Selects: How Audience Testing Works

Hi, everybody, Happy Saturday. Charles W. Chuck Bryant here with a pick from our past from June thirtieth, twenty fifteen. How audience testing works. Ooh, I shudder when I say that, because we had a TV show for one season and was it audience tested? I don't even remember. To be honest, it probably wouldn't have scored very well, or maybe it would have who knows. At any rate, this is how audience testing works for movies, TV shows, all kinds of things like that. Please enjoy it.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's over there. So let's just call this Stuff you Should Be, shall we.

Hey, that's a good name for a show.

Yeah, you know. I came up with that.

You did You're the Inventor, and from that was hatched all of the stuff podcasts.

Yeah, but I mean how stuff works? Stuff?

Yeah, but I don't know. I think you're you're selling yourself short.

It's okay.

So this is another one of our movie centric podcasts that people seem to love. We've done all kinds of things, from exploitation films to movies that change filmmaking, to how films are rated, THEA N PAA.

How TV ratings work. Yeah, ten exploitation films, Yeah, that was a good one, and some movies that changed filmmaking. That's right, all the stuff you just said.

Yeah, before we get going here, buddy, we need a blanket spoiler because we're going to be talking about movies that had their endings changed. And so this is your fair warning. Most of them are old movies. Most of this information is out there, of course, yes, but if you're one of those people who gets really upset by this kind of thing, you may want to You've been warned.

It can also be like a terrible the worst thing that's ever happened to you. Yep, And apparently even if you believe in the system, it's a terrible experience, says Ron Howard.

Yeah, he's he's a fame, well not famous for but he is on record along with his producing partner Brian Graser for who.

By the way, do you know this about Brian Grazer best hair and show business? Well, clearly, yeah. But he has the habit of taking frame pictures of himself over to people's houses and when they're not looking like, plants them among their family photos. That's pretty awesome, pretty cool.

That reminds me. I know, you hate George Cliney's guts, but there's you said that there's a famous practical He's a big practical joker, and he he prepared this one over the course of like a year, supposedly told like his best friends that he had taken up painting. Oh yeah, just kept that going and going, and then like gave some of his close friends He's awful, awful paintings, right, and you know you're kind of expected to hang it up. They're like, oh, thanks George.

Yeah that's a pretty good one. This is great. Oh but he felt so good about himself after that.

So glib. So Ron Howard and his producing partner Brian Greats are are on record as saying that they really can get a lot out of it, and like what they would hate is to put a movie out and find out there's something they really easily could have corrected, be either like confused or upset an audience.

As a whole.

But he also said it's terrible to go through, like even when it's a good experience, is never a good experience.

And that's somebody who believes in the system. So if you don't believe in the system and you still have to go through it, like Robert Altman did, He's.

Not a test audience kind of guy.

No, can you imagine putting him through that? No, that's like letting all of the town's ladies bring Boo Radley that the pies for killing Bob Yule. You know, Yeah, you can't put Robert Altman through the audience testing system. Who did they? Oh?

I don't know, a dummy because uh yeah, he was a Maverick filmmaker. My brother and my Emily worked on movies with him. It's pretty neat legend. I know it's good stuff. I wish I could tell a couple of the stories.

But but I mean, did you expect to get rich off of a Robert Altman movie?

No?

Apparently these people did.

I wonder what his top grossing movie ever was, probably The Player or Mash I'll bet it was Mash Yeah, movies didn't gross so much back then. Yeah, but it's just it's a perennial classic. Yeah, that's true.

The Player was great.

Yeah, I mean he's he's made a lot of great movies and some kind of stinkers as well.

Oh yeah, but a.

Lot of classics like Ashville. Have you ever seen Nashville?

No? I never saw in Nashville.

Man so good.

So the Player cuts. Yeah, didn't see the Uh, the Lake Wobegone one with Lindsay Lohan for some reason. What Yeah, they did a Prairie Home companion. Yeah, with Lindsay Lohan.

That's just weird.

And Meryl Street.

Huh.

It was like not a good id to getting casting director super drunk. Yeah, they just have a point out photos headshots and then that's how we'll cast this.

Uh. And then mckayb and miss Miller. That's a classic as well.

Never even heard of it. War and Batty liked Mash though. That was a good one.

It was so Ron Howard calls the process brutal and hideous. Yeah, he said, even if it's going well, it's not fun. Yeah.

