Bloopers and Trivia
["Bloopers and Trivia"? Aren't these very separate and distinct topics? Normally, I'd certainly think so. In the case of what one writer called the "transformation" of The Sterile Cuckoo from its literary roots in the popular novel by John Nichols into its cinematic counterpart under Alan Pakula's direction and Alvin Sargent's screenwriting, it becomes more difficult to classify what's intentional and what's accidental. "Cuckoo" has a complicated background. Consider this posting and its responses as simply a scattershot listing of curious details about the movie, some of which are clearly embarrassing errors, while others are noteworthy or questionable alterations of plot and character from the novel, and still others are tangential minutiae of interest only to obsessive nitwits such as the initiator of this thread.]
-Perhaps the most glaring and frequently-noted problem is that the weather doesn't appear to change much throughout the movie-- looking at all times like Autumn-- but the story takes us well into Spring. The characters complain of cold in the Winter, yet there's never any snow in the many outdoor shots... for residents of upstate New York, this must be very disorienting. There is a lyrical interlude in which the couple is shown wading along the beach in shorts during what was supposed to be the coldest part of the year! Brrr! The actors are shown sitting in a big, green and leafy tree, having only just returned from Christmas vacation. Most egregious of all, in the closing scenes, which take place only weeks from Summer Vacation, the couple takes a long walk down a path straddled by colorful, fallen leaves! Wasn't a chore of twenty minutes with a leafblower in the budget?
-The names of prominent characters have been altered in inexplicable ways: "Roe Billins" from the novel has become "Eddie Roe" and "Harry Schoonover" ("Schoons") is introduced as "Charlie Schumacher". This no doubt confused the cast: during the "is-he-queer?" argument scene, Burton twice calls McIntire's character "Charlie Schoonover".
-In the novel, Pookie overflows with adjectival descriptions of other people, such as:
"...of all the cross-eyed square-toed pink-phalanged five-uddered knuckle-brained clapp-congested audastic atavistic Bavarian Yeti sons of cabbage-headed hogbody bigluvulating bastards..."
and
"Jerry Payne, you lop-eared lilly-livered son of a double-crossing egg-laying mammoth, you shut up, God damn you, you and your God damn friends, you God damn animals, SHUT UP!"
However, I can't recall anywhere in the book where Pookie calls anyone a "creep" or a "weirdo". This is entirely Sargent's and/or Pakula's invention; in fact, the book does not describe Pookie as an outcast or unpopular girl at all. In the movie, she describes herself as a "literature nut", which is consistent with her character in the book... yet one of her letters to Jerry as depicted onscreen is a childish scrawl populated with the most naive misspellings imaginable: "takeing" "wierdos" etc. Would the highly literate and poetic Pookie have authored such a thing? I read that John Nichols was "let go" as screenwriter by Pakula; I believe this cinematic Pookie was cobbled together into a very different, and, to the author, practically unrecognizable character, and often wonder how Nichols felt about that.
-As they walk past the Holsteins discussing Pookie's letters, the couple's clothing changes completely after they've rounded the corner of the fence.
-In the movie, Nancy Putnam has been transmogrified into a despised enemy of Pookie's, whereas in the book they are best friends! While drinking plays a prominent role in the destruction of Jerry and Pookie's love affair in the book, nothing like her drunken rant against the "weirdos"-- Nancy in particular-- occurs there; this is another movie invention, but probably a good one. It appears that one of Nancy's lines was removed from the final cut: in the scene where Jerry is asking after Pookie, Nancy turns away from him appearing to have just said something very distasteful, and Jerry looks a bit stunned. I think this is where, according to Minnelli:
"'For example,' added Liza,
'after Pookie runs away from
school, and Jerry tries to talk to
one of the students about her,
the girl replies: 'We weren't the
best of friends. You know she
stole an insect specimen from
Marsha, during the first week of
school.'"
http://www-tech.mit.edu/archives/VOL_089/TECH_V089_S0409_P005.txt
The line about stealing the insect specimen (presumably the one given to Jerry as a gift during Pookie's first visit to him) appears to have been edited out. Perhaps the director thought this line would cause the audience to lose sympathy for Pookie? At any rate, the entire stolen gift event appears nowhere in the novel, though allusions to "Glorious beetles" infest Pookie's fey banter forever after Jerry shows Pookie a Gloriosa Beetle in a matchbox.
