“They took the heart out”: The butchered movie Andy Garcia will never forgive or forget
Andy Garcia is an actor who is incapable of not giving completely committed performances, but the issue he has faced a-plenty is having most of his scenes left on the cutting room floor.
Terms like ‘studio interference’ or ‘creative differences’ are now used quite often to describe some sort of conflict that emerges with the production, editing, or planning of a film. Although they’re so often utilised that they begin to lose meaning, it does reflect a genuine concern on the part of actors, directors, and writers who feel that their work has not been given a fair shake. More often than not, the decisions made about a film aren’t determined by creatives, but by studio executives who can’t see further than the bottom line.
Garcia was on a bit of a hot streak in the early 1990s, thanks to his acclaimed performance in The Godfather: Part III, and while the general consensus among pundits was that the third chapter in Francis Ford Coppola’s ambitious gangster trilogy wasn’t nearly as good as its two predecessors, Garcia received nothing but great reviews, and earned an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’. On paper, Jennifer 8 seemed like a compelling neo-noir thriller with a talented director in Bruce Robinson, whose previous film, Withnail & I, had become a cult favourite among actors.
Although Jennifer 8 was intended to be a gritty thriller about only slightly sympathetic anti-heroes, Garcia said that the film was severely edited at the last minute by Paramount Pictures, who were concerned that it wasn’t commercial enough.
“They took the heart out of the picture,” Garcia said, “They took three or four scenes of the interrogation out between me and John Malkovich. The script was originally called A Policeman’s Story, and in the end, there was no policeman’s story! It was a movie about him dealing with demons, and finding light and a muse in this blind girl, and there was an alcoholic struggle in the script, which is not in the movie.”
Few films don’t have at least a few critical deleted scenes, but according to Garcia, the sequences removed from Jennifer 8 made it incomprehensible in its shorter version.
“It was a better film at two hours and 20 minutes long instead of two hours,” he said, “There were electrifying moments between my character and Malkovich, and that interrogation was precluded by an all-night alcoholic binge by my character. When they come to arrest me, I was naked, with my pants down, in complete emotional shambles, but they cut that out and diminished the whole film.”
It should have come as no surprise that the jarring lack of context made for a very confusing film that received significant backlash, with Roger Ebert tearing Jennifer 8 to shreds in his review, and said that it was “the kind of movie where everybody makes avoidable errors in order for the plot to wend its torturous way to an unsatisfactory conclusion”.
While the film didn’t receive enough attention for there to be a strong desire to see a director’s cut, there are certainly many instances in which a refined and remixed version of an unsuccessful film is re-released and met with a better response. It seems unlikely at this point that Davis would ever go back and re-edit Jennifer 8, but he and Garcia shouldn’t receive the bulk of criticism for a disaster that was not his fault.
