Test audiences, who needs 'em? Am I right?
Chicago Sun-Times critic and Benji The Hunted cheerleader Roger Ebert was once asked that very question by a Dan Schwartz from Paradise Valley, Arizona, who asked: "How can the creators of ostensibly artistic and creative films...justify the asking of Joe Six-Pack's opinion? I don't mean to sound insulting, but what the hell does the public know?" Schwartz's question and Ebert's full response are transcribed in Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2004; said Ebert: "Many directors find test screenings invaluable; Billy Wilder, for example, killed the first reel of Sunset Boulevard after a screening. If the screenings are used by the filmmakers themselves to get screenings on a rough cut, that's valid. Too often, however, studio executives use preview screenings as a weapon to enforce their views on directors, and countless movies have had stupid happy endings tacked on after such screenings." (p. 860) It's easy to see test audiences and focus groups as the enemy to creativity. Fact is, negative test screenings can and do cause filmmakers to make very questionable compromises. You only need to look to Adrian Lyne's Fatal Attraction (1987) for an example of a film that had its ending radically reworked to appease test audiences who drastically failed to understand the point of the picture they were watching. On the other hand, there have been occasions where, quite against my better judgement, I've found myself feeling a surprising empathy for test audiences whose feedback resulted in contentious or unpopular decisions. A couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to attend a screening of Little Shop of Horrors (1986) with the original ending intact and I found that version very hard to take, even knowing in advance what was coming. That ending may work great on the stage, but film has a very different energy and atmosphere to theatre, and I can see why test audiences weren't so taken with it back in the mid-1980s. Still, I think the most haunting examples of test audience obtrusion occur when a director's vision is rejected with so little clemency than the director is compelled to approach their beloved brainchild with a sacrificial knife and gut it into a million pieces, so that its innards can be rejigged and reconstructed in an entirely different form. Pictures that exist in a state of half-existence, or perhaps even double existence, in that as you're watching them, you're sort of consciously aware that you're seeing two different pictures at once - the salvaged film you've actually got, and the ghost of What Might Have Been, which hangs over it like a musty smell. Either way, what you've not got is a film that feels at peace with itself. Test audiences murdered Mike's Murder. And they called I'll Do Anything on its titular bluff.
I'll Do Anything was the third feature film by writer-director James L. Brooks, whose previous films, Terms of Endearment (1983) and Broadcast News (1987), were major Academy Awards contenders, the former managing to bag the top prize at the 56th Academy Awards in 1984. I'll Do Anything, by contrast, died a dog's death on its release in 1994 - specifically, a death akin to that of the dog from the Ray Bradbury short story "There Will Come Soft Rains". Once huge and fleshy, but now gone to bone and covered in sores, it ran wildly in circles, biting at its tail, spun in a frenzy, and died. It lay in the parlor for an hour, its decay going largely unnoticed by a general public who were all too busy rushing off to catch the latest screening of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (fucking Philistines). One of the problems facing I'll Do Anything from the go was the negative press regarding its production history. Everybody knew its awkward little secret - that it was originally envisioned as a full-fledged Hollywood musical with a distinctively 90s twist, with songs written by Prince, Carole King and Sinead O'Connor and choreography by Twyla Tharp. It all sounded very good on paper. Only test audiences reacted with such vomit-spewing bile to the musical sequences that Brooks balked and put his editing knife to the film's singing vocal chords, rendering it forever tuneless (save for one song which survives in the closing credits). It's impossible to comment on this particular development without also noting that the plot of the film itself, which takes place in contemporary Hollywood, deals heavily with the pains of having to make movies by committee and cater to the whims of test audiences who wouldn't know artistic integrity if it bit them on the nose. And - get this - the title song was specifically about showcasing the raw desperation of a character imploring test audiences to like him and give his project a pass. It's a bitter irony that haunts I'll Do Anything to the finish.
