shit hitting the fan twice.
"That's a funny joke, but..."
That was so maddening.
Could have done with less
shit hitting... cut one of them.
This picture actually opened
in Toronto and Buffalo.
It first opened on a Friday,
and it just didn't
do any business at all in Buffalo.
And then the following Wednesday
it opened in the rest of the country
and... did quite well.
- I didn't know that.
- Yeah.
In Buffalo I looked at the numbers
and, like, nobody went.
I remember in St Louis
the trailer was really good,
and there were two theatres,
one where it opened gangbusters
and one where
it didn't do any business.
And they attributed it
to playing the trailer.
That's before
they did all this TV advertising.
- And the free dishes.
- Yeah.
Stan and Terry
were the names of our lawyers.
That's Kenneth Tobey.
Yep, from "The Thing".
Remember we did this
about 15 times because...
This was a tough master.
- He couldn't remember a thing.
- Couldn't quite...
That was like the 19th line we tried.
We couldn't come up with
a funny line, how about...
- Stephen sold it.
- It's just hanging there.
I remember you were worried
about how Steve Stucker was gonna
play in the style of the picture.
So many scenes were shot
so he could be eliminated.
But actually, the first time we
previewed it on the Paramount lot -
it was right after we had shown
the picture to Eisner at his house -
and Eisner's first reaction
was he loved it, and he said,
"Where did we shoot this?
What was the budget?"
He didn't know the details,
and then you explained,
we shot it for $3 million
at Culver City Studios,
and Katzenberg tried to tell him
when it was being released
and he says,
"What are you gonna do now?"
We said we wanted to cut the picture
and he said, "Don't touch it!"
So we said we've got to try it out
in front of some test audiences.
And he said, "You can't do that
until the executives have seen it."
And so they arranged that screening
for 20 or 30 Paramount executives,
but we felt that would be a mistake
so we had them recruit audiences,
but the recruiter just brought
people who were in line to see
"Happy Days"
and "Laverne And Shirley".
And a lot of them
I don't think spoke English.
Yeah, and so the picture...
The first half was like sparse laughs
and the second half was no laughs
except for Stucker.
He saved the second half.
And so it appeared
the picture just flopped.
And I remember Don Simpson and
Craig Bomgarten leaving the theatre.
Two Paramount executives.
Two funny guys.
And they looked at me and said,
"Well, that was... interesting."
And so we just thought the picture...
the picture just flopped.
And I remember Katzenberg
scraping us off the cement outside
saying get to work on it,
you can continue to cut it,
it'll be great, don't worry about it,
this is just one audience.
I mean, the next day
I think we listened to the tape,
- and it had laughs.
- Tape of the audience reaction.
So we realised
we had to continue cutting.
We realised releasing the movie
at three hours was probably wrong.
- But the original was funny.
- The first three-hour comedy.
We re-cut it and took it to UC Davis
and that was our official preview.
- How'd that go?
- Great.
You should've been there.
I remember
we previewed it at Harvard,
and the kids at Harvard
had this tradition
where they won't give you
the satisfaction of laughing,
so they would whistle.
But nobody advised us
about that tradition...
Let me tell this Harvard story.
- Jim, keep talking.
- Something about women at Harvard?
Wrestling women at...
I don't know what.
But that was their way of laughing.
We recorded it on audio tape,
the screenings,
and they would take this tape back
to the cutting room
and cut the picture
to the audio tape of the screening.
In case you wonder
why it's so choppy.
Or you thought we were artists.
- We just cared about the laughs.
- It was pace.
The famous mirror