It's unknown if either the original three hour and forty-five minute cut, or the two-hour cut that preceded the September screenings, even exist anymore. Hirsch and Hughes found the right cut of the film, it came out at Thanksgiving, and has since gone on to be a classic. In the end, of course, it all worked out. For example, they'd "thrown out a subplot about Candy’s and Steve’s credit cards getting mixed up." Without this, the audience thought that what were meant to be financial shenanigans resulting from an honest mistake were actually manipulative actions on the part of the characters, which made the audience dislike them. It turns out that they'd had so much footage that they'd cut some things that they really needed. Through the course of that September they re-cut the picture nine times, showing each new version to a preview audience, until they figured out what was going wrong.
And people started walking out of the screening!" In addition to audiences not responding to the movie, Hirsch and Hughes had another problem: because of the hard deadline of Thanksgiving approaching, they had little time to turn it around. "I am sky high, thinking this is one of the funniest movies ever made. "We go for our first preview and I am supremely confident," Hirsch remembered. By the beginning of September 1987, Hirsch and Hughes had a two-hour cut of the film they were ready to test on audiences. Go work on this.'"īut the story gets crazier.
In the end, said Hirsch, in order to get through all that film, "I had to hire another editor and just say, 'This is yours. – and filmed so many takes that Hirsch recalled "we had forty thousand feet of film" for the scene.Ī thousand feet of film is a single reel's worth, and lasts about eleven minutes this means that for the thirty-second sequence, Hughes had shot over six hours of footage. (One page is usually expected to last about a minute, so this scene would have been less than thirty seconds.) But Hughes filmed it with at least nine camera set-ups – a shot of the cab from the front, a close-up of the driver, close-ups of Neal and Del, two-shots that show both Neal and Del at the same time, etc. Take the scene when Neal and Del take a taxi to their first hotel - in the original script, Hirsch explained, this was about a third of a page long. On top of this, Hughes not only shot many sequences he couldn't use, but he radically over-shot even the scenes he did end up using. "He was rewriting scenes the night before," Hirsch recalled, "and handing the dialogue to Candy and Steve and the scenes would get longer and longer." To begin with, one of the main reasons the first cut of the film came in at three hours and forty-five minutes was that during a shoot lasting 85 days, Hughes continually added onto his own already-lengthy script. In a lengthy 2019 interview he gave in support of his book A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away… Hirsch spilled a lot of fascinating details about the film. Watch a Trailer for 'Planes, Trains and Automobiles'īut the best source for all of this turns out to be the man who edited the film, Hollywood legend Paul Hirsch. But it has also recently become clear that the making of the film was a far more complicated process than people initially realized. This lack of initial adulation of the film has often been explained by the fact that Planes, Trains and Automobiles was Hughes' first attempt at a story centered around adults, and audiences at the time saw him as a director of movies for and about teenagers.
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This was fine, but not what might have been expected, given the star power involved and how beloved the movie has become in the intervening years. It grossed only $7,009,482 in its first weekend, and ended its theater run with returns totaling $49,530,280. Big things were expected.īut it was not initially a huge hit. As a result, the studio had given Hughes a budget in the $30 million range for his holiday film, half of which was earmarked for a major marketing campaign. All had done extraordinarily well, both critically and at the box office. Martin and Candy were bankable stars, and Hughes was at the height of his powers and popularity, having released The Breakfast Clubin and Weird Science in 1985, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off in 1986. This was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and the hopes for the film at Paramount were high.