Brooks is of course the creator of Gracie Films and a producer of The Simpsons, and a number of Simpsons alumni feature in the cast of I'll Do Anything, including none other than Marge Simpson herself, Julie Kavner. She plays Nan Mulhanney, a prescription drug addict and compulsive truth-teller who has the unenviable job of having to tally test audience reactions all while trying to shore up her pitiful non-relationship with her boyfriend Burke Alder, a spineless and self-absorbed movie producer. Burke is played by Albert Brooks, who had previously courted Marge as pro bowler Jacques in "Life on The Fast Lane". That's actually what got my curiosity in I'll Do Anything piqued in the first place; if Julie Kavner and Albert Brooks were playing a couple, then hells yes, I was watching. Here, Marge and Jacques they ain't (for the most part, Burke barely acknowledges Nan's existence), but I nevertheless maintain that the two actors have terrific chemistry, and the scenes focused on their interplay are among the high points of the movie. In addition to Kavner and Brooks (who is of no relation to that other Brooks who helmed the project), Tracey Ullman appears in a supporting role (it was her TV show in which The Simpsons first appeared as crudely-drawn filler, and she later guest starred as Emily Winthrop in the Season 2 episode, "Bart's Dog Gets An F"), and that's Harry Shearer you can see lingering the backdrop of some shots.
I'll Do Anything centres mostly on Matt Hobbs (Nick Nolte), an out of work actor who, despite getting off to a promising start when one of his early roles in a mini-series was nominated for an Emmy in 1980 (he lost to Powers Boothe, who really did win for his portrayal of Kool-Aid/Flavor-Aid poisoner Jim Jones at the 1980 Emmy Awards) has never had the lucky break he feels he's due - the peak of his subsequent career has been playing an extra in Oliver Stone's Platoon. His marriage to Beth (Ullman) fell apart soon after the birth of their daughter, Jeannie (Whittni Wright); Beth and Jeannie now reside in Georgia while Matt continues to move around pursuing various acting gigs that inevitably fizzle. He's so committed to his non-existent acting career, in fact, that he hasn't seen Jeannie for years. Matt finally lands upon a steady source of income when he encounters Burke, who ropes him into becoming his personal chauffeur. He agrees to have Jeannie over for a three-week visit, only to later discover that Beth has other plans; she's facing a jail term for money laundering and needs him to take Jeannie for the duration - meaning that Matt suddenly has full-time custody of a girl who's effectively a stranger to him. Thanks to Beth's questionable parenting methods (the C word, compromise, gets thrown around a lot, which I guess ties in with the film's title), she's been raising quite the steely-eyed monster in Matt's absence (think Angelica from Rugrats if she'd been an octave screechier), and Matt, who's been shirking parental responsibility for Jeannie's whole life is now living under the same roof as the Kid from Hell. Matt and Jeannie's efforts to come to terms with their changed circumstances is the crux of the story, but there are also subplots involving Nan and Burke's relationship, and Matt's potential new relationship with Cathy Brelow (Joely Richardson), a development executive who gets little respect from her peers and is pushing to get her dream project realised, a remake of Mr Deeds Goes To Town. (Didn't they actually remake that movie in 2002 with Adam Sandler? I repeat what I said before - fucking Philistines.)
James Bridges, who was made to overhaul his initial rough cut of Mike's Murder when test audiences detested its intensely experimental approach, went to his grave insisting that he was happier with the project as it was theatrically released, and that audience feedback had enabled him to make a better picture. How does James L. Brooks feel about the changes he was forced to implement on I'll Do Anything? After making the call that the musical numbers needed to be culled, he was obligated to go back and create several new scenes to compensate for their absence, though he's long-maintained that he'd conceived the basic story and script independently to the musical numbers and as such saw them as fully capable of standing on their own. His interest in making the film as a musical was to explore that "heightened sense of reality" that you get through a musical, the idea that song and dance numbers, for all their artifice, bring you "closer to the truth", in what they reveal about the internal condition of your characters.
The million dollar question, of course, is are we ever going to see a director's cut of the film with the musical numbers restored? The answer, for now, is a clear outlook not so good, although Brooks has indicated that he himself was perfectly willing at one time. Sadly, it seems that the original cut of I'll Do Anything is being held captive by an assortment of legal barriers that would make its release too much of an ownership nightmare. Hans Zimmer, who worked as composer on the film, confirmed this much in a 2013 interview, where he said: "there’s a really simple reason it will never be seen: The deal structure on those songs was so complicated and so expensive, and it would cost so much money in rights to put it out.” In the same interview, Zimmer also weighed in with his views on why test audiences rejected the musical version with such hot-blooded ferocity. He felt that the film took too long to establish that it was a musical; by the time the first song kicked in, the audience had already accepted the film as a down-to-earth family comedy, and were unwilling to make the leap into Brooks' heightened sense of reality.
