Late Night Classics – Thinner

Trying his darndest not to oversaturate the world with too much off his writen word, best-selling author Stephen King doned the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Some of the novels to come out of his short-lived alter ego were Rage, The Long Walk, The Road Work, and The Running Man – which was later turned into a motion picture starring Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1987. Thinner was released in 1984 and it had a phony author photo of Bachman on the dust jacket.

It didn’t take long before a bookstore clerk named Steve Brown went to the Library of Congress to examine the copyright forms issued for the Bachman novels. Someone at the National Agricultural Library [NAL] had inadvertantly identified the ‘King of Horror’ as the author of Rage in those documents. King and Bachman were indeed one and the same. Stephen King dedicated his novel The Dark Half to the deceased Richard Bachman.

Director Tom Holland hit paydirt with two bona fide classics in the 1980′s – Fright Night and Child’s Play have stood the test of time are inimitable in every department. Let me tell you how much of an impact his 1985 vampire flick has had on me. I play the soundtrack every other day. I have probably seen it more than any other movie in my collection, and I even go by ‘Charley Brewster’ in some of the message boards I frequent.

After adapting Stephen King’s short story The Langoliers to booming ratings for network television, Tom set sail on a story of a lawyer who accidentally runs down an elderly Gypsy woman and gets away with the crime. Before Sam Raimi made his incredible horror comeback with Drag Me To Hell, Tom Holland showed us that Gypsy curses are ‘The Real McCoy’.

Jason Bene: How long after reading the book did you realize you wanted to turn it into a feature film?

Tom Holland: This is going to be interesting to you. It was at Warner Bros. and I was offered a choice of either Thinner or The Stand, and this was as a feature film. I didn’t think that The Stand could ever be boiled down to two hours or even three hours. I thought it should have been a movie series. I didn’t take it because I liked Thinner more. The Stand is probably Stephen King’s premiere work and the most startling of the time. Thinner was the one that could be done as a movie and could be encapsulated in ninety or one hundred minutes. That was how I ended up getting involved in it. I knew it was out there for thirteen years and they couldn’t get it done because the ending was such a downer. Stephen King would not change the ending.

Jason Bene: Was the rating success of the ABC mini-series The Langoliers the push you needed to get production underway on Thinner?

Tom Holland: Yes, it did. It was never my intention but certainly the success of The Langoliers helped get Thinner done. Thinner crashed and burned on that ending. That turned out to be the problem.

Jason Bene: How did you go about casting the big roles that needed to be filled?

Tom Holland: The casting director [Leonard Finger] deserves a lot of credit because he put together a terrific cast.

Jason Bene: The two performances that stick out to me are Joe Mantegna [Richie Ginelli] and Michael Constantine. Joe chews up every scene that he is in and Michael is unrecognizable as Tadzu Lempke.

Tom Holland: Everybody knew Michael Constantine from a television series from the late 60′s and he was the teacher in it. It was between him and Peter Boyle and I could believe Constantine as the Gypsy easier than Peter. Peter also gave a fabulous reading.

Jason Bene: There is some eye candy going on with Kari Wuhrer.

Tom Holland: She’s become the queen of this [sexy roles]. She was one of the best bodies in Hollywood at the time and a terrific girl, too. I don’t know what happened to her. If you look her up she is working non-stop.  She’s been working direct-to-DVD movies for a long time.

Jason Bene: You really believe that she is a born Gypsy.

Tom Holland: I’ll tell you what it was. The entire cast was terrific. We would run the film and the audience would arrive to the ending and they hated it. I have never had a series of test screenings that so graphically illustrated what the audience didn’t like about it. What happened was is I lost control of the film because the studio went batshit crazy trying to figure out how to make the ending work for the film. The ending that is on there was a compromise worked out with the studio trying to make it a more upbeat ending. The ending [from the book] that was on there and that I shot is by far the superior ending, but that the audience fucking hated it. You were able to gloss over it in the book. I think what happened was that Robert John Burke was so wonderful and empathetic as Billy Halleck that the audience started to identify with him and wanted him to have some kind of victory at the end. In the book, any kind of closure for Billy was ruled out because the original ending. That was the ending that I shot, and the ending that ninety-nine percent of the audience totally hated. Billy leaves the poison pie out for his wife to eat the following morning, and he comes down thinking he has killed his wife because she has been sleeping with the doctor. He finds out his beloved daughter has eaten the pie and now the curse has been passed on to her. In dispair of having done that, he then eats a piece of the pie and puts the curse back onto himself and commits suicide. That’s the ending in the book. That was the ending that I shot. That was the ending that everybody just hated. There was no way to come up with anything that could change that.

They were stuck with a film with an ending that didn’t work. With the new ending, they lost the emotional devastation that was implied in the original ending. The movie was not a commercial success even though it has a terrific ensemble cast and terrific performances. The other thing that happened was when it got the bad test screenings because of the ending, they tightened the script up and essentially took out all of the comedy. There were a lot of laughs in there. There was a lot of fun in there that was dropped out along the way. It was a wonderful experience making the film. It was a godawful experience for me in post-production. I don’t think there is an answer for it. I thought it was an actor driven piece and a character driven piece. It was like an art-house horror film. I thought it was interesting and worth making. Ever since then, I’m of the opinion that you better have an audience pleaser of an ending or you are in trouble.

