The one John Carpenter movie “shat upon” by the studio: “They just fucked it up”
Despite having several cult classics under his belt and continuing to exert his influence over the current crop of filmmakers through the number of times his movies have been remade, John Carpenter was rarely, if ever, left alone by the studios to make a film as he saw fit.
Obviously, titles like Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, Escape from New York, and The Thing showed that he was perfectly capable of delivering greatness when left to his own devices, but the longer he worked with Hollywood’s biggest outfits, the more disenfranchised he became.
20th Century Fox had no idea what to make of Big Trouble in Little China, so it decided to try and meddle. That wasn’t quite the straw that broke the camel’s back, though, but dealing with New Line Cinema on In the Mouth of Madness was, with Carpenter sharing how “the head of the studio wanted to gut it and throw it out, said it didn’t work.”
While all of his subsequent pictures, apart from his swansong, The Ward, were distributed by a major studio, most of them were funded through independent or smaller-scale production companies. Grubby fingerprints have been the scourge of countless movies, which Carpenter discovered very early on.
Shortly after he’d wrapped his feature-length directorial debut, Dark Star, the film’s producer, Jack H Harris, optioned an 11-page treatment that Carpenter had written called Eyes. When it was picked up by Columbia Pictures, the filmmaker was tasked with knocking out a full screenplay, but his drafts were heavily rewritten by David Zelag Goodman before Eyes of Laura Mars went in front of cameras.
In the finished article, Faye Dunaway’s title character is a fashion photographer who develops the ability to see through the eyes of a serial killer, hence the title. The murderer is targeting her nearest and dearest, so she offers her services to the NYPD to help track down and apprehend the culprit, even though she doesn’t have a clue who they are.
“They got some things wrong, I thought,” he explained to Under the Radar. “The original idea was that, for whatever reason, you can make it psychic, whatever, this woman begins to see through the eyes of a murderer. If that were true, if that really happened, all sorts of things would happen to her. When the killer moved, she wouldn’t be able to. She’d be on the floor, fall over. It would be a visual that’s not controlled by her.”
None of that was present, and Carpenter was frustrated that all of these “things you can do to heighten the suspense” were excised. “They just fucked it up in that sense,” he succinctly put it. “The explanation was on a TV set, I remember. They pointed to it. ‘I see this’. Come on.”
His only contribution to Eyes of Laura Mars was a co-writing credit, and he was never under consideration to direct, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t sting. “It wasn’t a pleasant experience,” he offered. “The original script was very good, I thought.” What happened once it got taken out of his hands? According to Carpenter, “It got shat upon.”