Test audiences may have not have dug the picture back in the early 90s, but I think it'd be an awful shame if the original cut of I'll Do Anything stayed locked up forever because that initial response was so hostile. Now that the dust has long settled and the film has done all the damage to Brooks' reputation that it was ever likely to do, I believe that the wider public should be given the chance to re-evaluate the film from the perspective of what it was versus what it could have been. Although I didn't care for the original ending of Little Shop of Horrors, I do think it's a very good thing that it's out there, so that viewers have the opportunity to decide for themselves which version they prefer. The musical version of I'll Do Anything has been kept so stringently under lock and key since its merciless disemboweling that the details of what lies within remain vague and obscure. It's difficult to say, from the outset, whether or not Brooks made the right call in excising those numbers, in part because I've encountered two wildly divergent responses from different sources purporting to have seen the original cut. In his article "The Unmaking of I'll Do Anything", film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum had this to say:
“Having had the opportunity to see I’ll Do Anything as a musical, I can report that it was immeasurably better in that form — eccentric and adventurous, to be sure, but also dramatically and emotionally coherent...And even though not all of the experimental numbers “work” especially well (I could have done without the title tune, for instance), I would still argue that the best of these — all featuring Twyla Tharp’s twitchy choreography as well as songs — are irreplaceable because they come closer to the truth than the remainder of this film."
Whereas Adam Groves of The Bedlam Files had this take:
"What the workprint version of I’LL DO ANYTHING isn’t is particularly interesting or even noteworthy. I’ll confess I was expecting a cinematic outrage on the order of THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED, but in fact I’LL DO ANYTHING in its musical format plays like most all truly bad movies: dreary and dull...Worst of all, the whole thing feels half-hearted, with the Twyla Tharp choreographed musical numbers staged in shockingly pedestrian fashion. It seems that Brooks, despite his high falutin’ proclamations about musical cinema (“Through song you can get closer to the truth”), just couldn’t bring himself to fully embrace the format–or perhaps he didn’t know how to do so. As he once admitted, “my style when directing is that I really don’t know how to get people to suspend disbelief,” and the suspension of disbelief is a requirement in a movie musical."
Honestly, whatever sins the musical cut of I'll Do Anything might have committed, something deep within my gut tells me that it was never going to be comparable to a wacky comedy about a clown luring children into Nazi death camps. We would probably do well to leave The Day The Clown Cried out of this.
The most illuminating article I've found on I'll Do Anything was written by Joe Baltake of The Passionate Moviegoer. Baltake does not claim to have seen the original cut of the film and offers no comment on which version is better, but he does provide helpful pointers on where the musically- curious can get tantalising glimpses of the film as it was once intended. His hot tip is to check out the trailers on the VHS release of The Pickle, a 1993 film by Paul Mazursky. (The next question being, was I really reckless/fanatical enough to blow $24 on this dubious-looking title just for a negligible window into what might have been? It would be terribly out of character for me not to. The video is on its way as we speak). Baltake also notes that "the laser disc version of the movie includes a "making of" documentary which shows co-stars Albert Brooks and Julie Kavner performing in numbers." (I don't have a LaserDisc player; could someone please be a love and put this onto YouTube?). Really, though, what I found most intriguing came not from the article itself, but from a comment on Baltake's piece by a user identifying as "Tommy" (although he states that's not his real name):
"I also worked on the film - as a dancer. I was hired for the song "I'll Do Anything" which Albert Brooks sang to a line of people waiting to get into a screening his film. It was a tap number and took a week to film. I can't tell you how disappointed we dancers were to find out all the numbers had been cut and that we would NEVER see them. BIG bummer. Tommy (not my real name)."
