The traumatising scene Jamie Lee Curtis wanted everyone to be prepared for: “You have to put a warning”
A quick glance at Jamie Lee Curtis’ filmography reveals an embarrassment of riches, which ticks through one of the most important movies in the history of the horror genre, several comedies held up as the funniest of all time, a ground-breaking Asian-centric sci-fi drama that landed her an Oscar, and, of course, Beverly Hills Chihuahua.
In this, one movie of hers that often gets overlooked in the 1991 coming-of-age story My Girl, where she plays Shelly DuVoto, a makeup artist at a funeral home. She begins a new relationship with the home’s director, played by one of her favourite co-stars ever, Dan Aykroyd, which brings her into conflict with his hypochondriac daughter, Vada, played by Anna Chlumsky.
The film also features Macaulay Culkin, who was fresh off the success of Home Alone the previous year, so naturally, Columbia Pictures wanted to capitalise on his popularity and put his face on the film’s poster, right next to Chlumsky’s, a seemingly slam-dunk move, until Curtis noticed a fatal flaw in this strategy.
“I called the president of marketing at Columbia, and I said, ‘Guys, you have a poster of the biggest star in the world, Macaulay Culkin, and this little girl laughing on the cover of the poster’,” she told The View.
She further explained, “I said, ‘You have to put a warning. You have to say [there are] issues of life and death explored in this film, because this little boy is going to die on film and you’re going to see him dead in a coffin and you’re going to freak out every child in America!’”
If it wasn’t already clear, My Girl is not Home Alone, which finds Culkin playing Thomas J Sennett, his middle initial a big part of his character, a young boy who forms a fast friendship with Vada. Everything goes swimmingly until it doesn’t, when Thomas J is stung by a bee and, due to a fatal allergic reaction, dies, making for a devastating twist and definitely not one you’d be able to guess from just looking at the poster.
Both versions of the promotional image for My Girl make it out to be nothing more than a quaint comedy: the laughing faces of the children, the quirky lettering, the jokey byline, none of it suggests that the film is going to take such a morbid turn.
It’s hardly one of the most controversial movie posters of all time, but given that the film was only rated PG, Curtis was absolutely right to raise it as an issue. Unfortunately, as this was a time long before trigger warnings were culturally acceptable, and so her concerns seemed to go unanswered.
In an interesting twist of fate, My Girl’s twist rubbed a lot of critics the wrong way, with several reviews mentioning how this sharp tonal shift was distracting and blatantly manipulative, which undoes a lot of the great work done by the rest of the film. Maybe if Columbia had listened to Curtis and adjusted the movie’s advertising, it might have gone down a little smoother.
