‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ Writers Break Down Those Two Spectacular Needle Drops
[This story includes spoilers for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.]
Clocking in at just under two minutes, the involuntary calypso dance sequence in the original Beetlejuice, during which Catherine O’Hara’s Delia Deetz leads her dinner guests in a lip sync of Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O,” is arguably the most famous scene from the 1988 film. An homage in the sequel was always a given.
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But, for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, director Tim Burton wanted to go even harder. The film’s climax includes another dance number — this one set to all seven minutes and 21 seconds of Richard Harris’ bonkers and much covered “MacArthur Park.” (Donna Summer’s disco-fied version spent three weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the fall of 1978.) It isn’t just another needle drop. It practically drives the narrative of the entire third act.
Screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, no strangers to the Burton-verse with their massive hit Netflix series Wednesday, spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about their inspirations behind boarding the now-hit film, the different rationales for killing off two main characters and, yes, “MacArthur Park” and one other key soundtrack entry that was in their script from the very start.
This movie has two exceptional, protracted musical sequences. I realize writers don’t always have a say in soundtracks, but both seem pretty bound to the script. How did you land on the Richard Harris recording of “MacArthur Park” and The Bee Gees’ “Tragedy”?
ALFRED GOUGH Well, “Tragedy,” we put in the actual script. It’s just one of those songs. I remember getting that album when I was 11 or 12. Of all the Bee Gees songs, that one has always been an earworm. So when we were coming up with that sequence, trying to think of what could play while Dolores [Monica Bellucci] is putting her body back together and killing the janitor, it just sort of felt right. That was in the first draft, I think. We also wanted a big “Day-O”-like musical number, but how do you top “Day-O”? We’d gotten to the end of the movie, and we had the wedding and all these things happening, but we wanted something more. And Tim had been searching as well. He’s got a jukebox in his kitchen, and he called and says, “I’ve been listening to ‘MacArthur Park,’ and it’s stuck in my head. I think it’s the song we should use.” The Richard Harris version is seven and a half minutes, and he wanted to use all of it. So, then we kind of built out that third act using that song and the weird moves inside that song to build the structure of that sequence.
It’s such a good song, but it’s also nuts.
MILES MILLAR Nuts. That’s exactly why it’s perfect. We listened to it again, and it’s just so out there and bizarre that it’s the perfect song for a Beetlejuice movie. There are all these turns to it. There’s this weird bridge, with an orchestral number, that works great when when Willem Dafoe comes out of the crypt with the Ghoul squad. The song has all these different elements Tim could use, but it was long. We attempted to cut it back, and Tim was like, “No, I want all of it.” And he was right.
This is a sequel that comes with arguably much more pressure than most. What were your biggest apprehensions about taking the job — and did they align with Tim’s?
GOUGH Throughout the course of our careers, we’ve done a lot where we had the ability to really ruin a lot of people’s childhood memories. There’s always that anxiety. You don’t want to be the guys that screwed up Beetlejuice. But you just have to put that part aside and figure out what the best story to tell is. What is the story that feels worth telling but also honors the legacy?
MILLAR The most important thing was that it had to be a movie that we’d want to see — that it wasn’t just about commerce. There has to be a story worth telling. Also, how do we expand on the world of the afterlife? How do we revisit the characters people love but feed them 30 years later and surprise people about where they are? I think when people see where Lydia [Winona Ryder] is in her life, it’s surprising that she’s now kind of this broken woman who’s been haunted for the last 30 years. You have to look at the characters and take the franchise element out of it.
I read that you had a version where Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis’ characters, the Maitlands, had a cameo, but Tim passed — because those actors have aged a lot for playing ghosts. What did that look like?
GOUGH It was in one draft, just a tag. We tried it and Tim’s like, “No.” We discussed upfront not having them in the movie for that reason. The ghosts should look like they did 35 years ago, and they don’t. And their story had been told. We really wanted to focus on Deetzes. But we had an idea, we tried it in a draft, and there really wasn’t much more to it than that.
This movie is only an hour and 45 minutes long. One, thank you. And two, did that mean killing any darlings?
MILLAR Not really. Because the first movie was only 90 minutes, we really wanted to keep things moving. You can’t overstay your welcome. That’s actually built into the DNA of the story. Tim was very conscious about that, as well. It was maybe 107 pages originally, and he said, “Let’s keep cutting.” We got it down to 97 pages without losing anything substantial. It was just about making sure that this movie could be light on its feet. For comedy, especially, that’s exactly right. Audiences get exhausted watching a comedy that’s too long — especially this is one being so visual and just bizarre. I think obviously it’s welcome.
