suicide and then stolen money out of the corpse’s pocket. Hey, no hard feelings. “You’re going to get out of here, and you’re going to come see me,” she assures Lisa, teary-eyed. It may be the first mental-hospital-slumber-party in movie history.

Likewise, the three sisters in “Hanging Up” spend two hours sloshing around in a familial pit of resentment and rivalries. Then they resolve everything with a teary confrontation scene and a family flour fight.

Again and again, Hollywood raises serious issues in films and then cops out with a false promise that everything can work out, even if doing so contradicts the spirit and meaning of everything that came before it.

This tendency to end movies in a Procrustean bed of synthetic uplift simply ruins a lot of films for me. You’re supposed to leave such movies wrapped in a gauze of warm feelings. All I want to do is run for the exit. When movie characters act in ways so at odds with human behavior, it’s like seeing game-show contestants squeal over the chance to win a set of steak knives: I feel disengaged from what I’m seeing, and embarrassed for the people on screen.

*

NONE OF THIS IS NEW, OF COURSE. HAPPY ENDINGS HAVE ALWAYS been Hollywood’s preferred way of doing business. That’s part of what makes it Hollywood. Let Europe be preoccupied with war and death. American movies are in the optimism and hope trade.

And when no hope is available, Hollywood is all too happy to engineer it. MGM once made a movie in which Anna Karenina, played by Greta Garbo, decides not to throw herself under the train. Instead she goes home and is reunited with Vronsky after her husband dies. None of that tedious Slavic brooding over fate and duty for her. Paramount’s 1932 version of “A Farewell to Arms” went a step further by offering theater owners two endings to choose from. In one, the heroine dies in childbirth (as she does in the Hemingway novel). In the other, she survives.

Movie history is replete with cases of sunny endings being grafted on to material deemed too dark or ironic. Take the 1928 silent film “The Wind,” directed by Victor Seastrom. It’s a haunting story about a young woman (Lillian Gish) driven mad by an unhappy marriage and the monochromatic bleakness of life in a prairie homestead. One day a visitor tries to rape her, and she shoots him. Because she believes her husband will suspect her of infidelity, she buries the body in a nearby field. It looks like she’s gotten away with it--until she realizes the corpse is being unearthed by the relentless prairie wind. It’s a metaphor for the slow unraveling of her sanity.

Not exactly “Singin’ in the Rain.” After studio executives saw it, they forced Seastrom to add a scene in which husband and wife reconcile and vow to fight the odds against them. When I saw the movie a few years ago and the scene came on, the theater audience burst into laughter. As for Seastrom, he left Hollywood a short time later and never worked in U.S. films again.

But the all-time silliest example of a changed ending has to be the 1964 film version of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s “The Visit.” In the play, a wealthy woman returns to the village where she was raised and offers everybody a fortune on one condition: They must kill the man who seduced her as a young girl. At first the villagers indignantly refuse, but gradually they begin to convince themselves that perhaps, as good citizens, they have an obligation to consider the request, and in the end they lynch the man.

In the film, the story is much the same, except that when it comes time for the killing, the woman (played by Ingrid Bergman) intervenes. I didn’t really want you to murder him, she tells the villagers. I was just trying to show how greedy you all are.

Why this kind of thing happens is no mystery: Hollywood has long believed happy endings sell better. “Movies are an escape, and people want to leave the theater feeling uplifted, rather than on a down note,” says Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations, which monitors box-office performance.

Within the industry, the pressure to conform to the code can be considerable, says former Columbia Pictures Chairman David Puttnam. Steven Spielberg may have the clout to kill off Tom Hanks at the end of “Saving Private Ryan,” but most filmmakers are expected to play along.

In his book “Movies and Money,” Puttnam recalled what happened after he’d produced the 1983 comedy “Local Hero.” The movie had been a hit in Britain, and Warner Bros. wanted to distribute it here. But studio executives didn’t like the ending and offered him money to re-shoot it, “to make it ‘more sympathetic’ to the expectations of the audience.” Doing so, they believed, would mean an extra $10 million to $20 million at the box office.

To his credit, Puttnam refused. The movie was released anyway and became a modest hit here.