Uh.

Francis Ford Coppola is somewhat responsible, although they have tested movies all the way back in the thirties. Yeah, when audience has said, you know that Somewhere over the Rainbow song really slows things down.

It's a stinker. Get it out of there.

Thank goodness they didn't listen, because that became one of the most iconic singing performances ever in a movie.

Yeah, and apparently pointing that out is a really good way to talk to somebody out of cutting something at a test audience. Yeah, think about Somewhere over the Rainbow. Chief.

So, when Coppola was making Apocalypse Now, he had focus groups and really, yeah, I would not have guessed that well that movie. You've seen The Hearts of.

Darkness, right, know, the documentary about it.

Yeah. No, it's really good that he had a lot of studio heat coming down on him.

You know you've got a great movie when the documentary about your great movie is a great movie.

Yeah, that's a good point. It's really good. I think it's wife made.

That, although that's not necessarily true. The best worst movie was a great documentary, and Trolls two was not a good movie in any way, shape or form.

I've never heard of best worst movie.

It's about have you ever heard of Trolls too?

I've heard of trolls, so I guess I've heard of trolls.

Too, apparently by totally different filmmakers, completely unconnected story wise

That was great documentary. The documentary is good. The movie wasn't good, right, Okay, so I ate my own words understood, No you didn't.

But I think one of your pals from UCB is in it Controls Too, in the Best Worst Movie the documentary.

You know one of the founders. No, not Matt Besser.

Yes it might be Matt Besser. Maybe I don't. No, one of the guys from you. There's like a bunch of UCB people in it.

Yeah, but okay, I got you. Besser was one of the founding members though, with Amy Poehler and Ian Roberts and Matt Walsh.

This maybe Matt Walsh is the one that was in old school, right, Yeah, so this is the other Matt.

Yeah, I think he might be in it. Yeah, he's a good guy. He listens to our show.

Prove me wrong, Matt, prove me wrong.

Oh, Razorbacks, that's for him.

He's an Arkansas fan. Or he just really likes Razorbacks. No, he's a Arkansas guy, gotcha.

Yeah, he's just a fan of the big Oh.

We had an ad break yet.

Not yet, not until I finished the story about Copola. He when he was making Apocalypse Now, hired a man named Joe Farrell or Farrell to help with marketing. And Farrell said, you know what, I see a pretty big opportunity here, and so he partnered up with Katherine Catherine Para and formed the National Research Group. I don't know, I don't think they're still exclusive, but at the time signed all the studios to an exclusive contract to do their audience testing. And I think they're still the top

Now, this is the company with the extraordinarily secretive name NRG, the National Research Group. Yeah, and they also do like contract hits I think for the CIA and the NSA.

No, but they don't have a website that I could find, like I was trying to just get a little information about the company.

But so they're a division of Nielsen.

Well, which of course they're super secretive. We already tell they are.

But yeah, so it's crazy like this.

It's like a cabal.

Yeah, you know very much. So Randy Quaid was right.

You might be. And they don't just do audience testing. They also, back when people had telephones, would do a lot of just random calling and saying like market research, like did you know this movie was coming out?

It's called awareness, Yeah.

Awareness campaigns and stuff like that.

And then they'd split you into four quadrants, right, which is the four quadrants that everyone on the planet is divided into, men under twenty five, men over twenty five, women under twenty five, and women over twenty five. That's right, that's it. There's the division of importance. At age twenty five, you cross over and get put out to pasture basically.

All right, so that's the longest setup in history.

So wait a minute, I want to make sure I understand what you're saying, because I made a lot of jokes in the middle of all this.

They were flying.

But you're saying that NRG, the National Research Group, came out of focus groups done for apocalypse.

Now, yes, that's the way I understand it. Wow. Yeah, I did not know that. Yeah, but they were already doing focus groups, but this company really ran with it, I think, in the corner of the industry.

Yeah, I gotcha.

All right, So let's take that promised break and we'll talk more about audience testing right after this. All right, back with audience testing. There's many different reasons to test your movie. Yeah, sometimes if it's a comedy, they will literally do multiple screenings just to test little bits and little jokes.

If that makes sense to me. Yeah, if you're testing a comedy, totally makes sense. Because a couple of comedy writers that you put into like a room and say, write this hilarious movie or take this dog of a movie and punch it up with some jokes.

