| Edward Scissorhands | |
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Theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | Tim Burton |
| Produced by | Tim Burton Denise Di Novi |
| Screenplay by | Caroline Thompson |
| Story by | Tim Burton Caroline Thompson |
| Starring | Johnny Depp Winona Ryder Dianne Wiest Anthony Michael Hall Kathy Baker Vincent Price Alan Arkin |
| Music by | Danny Elfman |
| Cinematography | Stefan Czapsky |
| Editing by | Colleen and Richard Halsey |
| Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
| Release date(s) | December 14, 1990 |
| Running time | 105 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $20 million |
| Box office | $86.02 million |
Edward Scissorhands is a 1990 American romantic fantasy film directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp. The film shows the story of an artificial man named Edward, an unfinished creation, who has scissors for hands. Edward is taken in by a suburban family and falls in love with their teenage daughter Kim. Supporting roles are portrayed by Winona Ryder, Dianne Wiest, Anthony Michael Hall, Kathy Baker, Vincent Price, and Alan Arkin.
Burton conceived the idea for Edward Scissorhands from his childhood upbringing in suburban Burbank, California. During pre-production of Beetlejuice, Caroline Thompson was hired to adapt Burton's story into a screenplay, and the film began development at 20th Century Fox, after Warner Bros. passed on the project. Edward Scissorhands was then fast tracked after Burton's success with Batman. Before Depp's casting, the leading role of Edward had been connected to Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Robert Downey, Jr., and William Hurt, while the role of The Inventor was written specifically for Vincent Price in his final performance.
The majority of filming took place in the Tampa Bay Area of Florida, which generated over $6 million for the local economy. Edward's scissor hands were created and designed by Stan Winston. The film is also the fourth feature collaboration between Burton and film score composer Danny Elfman. Edward Scissorhands was released with positive feedback from critics, and was a financial success. The film received numerous nominations at the Academy Awards, British Academy Film Awards, Saturn Awards, as well as winning the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. Both Burton and Elfman consider Edward Scissorhands their most personal and favorite work.
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An elderly woman describes to her granddaughter where snow comes from, by telling her the story of a young man named Edward (Johnny Depp), who has scissors for hands, the creation of an inventor (Vincent Price). The inventor's final result was a humanlike young boy who had everything except for hands, but the inventor had a heart attack and died while in the act of giving a pair of real hands to Edward, leaving him "unfinished" forever.
Many years after Edward was created, local Avon saleswoman Peg Boggs (Dianne Wiest) visits the Gothic mansion on the hill where Edward lives. There, she finds Edward alone, and decides to take him to her home. Edward becomes friends with Peg's young son Kevin (Robert Oliveri) and her husband Bill (Alan Arkin). He later falls in love with the Boggs' teenage daughter, Kim (Winona Ryder).
Peg's neighbors are impressed by Edward's adept hedge-trimming and hair-cutting skills (both of which he does with his scissor-hands), but two of the townspeople, a religious fanatic named Esmeralda (O-Lan Jones) and Kim's boyfriend, Jim (Anthony Michael Hall), immediately dislike him. Joyce, a housewife in the neighborhood, suggests that Edward open a hair-cutting salon with her. While examining a proposed site, she attempts to seduce him in the back room, causing Edward to leave in a state of panic.
Wanting money for a van, Jim, Kim's boyfriend, takes advantage of Edward's ability to pick locks, and breaks into his parents' house. The burglar alarm sounds and everyone except Edward escapes, despite Kim's angry insistence that they return for him. Edward is arrested and released when a psychological examination reveals that his isolation allowed him to live without a sense of reality and common sense. Meanwhile, infuriated by Edward's rejection, Joyce exacts revenge by claiming that he tried to "rape" her. This, added to the "break-in", causes many of the neighbors to question his personality and ruin his popular reputation. During the Christmas season, Edward is feared by almost everyone around him except the Boggs family, resulting in him and the family becoming outcasts.