I have to say, all of Groves' efforts to convince me that the world is losing nothing by keeping the musical version of I'll Do Anything sealed away in a vault for all eternity went down with a noisy thud when I read that statement by "Tommy". Assuming that what "Tommy" says is true, then all the Groves in the world are not going to convince me that I don't want to see a movie in which Albert Brooks tap dances before a crowd of painfully indifferent human guinea pigs, begging them to like him in exchange for his complete and utter pliability. I don't know why, but the knowledge that it was a tap number just sealed the deal. I formally need this film in my life, to the extent that it is now the unattainable Holy Grail. I find myself spectacularly in love with an ill-fated Hollywood musical that I have never seen and will very likely never have a chance to see. I don't know what I can do with all that dead-end energy other than to champion the ghost of that little lost film. The musical version of I'll Do Anything WAS here, and I'll do whatever I can to keep a fire burning for it.
Of course, Groves' article also implies that the cast themselves would be only too happy for the original cut to remain dead and buried, referring to a bootleg copy of the original soundtrack that was in circulation among some Hollywood cliques and, in Groves' words, "laughingly compared with Springtime For Hitler." If true, that does make my aforementioned mission statement to keep nursing enthusiasm for the musical cut into something of a double-edged sword. Fact is, I have way too much respect for the talent involved to want to rally for anything that would be likely to humiliate them. But then I'm highly suspicious of that tidbit Groves includes about Nolte and co-stars purposely attaining and destroying copies of the original musical cut, which seems like one of those anecdotal punchlines people tend to substitute where none exists. Baltake also makes reference to the bootleg soundtrack in his piece and includes a few contemporary comments from journalist Chris Willman, who didn't seem too enamored with the musical numbers and goes after Albert Brooks and Julive Kavner in particular, which I guess shouldn't surprise me. (Willman also refers to a "truncated drug subplot", implying that Nan's dangerous predilection for drugs cocktails was once intended to be more than just background detail to her involuntary tendency to speak her mind.) But here's the way I see it - right now, Hollywood has a real hard-on for awarding key roles in musical productions to big-name actors who couldn't sing if their life depended on it. Let's see, we got Russell Crowe in Les Miserables, Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia! and, most gruesomely of all, Emma Watson in Beauty and The Beast '17. I would sooner take a musical performance with a bit of purposeful character and eccentricity over an insipid performance from a Hollywood big shot who was blatantly chosen for their A-list credentials.
The lingering question is what of the I'll Do Anything that we got? Is James L. Brooks right about the story being capable of standing with or without the musical numbers that were at one time or another intended to be the heart of the movie? Is it at least an enjoyable film on its own terms? Obviously, I'm somewhat biased because I like the cast, but I would say that, yes, it's perfectly fine in its present state. It's also immeasurably better than that mean-spirited, homophobic Jim Carrey vehicle that devoured it at the box office back in '94 (a movie about an eccentric P.I. who locates missing animals frankly has no business being that repugnant). I suspect, however, that Rosenbaum is onto something when he says that the musical cut was more "dramatically and emotionally coherent" than the version Brooks put out. The non-musical cut more-or-less works from a story point of view (there aren't many obvious narrative blank spots caused by cutting the songs, although some individual scenes do fizzle out where it feels like more of a punchline should have been) overall it does feel very slight, and the constant interplay of intersecting story threads never really comes together in a cohesive or satisfying fashion. Obviously, the main focus of the narrative is on Matt's endeavors to tame the little red-toothed shrew he sired and has found himself unexpectedly saddled with, but how do the film's various subplots factor into that struggle, other than just entailing people whom Matt happens to have befriended in Hollywood? I think the loss of the songs hurts the picture, if not narratively, then certainly thematically; I'll Do Anything never gets to the issue that seems to be lurking at the core of its character dynamics, which I think has to do with what Kavner's character describes as "the near total degradation of what once were grand motives". She's talking about the corporate machinery of Hollywood and its strangulation of talent and creativity, but she also alludes to the means by which the characters' individual aspirations and preoccupations have caused them to blunder into their own private hells, cut off and stranded in what are effectively entirely separate universes to the people with whom they share a common physical space. It's here that I can see how the kind of inner monologue you get through musical sequences would have been a particularly valuable method of illustrating that disconnect. You know how it is in musicals. Characters get to have all that self-expression, and yet nobody hears them. They're belting out into a void.