It's very subjective.

It might sound funny to you, sure, but then you're a movie executive and you had like a three scotch launch, so everything seems kind of funny right now, you know what I mean? Yeah, nineteen sixties, right, so I get I get that, and then like this joke landed, this joke didn't, This joke was too far, and it like went against like what the what the character we've developed so far? That and then that to me makes sense. Yeah, Like I see audience testing to that end.

For sure, you see the value.

But if it's like should this explosion be seventy percent more explosive, well, or should this guy's brain splatter like more or less? Well?

With the violence, you have a point they that is something they will also test for it like, are you turned off by the amount of violence? Could we dial it back a little bit?

Yeah? What was the movie that was given an example in this article of of something that was found to be too violent?

Goodfellas?

Yes, yeah, that was in a Mental Floss article, right.

Yeah, yeah, Goodfellas? Uh, the audience like he had and that was the first movie Scorsese had ever tested.

Yeah, and yeah that's another guy I don't see like testing stuff. I'm really surprised about Apocalypse now.

Yeah, Well, like I said, it was studio heat, yeah, gotcha, Yes, Scorsese. I think like forty or fifty people walked out in the first ten minutes because of the violence. Yeah, and they said that they didn't like that third act where you know, just they thought it was too intense, Yeah.

And apparently very drawn out, way more drawn out than it even is now.

Yeah, they thought the ending of Goodfellows is too intense.

Right, and again very drawn out. So he went to a quick cut montage thing. Yeah, which actually ended up making it better because Henry Hill is like coke to the gills at this point. Sure, and like that whole thing where like he's looking driving watching the helicopter that's following him. Yeah, and it's like chop, chop chop. It really gets the point across.

Yeah, it was very effective.

So it worked in that case, I think, yes, right, the system works.

Well, I don't know about that. It worked in that case. So how these things work is if you live in the Los Angeles area and you go to the mall, or if you're even in a movie line, yeah, you've probably been approached or seeing the people with clipboards. Don't run away because they are not trying to sell you something. They're trying to give you something, which is a free screening.

That's true, and.

They'll come and sign you up there. I ask if you're interested. Hey, we got a new uh Owen Wilson movie that we're screening in Burbank next Friday night.

And everybody starts murmuring, oh oh, I love them. He's a national treasure. And everybody starts signing up.

What's with the nose?

He got it broken when he was younger.

It looks like more than once. I like that he didn't fix it though.

Yeah, he was a smart alec.

That thing is just like so crooked, and he's just like, yep, this is me.

He said. He always expected to do something like go into advertising or whatever. But if you're a buddy of Wes Anderson's from a young age, yeah you're going into movies. Sorry.

I'm a big fan of him and his nose. Yeah, so you're gonna get approached, Like I said, Uh, probably in LA but they do test all over the country because we've talked about will it play in Peoria? Yeah, sometimes they want to go to Ohio and see what you know, someone outside of the LA area feels about the movie.

Right. But the reason that your chances are vastly higher of being asked to be in a test audience for a movie in Los Angeles is because a lot of times the people working on the movie who live in Los Angeles have to attend these things. Yeah, because not only do they want to, they want to get the feedback from it, which we'll find out about that. They also want to experience it firsthand, sure, so they get a real feel for how the audience is responding.

Yeah, and if you're eighteen to thirty four, you're more likely to get approached, because that's the sweet spot of course that you talked about.

Yeah.

If you're older than that, then forget it.

No one cares about you.

No one cares about you.

Just give up all of your dreams and work and yep, smoke a pipe, be quiet.

That's right. If you are an assistant editor or in any part of the editing crew, it's going to be a bit of a hellish experience because you're going to be scrambling trying to temp in music and temp in and special effects like some really hackneyed version of special effects just so they know, like in the scene it's gonna be a spaceship.

Right, And then the editor's like, well, I can just cut to this stock quick quick time footage of a spaceship landing and get the point across. Like sure.

So they're gonna be scrambling trying to put together as much of a finished product as they can, and most of the times they will also be at the theater. They're gonna cue it up and watch it just to make sure it's ready to roll. Yeah, before the audience sees it, you're gonna have a moderator. Have you ever been to a test screen?

No of you?

Yeah?

Cool?

Yeah, it's neat what I don't remember?

Wow, it must not have been very good movie.