*

BUT AS BAD AS THINGS WERE BACK THEN, HOLLYWOOD ALSO went through periods, such as the early 1970s, when it was willing to abandon formulas. You can see how much Hollywood has reverted since then by looking at what happens when filmmakers take movies that were hits just three decades ago and redo them with new endings.

Take last year’s “The Thomas Crown Affair,” starring Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo. The original had a clever last scene that grew nicely out of its characters’ personalities: The thief (Steve McQueen) engineers an elaborate getaway from authorities and flies off in a plane. Meanwhile, the insurance investigator with whom he’s been playing an erotic game of cat and mouse (Faye Dunaway) watches from the ground, thrilled to see how slyly he’s succeeded. Last year’s remake had a more conventional ending, in which he goes clean and she’s up there on the plane with him, jetting off to romantic bliss. What will they actually do, one wonders, when the passion fades? Start a security consulting firm over the Internet?

Then there’s “The Out of Towners.” In the Neil Simon screenplay, the Midwestern couple (Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis) are so battered by strikes, muggings and other misfortunes during a trip to New York that they pass up the chance to live there. And there’s a memorable bit of black humor at the end: As they return home, their plane is hijacked to Cuba.

But the people behind last year’s remake apparently believed bad things no longer happen in New York (a notion held only by people who don’t live here, I assure you). The movie becomes a farce about triumphing over career adversity and the inconveniences of travel, with a lame subplot about a daughter giving up medical school to become an actress. At the end, both husband and wife get good jobs and live on as successful Manhattanites, and the daughter gets a role in a play. Everything is smoothly resolved. It’s filmmaking for the Zoloft era, stripped of any edge or bite.

The same thing has happened again and again over the past few decades. The last scenes of “1984,” “The Vanishing,” “The Natural,” “Yentl,” “A Thousand Acres” and “The Postman Always Rings Twice” were considerably different in their source material than as movies. And there have been well-publicized battles between directors and studios over the endings of “Blade Runner,” “Mad Love” and “Brazil.” As biting as it ultimately was, last year’s Academy Award-winning “American Beauty” was supposed to end on an even nastier note: The original script had Lester (Kevin Spacey) bedding his daughter’s young friend Angela (Mena Suvari).

Why is this happening so often? One reason is the widespread use of focus groups, which increase pressure on filmmakers to avoid unnecessarily complex emotions. The essence of drama may be conflict, but when a filmmaker has to bend to a committee of strangers handpicked by a market-research firm, the conflict had better be resolved with sniffles and smiles.

You can see the impact of that in how Hollywood treats death and dying. Postmillennial Hollywood too often wants to protect us from death, as though we are children too young to be told Grandma has cancer. The movie industry’s narcissistic infatuation with youth and beauty has naturally evolved into death avoidance. Nicolas Cage or Sylvester Stallone can kill dozens of thugs and criminals in some cop movie, but if a script calls for the death of someone the audience actually cares about, the studios get nervous.

“Does she have to die at the end?” a Disney studio executive asked John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion when they set out to write a movie about the late TV newscaster Jessica Savitch. Not if we change her name, they replied. The result (chronicled in Dunne’s book, “Monster”) was “Up Close and Personal,” a movie, needless to say, in which death takes a holiday.

At the end of Nicholas Evans’ novel “The Horse Whisperer,” the title character is killed when he tries to save a frightened girl from a herd of mustangs. At the end of the excruciatingly boring movie--well, I don’t even remember how it ends, and I just saw it. But I do recall that Robert Redford’s character appears to be in robust good health at the end.

Such squeamishness about death reveals a certain oversimplification of audience psychology. After all, the weeper is a venerable Hollywood tradition. Actresses such as Bette Davis and Susan Hayward used to get Oscar nominations with long, scenery-chewing deathbed scenes, and moviegoers loved them. (Maybe that’s why audiences liked “Titanic” so much: They got to cry at the end.)

Audiences of the past had no trouble accepting the deaths of lead characters in movies such as “A Man for All Seasons” and “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” because they died in the service of higher ideals, Puttnam notes. Sad as the stories were, they ultimately were uplifting. When you get right down to it, happy endings are in the eye of the beholder. The ending of “Boys Don’t Cry,” which involves rape and murder, is certainly dark. But producer Christine Vachon says, “I thought the ending was upbeat, but that’s me.” Despite the hostility and violence they faced, the love between Brandon and Lana endured.

