Deleted scenes

Yeah, I think my theory about the badly conceived reshot ending of the movie is correct. Here's an article from a June 1990 edition of The New York Times which begins with a description of the filming of what was surely the original climax.

FILM; James Dearden's Latest Fatal Attraction
By SUZANNE CASSIDY
Published: June 24, 1990

A dusty amber light fills the air in Stage H at Shepperton Studios in Middlesex, where, high in the rafters, in what is supposed to be the windowed cab of a crane, the American actress Sean Young stands staring down into a massive steel cauldron below. She does not speak; she barely moves. She just looks down, watching.

Watching her, from the floor of the cavernous studio, is the English writer and director James Dearden, kneeling on the concrete floor, staring into a monitor. At the far end of the studio, huge tongues of flame lick upward from wall-mounted flame throwers. Bluish smoke mixes with the amber dust; the smoke, the dusty light and the flame combine to give the place a nether-worldly feeling. And still Ms. Young stares down into the cauldron.

Most of this scene, which takes place in a copper mill, has already been shot at a steel mill in Wales. But there are close-ups and other shots Mr. Dearden still wants. He said he knows exactly what he wants from each scene, and he'll persist on this one until he is satisfied.
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Call it an obsession. That's what this film, ''A Kiss Before Dying,'' based on the novel by Ira Levin - who also wrote ''The Stepford Wives,'' ''Rosemary's Baby'' and ''The Boys From Brazil'' - is all about.

In fact, obsession has been prominent in much of Mr. Dearden's work. He wrote the screenplay for ''Fatal Attraction,'' the now-famous morality tale of the 1980's that starred Glenn Close and Michael Douglas. After ''Fatal Attraction,'' he directed ''Pascali's Island,'' about a restless Turkish spy, played by Ben Kingsley, and his relationship with a pseudo-archeologist from England. He also wrote and directed ''The Cold Room,'' a psychological thriller starring George Segal, which was released in the United States in 1984 but went straight to video in Britain.

At first glance, this 40-year-old writer-director with longish, wavy hair and a dimpled chin does not look like someone who would immerse himself in obsession, perfidy and pain. The son of Basil Dearden, the director who made such British classics as ''The Blue Lamp'' (1950) and ''Khartoum'' (1966), Mr. Dearden read French literature at Oxford University.

But according to Sean Young, Mr. Dearden has ''a fascination with morbidity.''

''He seems to love to put contradictions within characters and then see how they react,'' she said. ''Like David Lynch, he is very interested in the weird line where things seem to be normal, but there's an underlying tragedy.''

''I like obsessive characters,'' admitted Mr. Dearden, in an interview in a closet-sized dressing room at Shepperton Studios, some 15 miles southwest of London. Tipping his chair back against a wall and bracing his legs against a dressing table, he continued, ''Pascali was an obsessive. So, obviously, was the character Glenn Close played. Jonathan is the ultimate obsessive.'' Along with Ellen and Dorothy Carlsson, sisters both played by Ms. Young, the character of Jonathan Corliss (also known as Jay Faraday), played by Matt Dillon, is central to ''A Kiss Before Dying.'' It is his obsessions around which the film twists and turns.

Like the New York lawyer portrayed by Michael Douglas in ''Fatal Attraction,'' Jonathan exhibits a will to have it all. ''He is the ultimate version of the kind of go-getter of the 1980's taken to the nth degree,'' said Mr. Dearden, ''where he literally stops at nothing to get what he wants.'' But unlike Mr. Douglas's character, Jonathan is villain, not victim. The product of a poor, working-class home, he becomes obsessed with the family and fortunes of Thor Carlsson, a copper magnate played by Max von Sydow. Ruthlessly, he pursues one of Thor Carlsson's twin daughters, Dorothy, who falls in love with him, but then dies in an apparent suicide. Convinced that her twin's death was no suicide, Ellen Carlsson sets out to find the truth, meeting and marrying, along the way, Jonathan Corliss, who is known to her as Jay Faraday.

