How Stanley Kubrick almost ruined the ending of a movie he didn’t even direct: “I was wrong”
Everyone knows that Stanley Kubrick was a perfectionist who regularly veered into the obsessive, with his meticulous approach to cinema ensuring that every one of his features made it to the screen exactly how he intended, regardless of how long it took or how many takes were required.
What’s maybe not as well known is that he almost took his dilligence to the next level by completely altering the ending to a film he had nothing to do with in any capacity other than coming up with a brand new conclusion off the top of his head at an early screening that almost forced a last-minute reshoot.
On one hand, if an auteur of Kubrick’s calibre says there’s a way to make any picture better than it already is, it’s probably worth listening to him. On the other hand, the actual director was left completely bemused as to why their leading actor insisted on gathering the cast and crew together at short notice based entirely on the suggestion of someone who’d seen an almost-finished cut once.
When Malcolm McDowell praised Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon as “a wonderful film” at an event celebrating Kubrick’s achievements, Ryan O’Neal quickly disagreed. “Well, he didn’t think so,” the actor offered. “He said, ‘There’s something wrong with the ending. There’s no reason on Earth that this little girl should leave with you. She has a chance at a real family.”
At the end of Paper Moon, O’Neal and his real-life daughter Tatum’s characters, Moses Pray and Addie Loggins, steal a car and cross state lines to avoid their pursuers before dropping her off with her aunt, seemingly ending their misadventures. However, Addie refuses to stick around her family, and the story ends with the two of them leaving together, which Kubrick didn’t like.
“So I immediately called Peter Bogdanovich and said we need to change the ending: ‘That’s what Stanley said,'” O’Neal recalled. “He was stunned by this. And Kubrick showed me a way we could shoot it in two days, where she doesn’t get in the car and go away with him, and instead she stays with her aunt.”
Taking the wisdom on board, O’Neal phoned his director and “explained all of this to Peter and said, ‘I’ll do it for free, and Tatum will show up. We’ll do it.'” Bogdanovich was naturally hesitant, and O’Neal’s determination to do right by Kubrick almost bit him in the arse before the Clockwork Orange maestro had the chance to watch Paper Moon for a second time.
“He noticed during the course of the screening that people were laughing,” he remembered. “And leaned over to me and said, ‘I was wrong. It’s a comedy. She can go with him.'” O’Neal had to return to Bogdanovich with his tail between his legs, inform him that Kubrick had confessed he’d misunderstood the final scene, and Paper Moon was better off the way it already was.