Talk to me about the guidelines you established in writing around the Charles Deetz character. Obviously, his death is the catalyst for the whole narrative — but the actor from the original film, Jeffrey Jones, is persona non grata. [He is a registered sex offender.] The character is only seen as a corpse with its top half bitten off by a shark, but you use his likeness in a photo and in one animated sequence.
GOUGH The animated story of how Charles died is from Tim telling his worst nightmare of dying, which is he’s in a plane crash, he survives, he almost drowns, he’s about to be saved and then he’s eaten by a shark. That’s a great story. Because the first movie there is stop motion — remember when the sculptures come to life and there’s those things — we wanted to have that in there. So it became about putting a twist on the backstory exposition moments. Like with Betelgeuse and the Italian movie of his origin story. For Charles, showing him with his head off helps with the real-life situation.
There are a lot of practical effects in the movie, one of them being the Betelgeuse baby. Did you originally intend on coming back to that as a tag at the very end, or is that a product of how funny it turned out in its first appearance?
GOUGH We didn’t want the movie to feel like it got wrapped up in a bow, so we had the idea with Tim of Lydia giving up on her show and she and Astrid [Jenna Ortega] go off on this trip that she was going to take with her dad. It was Tim’s idea to do this sequence and make it looks like she gets married and everything is going great — and then she has this Betelgeuse baby and you realize it’s a dream. It was the end-of-the-movie curveball, so you realize nothing in the this world ever gets wrapped up in a bow.
MILLAR That was the last scene we wrote before the strike. We initially turned that scene in the hospital hours before the strike was called. It was the last thing we wrote for the movie at all. It just felt bonkers and inspired to have it seem like it’d be this nice, warm, cuddly feeling and then the Betelgeuse baby comes back and it’s too perfect.
Why did you choose to kill off Delia?
Millar That was actually Catherine’s idea. We were talking about her character, and she said, “I think she should commit suicide just because she’s so in love with Charles. The ultimate thing she can do is to join him in the afterlife.” It’s a great idea, but it felt like a weird well to go down in a comedy to have a main character commit suicide toward the end of the movie. What’s a more creative, bizarre way that she could die? That was an accidental death. So we got to his idea of the asps, which we really loved.
Where are you with season two of Wednesday — and did the response to season one impact the direction of where you’re taking it now?
GOUGH We are halfway through production. We’re both in Dublin right now. Ideals obviously evolve as you see the show come out and how people respond to it, but we’re not going to service that stuff. You definitely take it in, but we’re doing what we wanted to do and how we saw the second season before anybody knew what that first season would become. It’s also insane. To have something really hit the culture the way it did, it’s great.
MILLAR We always just take it one script at a time and sort of put what people think of it out of our minds. Shooting on an island has been a great kind of bubble. We’re unaware of everything and just really focused on trying to make great episodes. It’s something that we’ve really dedicated ourselves to the last three years.
Have you been approached about doing The Addams Family as a feature? There hasn’t been a live-action theatrical exploration of that property since the early ‘90s, which is kind of surprising.
GOUGH We feel like we explore The Addams Family in this show, through Wednesday. So, this is the story. When we did Smallville, people always asked if we were going to do a Superman movie. But that was the story we were telling. I think that’s how we feel here. There’s a lot of stories to tell in this universe and we’re excited to do that.
Have you been surprised by the legs to Jenna’s comments about her Wednesday script notes? It almost seems like she has to address it every time she does press for something — and I realize that I am basically doing the same thing by asking you about it.
GOUGH That’s hard. We’ve done a few of these shows, like Smallville, which was a big hit out of the gate. Suddenly, you have these young stars in the spotlight. They’re going to misstep. They’re going to say things. I think you just have to give them grace and know that it happens. It’s never pleasant, but it just comes with the territory. I think we’re at the point now where the internet’s going to do what the internet’s going to do. What you don’t want to do is give these things oxygen.
MILLAR We work with Jenna very closely on the show. We obviously worked with her on Beetlejuice. It’s always an incredibly collaborative and joyful experience. We couldn’t be prouder of her work and we’ve embraced her as a producer on the show this year. She is one of the hardest working, most talented young actresses in the business, and we are very lucky and feel very proud that she’s working with us. So it is what it is. A show of this size and this scale is always going to have people chattering. But it’s not our reality or her reality.
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