That was a long time ago. Yeah, that was it.

I love that movie.

It wasn't. I did watch that the other night, though, in full.

That's that was it. That was one of the songs that I sang at piano karaoke a couple of dollars saying that you mean and I sang Islands in the Stream.

Oh well that she did the Kenney Rogers part and you did the Dolly part.

We switched it up a little. Yeah, very hard song to sing, by the way.

And that movie holds up. Man, it's still very funny. Yeah, the great Dabney Coleman.

Great Lily Tomlin, the great Dolly Parton, the great Jane Fonda, the great Jane Fonda.

So good, and you know, the three of them, like it was just a great shoot and there were best buds and they remain friends all these years later.

You can tell.

Yeah, it's kind of neat. Uh, all right, so where was I? Oh? Yeah, someone's gonna introduce the movie and they're gonna get you all excited and like everyone's glad to be here. So you know when Wilson's new movie.

Right, everybody reach under your seat for some free red vines.

Yeah, yeah, you might get a little free something you never know. And they're going to explain, like what you're about to see is gonna be a little rough in parts, and the effects aren't complete, so just don't take that into account.

Right, They're not looking for like, whoa, maybe you should color correct it a little more before you release it. They're aware of that.

I think you're supposed to take the green screen out of the shot.

Right. What they're looking for is pacing. They want to know you as like an audience members keeping up with the movie and how it's how it is going, right.

Yeah, you're gonna well, you're gonna watch the movie just as cleanly as possible, and then you're gonna have to fill out comment cards. And they're pretty standard, but they can tailor it for the movie. Like if, like, let's say you think there's a problem with one of the characters, they might specifically say, like, what do you think about the Luke Wilson character?

Too much?

Too little?

He's no Owen Wilson.

They might ask your favorite parts, your least favorite parts? Yeah, how did it flow? Did anything stand out to you?

Is like, like could you follow it the whole time? Yeah?

Did it make sense? That's a good one, right. What did you think of the jokes? Yeah? What do you think of the jokes? They drill down, They try and get as specific as they can, and these are just the comment cards. Yeah.

Supposedly, if you're in the demographic that they're shooting for in release and you're at this thing as you're trying to leave, they might come up to you and be like, hey, like yeah, this is just kind of the schlubby like audience. You want to be part of a real focus group, come with us, and then you follow the stranger to a second location.

Yeah, do you follow him to a van with a little round window in the back that's.

Been covered over with a black plastic bag.

Yeah, it got dark, it did. So the big thing they're looking for, though, the money question, is would you recommend this movie to a friend. That's the one thing they want to know, and that is where you're going to get your overall score that they really are going to hone in on.

Right, and they want to know that so bad that if they don't say I definitely would, Yeah, they don't even count that.

Yeah you can say like yeah, yeah, maybe probably Nope.

So a movie. A movie gets a score at the end, and it's based apparently exclusively on whether or not you said you would definitely recommend the movie to a friend. Yeah.

Out of one hundred people, they will score that.

So yeah, we're out of however many people. But for example, out of one hundred, yeah, if sixty people say that, yeah, I guess I would recommend it to a friend, and forty people say that they definitely would, that movie got to score forty terrible, not even like a like you can't even take into account that Yeah, probably, Yeah, you have to say you definitely would recommend it to a friend to get a point for that movie.

Yeah, And they said in this article, I'm sure there's a huge caveats and a sliding scale, but uh and anything over eighty they think they're in pretty decent shape. I would guess eighty percent a low B average.

They've really says a lot, a lot less than eighties lately, except of course for Mad Max. They makes an X Machina that was a pretty great movie too, so.

Good they ask in this article, though, it makes you wonder, like when you when a train wreck of a movie comes out, like what happened? Did they focus group it? Did they test screen it? Did they ignore it?

Yeah?

Like what what? How does that thing get released? Is the question?

Or are you asking me? Yeah?

Well, I mean no, I'm just throwing it out there. I'm not the one who's been to one of these tests creating. No, it does make you wonder though, like it probably didn't salvageable.

They didn't screen it, or the the people who had edit rights didn't care to listen. But this this article keeps picking on glitter, which seems mean because there's a lot of stinkers out there. Apparently Human Centipede three has the I think it came out recently.

Is this the one in prison?

I don't know.

I think it's the first, like hundreds of people centipedes.