While the family is setting up Christmas decorations, Edward creates an angel ice sculpture. The shavings create an effect of falling snow, which Kim dances under. Jim calls out to Kim, distracting her, and Edward accidentally cuts her hand. Jim says that Edward had intentionally harmed her and attacks him. Edward runs away, tearing the clothes Peg gave him, and wanders the neighborhood in a rage. When Kim sees this, she breaks up with Jim, and he goes to his friend's van to get drunk. While Peg and Bill search for him, Edward returns and Kim greets him with a hug. When Kevin is almost run over by Jim's drunk friend, Edward pushes him out of the way, but cuts his face, causing witnesses to think he was attacking him. When everyone hears the police siren, Edward flees to his hilltop mansion and the neighbors form an angry mob and follow.
Kim heads to the mansion before the neighbors can get there and reunites with Edward. Jim follows them and brutally attacks Edward, who does not retaliate until Jim slaps and pushes Kim. Edward stabs him in the stomach and pushes him away to fall out of a window to his death. Kim confesses her love for Edward and shares a kiss with him as they say goodbye. To save him, Kim lies to the townspeople that Edward and Jim killed each other in the fight. She tells them that the roof had caved in on them and shows them a disembodied scissor-hand similar to Edward's. All the neighbors, both shocked and content, return to their homes.
The elderly woman from the beginning, now revealed to be Kim in her old age, reappears, as she finishes telling her granddaughter the story, saying that she never saw him again. She chose not to visit Edward because she wants Edward to remember her the way she was in her youth. She also reveals that Edward is still alive, seemingly immortal since he is artificial and can never age, and he "creates snow" from his ice sculptures, which falls upon the neighborhood below. She tells her granddaughter that "Sometimes you can still catch me dancing in it." While Edward creates more ice sculptures, a flashback of a young Kim is then shown dancing under the snow, falling from the angel ice sculpture above her.
The genesis of Edward Scissorhands came from a drawing by then teenaged director Tim Burton, which reflected his feelings of isolation and being unable to communicate to people around him in suburban Santa Clarita Valley, California. Burton stated that he was often alone and had trouble retaining friendships. "I get the feeling people just got this urge to want to leave me alone for some reason, I don’t know exactly why". During pre-production of Beetlejuice, Burton hired Caroline Thompson, then a young novelist, to write the Edward Scissorhands screenplay as a spec script. Burton was impressed with her short novel, First Born, which was "about an abortion that came back to life". Burton felt First Born had the same psychological elements he wanted to showcase in Edward Scissorhands.[1] "Every detail was so important to Tim because it was so personal", Thompson remarked.[2] She wrote Scissorhands as a "love poem" to Burton, calling him "the most articulate person I know, but couldn't put a single sentence together".[3]
Shortly after Thompson's hiring, Burton began to develop Edward Scissorhands at Warner Bros., with whom he worked with on Pee-wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice. However, within a couple of months, Warners sold the film rights to 20th Century Fox.[4] Fox agreed to finance Thompson's screenplay while giving Burton complete creative control. At the time, the budget was projected to be around $8–9 million.[5] When writing the storyline, Burton and Thompson were influenced by Universal Horror films, such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Frankenstein (1931), Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), as well as King Kong (1933) and various fairy tales. Burton originally wanted to make Scissorhands as a musical, feeling "it seemed big and operatic to me" but later dropped the idea.[6] Following the enormous success of Batman, Burton arrived to the status of being an A-list director. He had the opportunity to do any film he wanted, but rather than fast track Warner Bros.' choices for Batman Returns[1] or Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian, Burton opted to make Edward Scissorhands for Fox.[7]