Jeannie is, for a good part of the film, nothing more than the perfect manifestation of her estranged parents' mutual self-loathing and thwarted ambitions; totally uncommunicative, except to lash out at the world whenever it threatens to send her a jarring reminder that it does not revolve around her. Jeannie cannot read, which makes her all the more impervious to external influence. And yet her greatest wrath is directed inward, as demonstrated in a scene where she goes to pieces over not remembering the words to a song (the same song she performs for real during the closing credits). Her name is, of course, symbolic, since she's spent her whole life sealed away in a bottle, enforced by her father's abandonment and her mother's extremely warped overcompensation. I'd say the whole point is that the adult characters aren't really any different. Nan is the only one who sees things as they are and is prepared to speak the truth (which does make her pretty tactless at times, but she nevertheless remains the moral centre of the film), although she's largely ignored by Burke, a man so obsessed with what other people think of him that he doesn't think of other people. Burke has taken this self-immurement to its greatest extreme, clinging to it as if it were tantamount to self-preservation. As he says at one point, "I'm all alone. At least there's that." (Horrifyingly, he says this right after terminating a call from Nan in which she was attempting to profess her love for him.)
The third act sees Jeannie land a role in a sitcom, effectively surpassing her father on the success front, while Matt's big shot at scoring a lead role is blown when Cathy folds on him after being put on the spot by Burke in a particularly idiotic focus group. Jeannie's own breakthrough is at risk of turning sour when she discovers that he can't make herself cry on demand, which gives Matt the opportunity to connect with his daughter by sharing his acting wisdom. By the end of the film, there's nothing to suggest that Matt will be breaking out of his bit-part rut any time soon (he gets a role in another Oliver Stone picture, although it's not one of the leads), but he finds release from his own bottle in being able to put aside his own ego and ambitions aside and nurture Jeannie's talent, and she reciprocates by finally opening up to her father. It all ends a little abruptly. For one thing, I expected Ullman's character to have some form of input in the film's resolution, but she doesn't reappear at all once Matt has taken Jeannie, which seems slightly off to me (she's imprisoned, she's not dead; couldn't Jeannie at least have had a telephone conversation with her or something?). The subplots are wrapped up in an equally sketchy fashion. We are given indication that the relationship between Nan and Burke will endure and (hopefully) improve, since the two are shown getting physically intimate for the very first time, although the film's treatment of Cathy is kind of egregious; as a character she gets next to no closure, and her relationship with Matt goes out on such a bizarrely chilly note that I'm left puzzled as to what I was intended to make of it in the first place.
I'll Do Anything is an unsettled film that spins a lot of wheels and doesn't seem entirely clear about where it ultimately ends up, but the pleasures of the picture are in the assortment of smaller character moments leading up to it, which are engaging enough to hold your attention. I give props to the quietly contemplative scenes in which we see Matt taking the time to bridge a connection with Jeannie. Those scenes are so well-done, in fact, that I have wonder how well their unassuming realism would have sat with the heightened reality of the musical sequences, had those stayed in (assuming that Brooks didn't add in all of those moments in afterward). But then all of the evidence suggests that the musical cut would have been a very, deeply eccentric beast indeed, and for that much I think it's worth mourning.
In its current state, I'll Do Anything is a case of "I'll go with it, but I'll inevitably be thinking of that other version of itself and wondering how much more far out it was, for better or for worse". I yearn for that cut, and yet every last bite of this extremely bitter reality sandwich tells me that it's not coming. Oh, but my copy of The Pickle is, so silver linings.
Finally, what do we know about all those ill-fated musical numbers that had to be jettisoned along the way? The good news is that they haven't completely vanished without a trace - although the original cast recordings have stayed locked away in a heavily-guarded vault for the past quarter-century (save for those bootleg copies that slipped the net), a number of them were recycled in subsequent projects, giving us a further tantalising glimpse of what might have been. "Don't Talk 2 Strangers", a song originally intended to be sung by Beth as she bids farewell to Jeannie, later appeared on the soundtrack to Spike Lee's 1996 film Girl 6, and later still on Chaka Khan's 1998 album Come 2 My House, while Prince included his own renditions of three of those songs ("The Rest of My Life", "My Little Pill" and "There Is Lonely") on his 1999 studio album The Vault...Old Friends 4 Sale. This site has some useful information on the fates of various tunes. As I say, the musical version of I'll Do Anything WAS here. We need to hang onto whatever scant traces we have.
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