Jason Bene: I think it is so odd that audiences didn’t like the downbeat ending because Pet Sematary has a bleak finale and it was a box-office hit.

Tom Holland: That was exactly the arguement that was made by the producers for thirteen years. Pet Sematary does work, but they sure didn’t like it in Thinner. Stephen King said, “Thinner is about the moral jellyfish gets squashed at the end.” That was the theme and the moral of the tale. I think in this case it was too cold and chilly. I don’t know how to describe it. That’s the story of that. It was a great disappointment to me because I thought the film was so good and there was so much good work in it. I know Stephen was disappointed. Pet Sematary had a sympathetic protagonist in the husband, and even though he loses at the end, it still felt right that you liked him. Whereas the original ending to Thinner is absolutely and emotionally devastating. I just don’t think that an audience of people who weren’t into full on tradegy could buy it. You could feel them fucking freeze in the last two to three minutes when they realized what it was. They couldn’t figure out what had happened because they didn’t spell it out. They just didn’t want to accept it.

Jason Bene: Throughout the movie there is a metaphorical theme that Billy Halleck is wasting away like someone who has AIDS or Cancer. It boggles my mind that moviegoers gave that a free pass and went ballistic on the ending.

Tom Holland: The film didn’t feel nasty watching it. I just always felt that they identified with Billy Halleck. They wanted him to have some kind of win at the end. Instead, what you had was a total wipeout. It’s very hard to pull off a film where antagonist is your protagonist.

Jason Bene: Billy Halleck is cursed ‘Thinner‘ and Judge Phillips is ’Lizard’. What physical atrocity is layed down on Duncan Hopley? He looked like he had a hoof and a pig snout for a nose.

Tom Holland: The idea was that he was cursed with acne beyond belief. Acne that absolutely destroyed him and turned him into a human pizza, as he was described in the book.

Jason Bene: I believe in the book that Duncan Hopley had severe acne as a teenager.

Tom Holland: That’s right. You’re right.

Jason Bene: He looked like he needed Oxy 1000.

Tom Holland: [Laughs] Yeah, right.

Jason Bene: Quite a bit of the movie was shot in Maine. Did that make it easy for Stephen King to visit the set and make his cameo as ‘Dr. Bangor’?

Tom Holland: Stephen came over and he was very supportive during filming. If you read the book, Billy is not a sympathetic character. He is a man full of vile and increasing hatred as he realizes that his wife is having an affair on him. The weight loss is driving im insane and at the same time he’s morally corrupt because he did use his relationships in town to get out of the accidental manslaughter of the Gypsy. He did do wrong and he’s cursed for it by the Gypsy king. It makes sense that since he did a bad thing that he would get punished for it. You can do a happy ending and a bittersweet ending, but you cannot do a total wipeout bitter ending. The ending to Thinner is very harsh. Thinner was a huge disappointment because the work in it is so good. The effects were good. Give a tip of the hat to Vincent Guastini. Vince was the one who was there day to day dealing with the problems.

Jason Bene: Wasn’t the head make-up artist Greg Cannom in Los Angeles for most of the shoot?

Tom Holland: Greg was in L.A. designing effects. I think he was on-set for a week or two at the very beginning, but turned everything over to Vince. Vince did the applications day to day and kept things working, which was very difficult to do because blending the edges is always a problem. It’s very difficult to do what we did because the actors start to sweat.

Jason Bene: I love how the structure of the story is a breakdown of class and society. These men who have money and power protect each other, and in the same breath look down on the Gypsies and try to run them out of town. They think they are above the law, but in the end, it’s some old school Gypsy curse that breaks them down and leaves them begging for mercy.

Tom Holland: Exactly. I could have gotten away with all of that up until the very ending. When his daughter died by inadvertantly eating the pie, the audience just left in droves.

Jason Bene: How many test screenings were done?

Tom Holland: We did a lot. It was just fucking awful. You could feel this film playing all of the way through and really playing all of the way through. Nobody left the theater. The audience was fascinated. They got to the ending and said the worst things in the cards. It was all about the ending. There was never any way out of it. I had set the film up to head towards that ending the entire way.

Jason Bene: The first time I heard about an alternate ending was in an issue of Fangoria.

Tom Holland: Now you have this ending that attempts to get Billy a win because at least as he’s dying he’s able to feed a piece of the pie to the doctor who’s been banging his wife. The idea was at least it gave him some kind of victory even though he was dying. That was small potatoes in terms of the emotional impact compared to the original ending where he inadvertantly kills his daughter and then suicides himself eating a piece of the pie.

Thank you, Tom Holland! Besides directing Fright Night, Child’s Play and The Langoliers, he also was behind the camera for The Temp, Fatal Beauty, Masters of Horror [We All Scream for Ice Cream], and perhaps my favorite episode of Amazing Stories [Miscalculation].

Tom is the writer/director of Twisted Tales, a brand new series of short films created in the great tradition of anthology shows like The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Amazing Stories. Here is the link to the official website.