Although Winona Ryder was the first cast member attached to the script,[6] Dianne Wiest was the first to sign on. "Dianne, in particular, was wonderful," Burton said. "She was the first actress to read the script, supported it completely and, because she is so respected, once she had given in her stamp of approval, others soon got interested."[8] When it came to cast the lead role of Edward, Fox was insistent on having Burton meet with Tom Cruise. "He certainly wasn't my ideal, but I talked to him," Burton remembered. "He was interesting, but I think it worked out for the best. A lot of questions came up."[8] Cruise wanted the ending to be "happier".[9] Although not publicly known, Burton's first choice for the role of Edward was Michael Jackson, but there were circumstances that made this impossible. Tom Hanks turned it down in favor of The Bonfire of the Vanities. William Hurt and Robert Downey, Jr. both expressed interest, and were considered.[5][6]
Although Burton was unfamiliar with Johnny Depp's then popular performance in 21 Jump Street, the actor had always been Burton's first choice.[8] At the time of his casting, Depp was wanting to break out of the teen idol status which his performance in 21 Jump Street had afforded him. When he was sent the script, Depp "wept like a newborn" and immediately found personal and emotional connections with the story.[10] In preparation for the role, Depp watched many Charlie Chaplin films to study the idea of creating sympathy without dialogue.[11] Fox studio executives were so worried about Edward's image, that they tried to keep pictures of Depp in full costume under wraps until release of the film.[12] Burton approached Ryder for the role of Kim Boggs based on their positive working experience in Beetlejuice.[8] Drew Barrymore previously auditioned for the role.[13] Crispin Glover auditioned for the role of Jim before Anthony Michael Hall was cast.[5]
Kathy Baker saw her part of Joyce, the neighbor who tries to seduce Edward, as a perfect chance to break into comedy.[6] Alan Arkin says when he first read the script, he was "a bit baffled. Nothing really made sense to me until I saw the sets. Burton's visual imagination is extraordinary."[6] The role of The Inventor was written specifically for Vincent Price, and would ultimately be his final feature film role. Burton commonly watched Price's films as a child, and, after completing Vincent, the two became good friends. Robert Oliveri was cast as Kevin, Kim's obnoxious younger brother.[14]
Burbank, California was considered as a possible location for the suburban neighborhoods, but Burton believed the city had become too altered since his childhood.[8] Lutz, Florida and the Southgate Shopping Center of Lakeland were chosen[2] for a three month shooting schedule. The production crew found, in the words of the production designer Bo Welch, "a kind of generic, plain-wrap suburb, which we made even more characterless by painting all the houses in faded pastels, and reducing the window sizes to make it look a little more paranoid."[15] Rick Heinrichs worked as one of the art directors. The key element to unify the look of the neighborhood was Welch's decision to repaint each of the houses in one of four colors. He described them as "sea-foam green, dirty flesh, butter and dirty blue".[16]
The facade of the Gothic mansion was built just outside of Dade City. Filming Edward Scissorhands in the Tampa Bay Area created hundreds of (temporary) jobs and injected over $4 million into the local economy.[17] Production then moved to a Fox Studios sound stage in Century City, California, where interiors of the mansion were filmed.[15]
To create Edward's scissor hands, Burton employed Stan Winston, who would later design Penguin's prosthetic makeup in Batman Returns.[18] Depp's wardrobe and prosthetic makeup took one hour and 45 minutes to apply.[19] The giant hedge sculptures that Edward creates in the film were made by wrapping metal skeletons in chicken wire, then weaving in thousands of small plastic plant sprigs.[20]
Edward Scissorhands is the fourth feature film collaboration between director Tim Burton and composer Danny Elfman. The orchestra consisted of 79 musicians.[21] Elfman cites Scissorhands as epitomizing his most personal and favorite work. In addition to Elfman's music, three Tom Jones songs also appear: "It's Not Unusual", "Delilah" and "With These Hands". "It's Not Unusual" would later be used in Mars Attacks! (1996), another film of Burton's with music composed by Elfman.[22]
Burton acknowledged that the main themes of Edward Scissorhands deal with self-discovery and isolation. Edward is found living alone in the attic of a Gothic castle, a setting that is also used for main characters in Burton's Batman and The Nightmare Before Christmas. Edward Scissorhands climaxes much like James Whale's Frankenstein and Burton's own Frankenweenie. A mob confronts the "evil creature", in this case, Edward, at his castle. With Edward finally unable to consummate his love for Kim because of his appearance, the film can also be seen as being influenced by Beauty and the Beast. Edward Scissorhands is a fairy tale book-ended by a prologue and an epilogue featuring Kim Boggs as an old woman telling her granddaughter the story,[18] augmenting the German Expressionism and Gothic fiction archetypes.[23]