One writer has noted the "bug" subtext of of Pookie's advances on Jerry: she starts bugging him by showing up in a Volkswagen bug and giving him a bug! In the movie, Pookie asks Jerry about the "Glorious" beetle, and he provides a species name that sounds something like "Malictus polonus"... whatever he says, it bears no resemblance to the actual species name of the Gloriosa beetle, which is "Chrysina gloriosa", formerly "Plusiotis gloriosa". These are facts Nichols himself surely knew, but perhaps Sargent didn't. At any rate, why invoke a fake species name when five minutes of research-- at a college campus, no less-- would turn up the correct one? Perhaps so Liza's Pookie could spin her garbled, semi-rhyming benediction: "Dominus, Dominus, Malictus polonabus"? I fear the term "Malictus polonus" is bad Latin for "Pollack joke".
-Elsewhere it is implied that the titular poem was in the script, but was removed, no doubt leaving many to wonder at the meaning and relevance of a "Sterile Cuckoo". This is especially sad, because the short poem would have fit well if recited during the alienation-of-affection scenes in Jerry's dorm during Spring Break:
"Without looking up she began to read. Her voice was flat, emotionless.
Oh, Hi-ho in the Lavender Woods
A Sterile Cuckoo is crying;
Oh Hi-ho in the Lavender Snow
A Sterile Cuckoo is dying.
Cuckoo! Cuckoo!
Cuckoo! Cuckoo!
In the real dark night of her soul it's
always three o'clock in the morning.
(F. S. Fitz-P. Adams)"
Hardly a title expected to pack 'em in in the first place, Pakula quipped that the only thing worse than "The Sterile Cuckoo" was the title under which the movie was released in Europe: "Pookie".
-Depicting Pookie as a tortured but sympathetic character seems to have been the primary intention of the screenwriter and director, and they turned many elements of the plot inside-out to do it. Hence, Pookie's family-- fully intact though described by her as "inanities personified" in the book-- is a heartrending tragedy in the movie. In the screenwritten version, Pookie's mother died at her birth, and her father never got over it, and this is the environment from which the deeply wounded Pookie has arisen. Pookie's resulting obsession with death and dying is played hard onscreen, as is the strained relationship with her father. However, the actor who plays the father is uncredited in the scroll, as are Roe and Nancy and nearly everyone else in the picture.
In the novel, Pookie is obsessed with death in a rather different vein: she is a killer. She kills spiders, frogs, crows ("I'll get one of those miserable black bastards if it's the last thing I do!")... ironically forming an intimate relationship with each of her victims before, during or after the killing. One reviewer described Pookie as a "monster" and was at pains to explain why so many male readers of the book fell in love with such a twisted young woman.
Among the most prominent plot revisions/reversals:
*-In the novel, Jerry surprises Pookie with an unannounced and obnoxious visit to her college; in the movie, Pookie chases Jerry to his dorm.
*-In the novel, the Spring Break "together alone" time was one of great intimacy; in the movie, it was a time of estrangement.
*-Nothing like Pookie's claimed pregnancy occurs anywhere in the novel.
-How many have noticed that, in the famous mouth-taped-shut scene, Minnelli is already chewing on her dinner as she removes the tape? How/when did that mouthfull get past the tape?
-I suspect Liza Minnelli-- who mounted a determined, unrelenting pursuit of this part for close to three years, beating out Elizabeth Hartman, Patty Duke and Tuesday Weld for the role-- remained very attached to the details of Nichols' characterization of Pookie. She appears to have inveigled small details lifted straight from the book when- and wherever she could squeeze them past the scriptwriter. Such as:
*-A dancing scene where she stands on her lover's feet
*-Lots of stuff involving feathers from torn/thrown pillows happens in the book, but would not have been required for her "drunken rant" scene
*-The brief kite flying scene... Pookie's affinity for kites was well described in the novel
*-The verbatim "one minute of good things" monologue, which she also inserted into her version of the soundtrack theme song
*-Her brief "rolling in the grass" scene in the cemetery, a detail which occurred at a crucial point in the novel.
-There is a dog which appears in the gymnasium and other scenes, wandering around for no apparent reason, barking at vehicles, etc. Since the movie was shot at Nichols' alma mater not too many years after he attended-- and, let's face it, the book reads a lot more like a memoir than a novel-- I have often wondered... could that dog be... POOPSICK? That dog appears very much as Poopsick is described in the book.