Yeah, it has the lowest Metacritics score of all time.

Really, you saw the first one?

Yeah? Have you seen it? No, dude, it's definitely worth seeing.

Really, yeah, I just think I get it just by seeing the trailer.

You would. No, No, I mean there's no real support beyond what you've seen in the trailer. But it's not even appreciating it in an ironic way. Even taking it on its own terms, you're kind of like it's worth seeing at least once.

Like can't be disturbing or yeah.

Okay, but not like not like hostile can't be disturbing. Have you seen Hostile?

Yeah? I didn't think that was very campy.

It was just straight up disturbing. This one already disturbing. Yeah, the guy was definitely going for an already bent despite the premise of the movie. All right, but yeah, there's some disturbing stuff.

I'm curious to see if that guy has anything left in his bag of tricks because you can only go mouth the butt for so long.

What's what's can't be disturbing? Give me an example of that thing.

Oh, I think like like a reanimator type of thing.

Oh yeah, okay, I see, Yeah, hostile's not can't be disturbing. That definitely. Yes.

Can we talk about Tom Cruise for a minute and how obnoxious this move was?

Yeah, I guess he really believed in the way the editing process was already going.

Yeah, he crashed his own test screening of Mission Impossible three, allegedly, uh and ran in there and looked like, Hey, everybody, I'm Tom Cruise. Let's high five each other, enjoy.

The movie, give me a couch to jump on.

I mean, can you believe that that totally negates the purpose of an audience screening because everyone there. I'm sure there were a few people who are like, oh I hatred got too weirdo. But the rest of people are like, oh my god, Tom Cruise just came into the very test screening. Yeah, like they probably didn't feel good about writing negative comments, right, you know why.

Here he might want to hang out with me after this, and I want to be able to tell him that I gave him a high marks.

I can't believe he did that. I can't believe he did that.

Actually, yeah I can too. So by the way, Also, there was a really interesting long form our in La Weekly from about a year ago called how YouTube and internet journalism destroyed Tom Cruise our last real movie star. And it's it's not an apologist's view, but it definitely defends him against a lot of it's just read it.

I'm still a fan of his acting in most cases, Like that Edge of Tomorrow movie was terrific. Yeah, I haven't seen it yet and I've heard nothing but good things about it. Yeah, it was really good. But I know I can still watch his movies and separate that from the wacko in real life.

This is, yes, this is defending his acting as well, but it's defending is that public perception of him as being a wacko.

Yeah, And it.

Basically like really kind of pulls apart like all the layers and you're like, oh yeah, Like it really goes to town stressing that he never jumped up and down on.

The couch, right, He just jumped up on the couch.

Exactly, But they go to great lengths to point out that that is not the same thing as just offhandedly saying, oh, yeah, he jumped up and down on that couch like he was crazy. Yeah. No, he jumped up on the couch

Well, I think the knives are out, not just because like, oh, he's a scientologist and people think that's weird. It's like when you dig down into scientology and find out the things that he abides by, like the slave labor to decorate his cars and to wash his truck, and you know, that makes you kind of not a good person, you know.

Yeah, I see what you mean.

Like that's beyond like, oh, that's just a strange religion. That's like people are being paid fifteen cents an hour to take care of me.

Oh, if they're being paid, that's not slavery, that's true.

It's a good point.

What was the what's the name of the was it an HBO documentary.

Going Clear, Going Clear. Yeah, based on the book Going Clear.

I saw the guy who wrote the book come speak.

Oh really, that guy likes something that.

I don't remember his name, but like, I mean, how whatever you think of his book, his journalism. That guy had brass ones. Oh really, he's the one who did it. He's the one who went after scientology when no one else would touch it. Yeah, he's the guy who did And apparently five million lawyers read that book before it was ever published.

I think HBO supposedly had like one hundred attorneys when they went to adapt it as a documentary.

Yeah, and this is after it had already been vetted by all of the lawyers in the book publishing world.

Yeah, it's good. Yeah, the great book. All right, let's take another break here, and when we come back, we'll talk about some of the more famous examples of movies that have been changed due to audience screenings.

It's gonna be so good, so Chuck, there's there's some legendary changes to movies that have been made over the years. Like we mentioned, uh, the Wizard of Oz that was not a change actually, but like a test audience suggested

I mean it sounds like a like a Queen Tifa comedy, like you know, like where she's a bus school sassy school bus driver.