''When I was re-creating the character of Ellen, I thought, she's just like a Kennedy would be,'' said Mr. Dearden, ''In fact, when I was writing the script, I just thought of those big American families who have so much money, so much power and so much tragedy.''

When he was writing the character of Jonathan, he said, he was driven by wondering ''how far the audiences would accept this character, would sympathize with him.'' To that end, he has also filmed the movie so that it oscillates from Jonathan's to Ellen's point of view until the closing sequence.

As in ''Fatal Attraction,'' one way this film arouses fear in the viewer is to ask: How much do you really know the person you love? ''It has a similiar type of theme in that it's about the unknowability of people,'' explained Mr. Dearden. ''Ellen thinks she's marrying this perfect guy, but he has this incredibly dark, hidden side.''

However there, he said, the parallels with ''Fatal Attraction'' end. '' 'A Kiss Before Dying' is a much more extreme story,'' he said. ''This is an unabashed melodrama with a kind of operatic, baroque plot. It's over the top. It's anti-realism, not grainy naturalism.''

Though the film is set in New York and Philadelphia, Mr. Dearden chose to shoot it in England, because, as this is the first major film he has directed, he wanted to work with technicians with whom he was familiar. ''Also,'' he said, ''in the United States, we couldn't have made this film this way for anything like the money. It probably would've cost us 30 percent more.''

Except for a few location shots, the film was shot in the studio, giving Mr. Dearden, as he put it, ''an excuse to play with that train set Orson Welles discovered.''

Mike Southon, the cinematographer, described ''A Kiss Before Dying'' as a ''very structured, classical kind of film.''

''There's no roughness in it,'' he went on. ''It's a thriller and labyrinthine, but not without the sort of wink Hitchcock tried to slide in, too. ''

Working closely with Mr. Southon was Jim Clay, the set designer with whom he worked on Jon Amiel's ''Queen of Hearts.'' To Mr. Clay fell the task of convincingly reproducing New York City and Philadelphia in England. Because it was deemed too dangerous to stage Dorothy's fatal fall using a real building, Mr. Clay had to reproduce the rooftop of a Philadelphia building; photographic slides were used to provide a realistic background. Among the other sets he had to design were the interiors of New York hotels and brownstone buildings and the multimillionaire's apartment on New York's Upper West Side in which Jonathan and Ellen live after their marriage.

''To track Jonathan from his heavy industrial background through the far reaches of wealth was my brief,'' said Mr. Clay.''James also said it was to be a modern movie, a movie of style with a cohesive look.''

To that end, Mr. Clay chose with Mr. Southon and Marit Allen, the costume designer, a palette of colors to be used throughout the movie. In lighting, costuming and set furnishings, they mixed the deep rich browns and blacks of New York brownstones with the amber and gold hues of copper.

Like Mr. Southon, Matt Dillon said the film ''feels like a Hitchcock movie.'' In an interview in his dressing room, Mr. Dillon, wearing the dark suit belonging to his character, said the director ''has that same kind of humor. The film is kind of demented.''

Though he balked at comparing his film to a work by Hitchcock, Mr. Dearden agreed that ''A Kiss Before Dying,'' to be released in the United States late this year by Universal Pictures, contains some Hitchcockian elements. ''Hitchcock is one of my favorite directors, so it's a homage, though not a conscious one. I'm working in his medium, so I can't escape his influence. People may say I've ripped him off, but all painters quote from each other's work. All composers quote from each other's work.

''I'm certainly not putting myself in the same league as Hitchcock. He had such a wonderful sense of shape and order.''

''A Kiss Before Dying'' with Robert Wagner and Joanne Woodward as the stars, was also filmed in 1956 by Gerd Oswald. ''I'd rather it hadn't been made,'' said Mr. Dearden, ''but we're not remaking a film. We're going back to the book and making a film about a book. ''If I thought the first movie was great, I wouldn't have wanted to remake the book. But I thought it was sufficiently obscure not to be a threat.''