Such nuance too often gets lost today. Could a movie such as “A Man For All Seasons,” in which the lead character is beheaded at the end, be made in Hollywood right now? “I don’t know,” replies Puttnam, who’s now an education advisor in England. “That’s one of the reasons I’m glad I don’t work in movies anymore, so I don’t have to ask myself that kind of question.”

*

BY NOW YOU’VE PROBABLY CONCLUDED THAT I’m one of those people who believe movies have to be depressing to be good, and that the high point of world cinema was some Ingmar Bergman film with the Grim Reaper walking around. No, I’m as susceptible to Hollywood high spirits as the rest of the world. As I write this I can see the bookcase where I keep my videotapes, the movies I love enough to pay for, and they include “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Midnight,” “Splash” and “Bandwagon.” A pretty sunny bunch.

But I care about movies. To know what a movie’s original ending was to be, and to think about how much better it could have been, is a mournful experience.

I can never see the 1941 movie “Suspicion,” for instance, without pondering how much better it might have been had director Alfred Hitchcock been allowed to follow his instincts. It’s the story of a rich young woman (Joan Fontaine) who begins to suspect her charming husband (Cary Grant) is out to kill her. Hitchcock envisioned a deliciously smart ending that he later described in his interviews with Francois Truffaut:

“The scene . . . was for Cary Grant to bring her a glass of milk that’s been poisoned and Joan Fontaine has just finished a letter to her mother: ‘Dear Mother, I’m desperately in love with him but I don’t want to live because he’s a killer. Though I’d rather die, I think society should be protected from him.’ Then Cary Grant comes in with the fatal glass and she says, ‘Will you mail this letter to mother for me, dear?’ She drinks the milk and dies. Fade out and fade in on one short shot: Cary Grant, whistling cheerfully, walks over to the mailbox and pops the letter in.”

But Hitchcock ultimately substituted a much less satisfying ending in which the wife confronts her husband and finds out he’s innocent. Why the change? Hitchcock knew the film’s producers wouldn’t let a major star such as Grant play a killer.

A much more significant loss occurred the following year, with RKO’s mangling of Welles’ “The Magnificent Ambersons.” Based on a novel by Booth Tarkington, it’s the story of a wealthy Indiana family in late Victorian times, and how it’s brought down by pride and shortsightedness. (It’s now being redone as a TV miniseries.) Critics have long called the movie one of the best ever made, with some of the greatest acting ever put on film.

But preview audiences disliked the film, and after the financial losses from “Citizen Kane,” RKO was reluctant to indulge Welles. So it cut and refilmed scenes, making changes throughout the last third.

In the original’s final scene, Eugene (Joseph Cotton) visits his now-impoverished friend Fanny (Agnes Moorehead) at her boarding house to talk about a recent accident involving Fanny’s nephew George. Fanny once loved Eugene, but with old age and poverty, she has lost all feeling for him, and as he talks she’s indifferent and preoccupied. As Welles told Bogdanovich in “This is Orson Welles,” everything is over for her, “her feelings and her world and his world; everything is buried under the parking lots and the cars. That’s what it was all about--the deterioration of personality, the way people diminish with age, and particularly with impecunious old age.”

The re-shot ending retained some of the original dialogue, but it’s starkly different in tone and feeling. Fanny and Eugene meet outside George’s hospital room and discuss how much he’s changed. Fanny is no longer a destitute woman whom time has passed by; she’s engaged and optimistic and wears nice clothes; Eugene beams with warmth and happiness. The future is bright. The music swells. And all that Welles meant to say about age and the passage of time is lost.

Although “The Magnificent Ambersons” was nominated for an Oscar, it was a box-office bomb. For a long time Welles talked about re-shooting the end, with the same cast, but he was never able to secure the rights to the film, Bogdanovich says.

Today “The Magnificent Ambersons” remains a flawed masterpiece, a movie that retains its greatness despite all that was done to it. As for the deleted footage, no one’s really sure what happened to it, Bogdanovich says. But there’s a long-standing rumor that RKO burned it sometime later to free up shelf space.