And the like the K and the R backwards or something like that, and the poster.

Yeah, absolutely, she's a sassy bus pretty woman. The movie, the Sacarine feel good movie from Richard Gear and Julia Roberts.

Apparently not started out as Sacraine.

No, this is hysterical to me. It was originally titled three thousand, based on the amount of money it costs to hire a hooker for a week. Sure that would like made no sense.

Yeah, Apparently they changed the name not because of the test says, because the execs were like, sounds too science fiction y, and they were right.

They were right, pretty woman, it's a much better title for that for that movie. Uh. And then apparently it had a lot darker edge when it was in script form, and it ended with Richard Gear's character kicking Julia Roberts character out of his car and driving away. That's how it ended. Not very rom COMMI.

No, No, well it wasn't a rom com.

No, it was Gary Marshall. But see what I want to know is.

Gary Marshall, he's a rom COMMI director.

No, that's what I'm saying. He made that, like what I want to It seems to me like all that would have changed with Gary Marshall, not like in test screenings.

Yes, I think that's what happened. And then what the test audience, the hand they played was that they're like, you need to change that ending. Okay, gotch they need to get together.

Right, Fatal Attraction famously changed.

Yeah, So the ending of Fatal Attraction apparently has Glenn Cose Glenn Close, who's Michael Douglas's former one night stand turned stalker, killing herself slitting her own throat. Yeah, pretty good with a knife with Michael Douglas's fingerprints on it. And then Michael Douglas is arrested for her murder.

Yeah, and like it's supposed to They don't show trials and things, but it ends with him going to prison.

Yeah, and that's great ending. Glenn Close loved it. She was very sad when audiences were like, Nope, we hate this character so much, like she has to be killed off. She can't kill herself. Somebody has to kill her. Yeah, and just for good measure make it the wife.

Well, that makes sense because I think people people weren't rooting for Michael Douglas in that movie either because he was such a jerk right toyed with this woman left her, had this great wife at home and kid. So people I think they said, you know what would go over the top is if the only sympathetic character in this movie, which is Ann Archer, is the one who does it right and it was effective, I'll give it to him.

Yeah. But apparently Glenn Closes like the original ending was way better.

She washed her hands of it. Did you ever see Scott Pilgrim Versus The World? No, Michael, it's a good flick. The original ending of that one had him had his character ending up with his his love Entry knives Chow played by Ellen Wong instead of his dream girl Ramona Flowers, and the test audiences didn't like that and said, basically, this guy spent the whole movie annoyed by this girlfriend and pining for this other girl and defeating her evil ex boyfriends. Right, he can't just not end up with

Who knows, So they went back to the original ending. Yeah, that it was of the material is adaptive.

From that's right. Yeah, pretty in pink.

Yeah, this one's pretty famous too. I'd heard this many many years ago that originally they had Molly Ringwald ending up with John Cryer, Yeah, with Ducky rather than Blaine Andrew McCarthy, which, by the way, saw a Weekend at Bernie's again recently HiT's. Ah No, it's not that bad really, Yeah, it's very thin. Well it's one. It's one good joke.

Yeah, but boy, they take it in so many directions.

Yeah, it's pretty funny, and it's amazing how young Jonathan Silverman and Andrew McCarthy look, I mean young.

Yeah, and the guy who played Bernie, who like I don't think ever did anything else. No, I never saw him anything else.

He threw out the ball at like a Los Angeles Dodgers game or San Francisco Giants gamers some nineteen eighty seven. Yeah, no, no, like last season. Really, I don't remember the reason why, but it was like he's been working that character for a long time.

Do you know it would have been genius if they would have had Silverman and McCarthy out there like grabbing his arm and throwing the ball for him as if he were dead, It would have been great. That would have been pretty good. I think they call that meta

Yeah, so they he recovers. Yeah, didn't end in like a field or a.

Meadow or they're like romping in the field and I think they see a plane.

I'm sure Danny bow was like, oh, you want a happy ending. Yeah, I'll give you your happy, stupid ending. Here's your stupid ending. Choke un it, you, stupid audience.

I like the ending, though I don't. I like both. I don't mind a happy ending when it's done well, but I also like dark endings. Yeah, you know, one of the It doesn't have to be one or the other.

What about the opposite dark beginnings in un dark beginnings like with Sunset Boulevard.

