BASIC INSTINCT
I still call myself a “film editor” when someone asks what I do. But, it has been thirty years since I made my last splice on film. To this day, that last cut-on-film project holds a special place in my heart…
The last film splice I ever made. (So far.)
After the success of TERMINATOR 2, one of TriStar’s next big films for 1992 was a thriller directed by TOTAL RECALL’s Paul Verhoven—the film that would make Sharon Stone a star—BASIC INSTINCT. The studio wanted an early teaser trailer that they could attach to the video release of T2, but the studio had yet to see a cut of the film, so Cimarron sent me over to the feature cutting room, to sit with Frank Urioste, the film’s editor, and make a one time pull of whatever shots I wanted for the teaser. This would be the fourth (and not last) time I was cutting a trailer on a movie Frank was editing, but this was the first time we actually met. Frank was really warm and friendly, and as we marked shots for his assistant to pull, he talked about his long career and I gushed that his work on DIE HARD was among my favorites. We compared film experiences—but, where my first P.A. job was on an ultra low budget, cheesy Roger Corman ALIEN rip-off—his was on THE DIRTY DOZEN!
While he showed me his first cut of the nightclub scene, I was hooked by the house music cue, BLUE by LaTour, that he had temped in (and would end up in the final film and even on the soundtrack album). It had a relentless, almost hypnotic quality that, I thought, could be perfect for the teaser.
Back in my own trailer cutting room, I started to panic—maybe I didn’t pull enough footage, maybe that music was really just too freakin' monotonous... but, I was self aware enough to realize that this second guessing was just part of my creative process; total confidence, usually followed by blind panic, leading to eventual grudging acceptance. I love cutting thriller trailers and especially ones with detectives, because they usually ask all the questions that we, the audience, would ask—and it makes us subconsciously invested in the story we’re seeing. In fact, I think half the dialog lines in this teaser are questions.
I was feeling pretty good when Bob Farina and I showed the first cut to Bill Loper and, luckily enough, he loved it! He took it back to Buffy and Cathy, his bosses at TriStar and they were ready to go to finish on version 1... then they showed it to Paul Verhoven. He hated it. Really hated it. Said it was all wrong. Loper managed to convince Verhoven that there was no time to cut anything else—the VHS copies of T2 were almost ready to dub. Reluctantly, Verhoven agreed, they could put the teaser out on VHS, but, only on the condition that that was the only place it would ever be seen.
I was still more than happy to take the V.1 finish, but then Loper showed it to the legendary Bethlyn Hand at the MPAA (which in the years since, has lost one of their As, but I digress). We had cut the teaser as a “Red Band”, meaning that it could only be shown with other R rated films, but until the BASIC INSTINCT feature received its R rating (something months away) the studio could only release an “All Audience” green band. What I had used as Sharon’s original final line, “It was the fuck of the century,” had to go and in the shot of Sharon lifting her dress up as we hear her saying, “You’re in over you head”, we had to blow up the shot, so we couldn’t see the top of Michael Douglas’s head just below Sharon’s underboobs. And with that, V.2 of my BASIC INSTINCT teaser finished with a green band, which is kind of amazing to me, because back in my Cannon Films days, Bethlyn had spotted and made me cut around one single frame of a nipple popping out from a toga in a crowded fight scene in the otherwise forgettable trailer for SWORD OF THE BARBARIANS. But Loper, using the same tight VHS mastering schedule, pled with Bethlyn, convincing her that VHS resolution was so poor, that no one would ever see the blood dripping off the ice pick, or Sharon’s quick flash of boob when she gets dressed and somehow... thanks to Loper’s tenacity, it finished as is.
I was happy with the finish and had moved on to other trailers, and began experimenting with Cimarron’s very first brand new Avid non-linear editing system—but then something interesting happened. Two other editors at Cimarron began working on the theatrical trailer for BASIC INSTINCT. Armed with a finished cut of the feature and a music score for the film by Jerry Goldsmith, they cut very different trailers than mine. (In fact, it's very strange for me to happen accross the finished film on tv—almost every line of dialog is from a different take than what I pulled, it just sounds 'wrong' to me…) This was still early in the multi-vending trend in the trailer business, but when Verhoven still wasn’t in love with what he was seeing, Bill Loper sent the trailer to Kaleidoscope and at least one other shop and there were suddenly a half dozen trailers being cut around town—each of them specifically meant to be "better" than that first teaser. But each time one of them went in for market testing, Loper pulled the original teaser “out of the drawer” and tested it as well. And every time, the original teaser got the highest score! Loper convinced Verhoven that they just had to follow “the numbers” and he resubmitted the already Green Band approved teaser to the MPAA as the final trailer.
Loper and Bethlyn Hand’s relationship was never the same after that. Bethlyn felt she was railroaded into approving the original teaser (for VHS only, remember), but Loper had precident on his side—after all, the cut was exactly the same, how could they not re-approve it? It was a long drawn out process, first we cut out two of the swings of the ice pick in the opening. The killer was still naked, but no “naughty bits” were visible. Sharon getting dressed was slid to a later part of the shot and frames were trimmed and a few alternate takes were cut in and in the bizarre numbering system sometime adopted when you thought a version was already finishing, version 4J AltRev went to finish.
And late in 1991, I pulled the last piece of final dialogue for the sound mix later that week and made my last splice on film. I was forevermore an Avid guy (well, until Final Cut Pro… and then Premiere… but never again actual film).
The original "Green Band" VHS Teaser
The trailer seemed to play for months in theaters and once, sitting behind director William Friedkin at the Sherman Oaks GCC, I heard him turn to Kelly Lange and say, “now that’s a trailer.” A few weeks before the film opened, as is only fitting, the last word was Verhoven’s…