Burton explained that his depiction of suburbia is "not a bad place. It's a weird place. I tried to walk the fine line of making it funny and strange without it being judgmental. It's a place where there's a lot of integrity."[16] Kim leaves her jock boyfriend (Jim) to be with Edward, an event that many have postulated as Burton's revenge against jocks he encountered as a teenager. Jim is subsequently killed, a scene that shocked a number of observers who felt the whole tone of the film had been radically altered. Burton referred to this scene as a "high school fantasy".[18]
Test screenings for the film were encouraging for 20th Century Fox. Joe Roth, then president of the company, considered marketing Edward Scissorhands on the scale of "an E.T.-sized blockbuster," but Roth decided not to aggressively promote the film in that direction. "We have to let it find its place. We want to be careful not to hype the movie out of the universe," he reasoned.[24] Edward Scissorhands had its limited release in the United States on December 7, 1990. The wide release came on December 14, and the film earned $6,325,249 in its opening weekend in 1,372 theaters. Edward Scissorhands eventually grossed $56,362,352 in North America, and a further $29,661,653 outside North America, coming to a worldwide total of $86.02 million. With a budget of $20 million, the film was declared to be a box office success.[25] The New York Times wrote "the chemistry between Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder, who were both together in real life at the time (1989–1993), gave the film teen idol potential, drawing younger audiences."[19]
Edward Scissorhands also went on to receive positive feedback from critics. Based on 53 reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, 91% of the reviewers enjoyed the film, with an average score of 7.6/10.[26] By comparison, Metacritic collected an average score of 74/100, based on 19 reviews.[27] Janet Maslin of The New York Times gave a largely positive review, "Burton invests awe-inspiring ingenuity into the process of reinventing something very small," she wrote. "In the case of Edward Scissorhands is a tale of misunderstood gentleness and stifled creativity, of civilization's power to corrupt innocence, of a heedless beauty and a kindhearted beast. The film, if scratched with something much less sharp than Edward's fingers, reveals proudly adolescent lessons for us all."[28]
Desson Thomson of The Washington Post found contemporary homages to The Elephant Man, Brothers Grimm stories and The Ugly Duckling.[29] Peter Travers, writing in Rolling Stone magazine, felt that "Edward Scissorhands isn't perfect. It's something better: pure magic."[30] However, both Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel gave the film a negative review. Ebert stated that "Burton has not yet found the storytelling and character-building strength to go along with his pictorial flair. The ending is so lame it's disheartening. Surely anyone clever enough to dream up Edward Scissorhands should be swift enough to think of a payoff that involves our imagination."[31]
Stan Winston and Ve Neill were nominated the Academy Award for Best Makeup, but lost to John Caglione, Jr. for his work on Dick Tracy.[32] Production designer Bo Welch won the BAFTA Award for Best Production Design, while costume designer Colleen Atwood, and Winston and Neil also received nominations at the British Academy Film Awards. In addition, Winston was nominated for his visual effects work.[33] Depp was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy, but lost to Gérard Depardieu of Green Card.[34] Edward Scissorhands was able to win the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation[35] and the Saturn Award for Best Fantasy Film. Danny Elfman, Ryder, Dianne Wiest, Alan Arkin, and Atwood received individual nominations.[36] Elfman was also given a Grammy Award nomination.[7]
Burton cites Edward Scissorhands as epitomizing his most personal work.[7] The film is also Burton's first collaboration with actor Johnny Depp and cinematographer Stefan Czapsky. In October 2008, the Hallmark Channel purchased the television rights.[39] Gothic metal band Motionless in White have a song entitled "Scissorshands (The Last Snow)" with its lyrics written about the film in homage to its legacy and impact on the gothic subculture.
A theatrical adaptation by the British choreographer Matthew Bourne premiered at Sadler's Wells Theatre in London in November 2005. After an 11-week season, the production toured the UK, Asia and the United States.[40]
The British director Richard Crawford directed a stage adaptation of the Tim Burton film, which had its world premiere on June 25, 2010, at The Brooklyn Studio Lab and ended July 3.[41][42]
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