All right, go ahead and break it down. I don't know that one. Oh have you ever seen Sunset Boulevard. No, that's on my left as a classic movie for a reason. It's a truly great movie. But apparently at the beginning of it, originally they had Bill Holden's Corpse, the character he plays Corpse, talking to other corpses in the morgue explaining how he got there. Oh wow, and audiences were like, is this a comedy?

Like? What is going on here? Apparently a lot of people walked out and Billy Wilder, the director, was there. Yeah, and some lady told him to his face that it was a steaming pile and maybe didn't know it was him or something like that. But the legend goes that she told them to his face, like this is terrible and.

So steaming pile.

He reshot the beginning to where it's Bill Holden's corpse, but it's a voiceover and he's not talking to other corpses in the morgue.

But it's not a comedy, right, it's not at all. Maybe because it was Billy Wilder, people had an expectation.

Yeah, And I mean there's some parts that you wonder like, did he mean that to be like kind of funny, like in a really dark way. Maybe, Yeah, it's quite possible.

But great, I need to see that. I love Billy Walls.

You should watch it, like tonight, doesn't matter the mood you're in, It doesn't matter what you got going on. Just you could watch Sunset Boulevard and be like, this is a great movie.

Okay, Heathers. Did you see Heathers? The regular ending? Oh, I'm sorry, the Yeah. The ending they went with was Christian Slater's character wants to blow up the school gymnasium during a basketball game, and Veronica what's her faces? Went on A Ryder's character shoots him dead, stops it, and ends up bonding with the outcast girl. Yes, and the original ending and the script I don't think this was

I had not heard that.

Yes, you know, the original ending of Blade Runner was very dark, and that's the one that ended up in the director's cut, Ridley Scott's director's cut.

What was that ending?

Basically that Harrison Ford is going to die, Well, that Rachel Ward is going to die because replicants have expiration dates, and is Harrison Ford a replicant or not? And it leaves open. I'm pretty sure the director's cut leaves it ambiguous, even though I think Ridley Scott came out years later and said, yeah, he is a replicant.

So in the in the audience tested version, he turns to the camera and says directly the audience, Nope, I'm not a replicant.

Not quite end but they all that terrible voiceover narration was added, you know, in the non director's cut, and they had the happy ending with infamous blue Sky shot the Only Blue Sky, and the whole movie was them like driving down the road at the end and explaining via voiceover that, well, not all replicants have an expiration date. You're special, so you don't have one. Wow, so we can just live together in harmony, and.

That Philip K. Dick rolled over in his grave. Probably so.

But that shot of the Only Blue Sky, it wasn't even from that movie. It was pulled from outtakes of The Shining, the beginning car scene in the Shining when they're driving.

Up the road. Wow.

So wow. Yeah, Blade Runner really screwed that one up. And really Scott, of course was he was not so happy about that.

I can imagine this masterpiece. And then somebody tacks on outtakes from the shot of the movie. Yeah, weird, bad You got anything else? Nope, Okay, I don't either. We could probably do this for a while though, because there's plenty of other movies that were changed thanks to audiences. But if you are ever in a line at a movie theater and somebody trustworthy seeming comes up to you and I see you. If you want to be in a test audience, give it a shot.

Yeah, and big thanks to Mental Floss for all. A lot of that list stuff came from one of their articles.

Yeah that's right.

Yeah, that's all I got.

And if you want to know more about audience testing, type those words in the search bart HowStuffWorks dot com. And since I said that it's time for listener mail.

I'm going to call this oceans are cool if I pay attention. Hey, guys, love the show. I used to listen every day when I rode the trains from Brooklyn and to Manhattan to work, but recently I started to work in Brooklyn close enough for me to bike to, so I don't ride trains anymore. They're pros and cons to that. On one hand, I save over one hundred and ten dollars a month in metro card fees, don't have to wait for trains, which adds another twenty minutes

Well, thanks a lot, Andrew. We appreciate you getting in touch with this. We hope you figure this out. This sounds like a terrible conundrum. Maybe get a new job that requires you fur. Yeah.

Yeah, go work in Vermont.

Yeah, there you go. Problem solved. If you have a problem that you want Chuck and I to solve for you, like we just did for Andrew, you can tweet to us at sysk podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email the Stuff podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com and has always joined us at our home on the web. Stuff you Should Know dot com.

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