Everybody trooped in, really proud of themselves because they had sort of made me do this, and we screened the movie for them. I actually had to shoot them, otherwise I would have been in violation of my contract, and so in order to protect the movie that I thought we were making I had to shoot these very bad scenes.įinally we shot the scenes and had a screening for the Warner Brothers executives. We had this hard-nosed feminist, all women together thing, and Kurt Russell was supposed to be a bastard, and suddenly all these scenes were being rewritten, and I found myself in a very awkward position because I had to co-operate with these new scenes. So a very high profile Hollywood writer was brought in to rewrite the movie as more of a kind of Tracy and Hepburn film, a light romance. When the picture was finished and the studio looked at it, they perceived this great chemistry that existed between Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell - who had fallen in love while making the movie. We made this film and it told the story a certain kind of way and it was a very different kind of movie for Goldie Hawn to make. JD: Oh great! Well, an extraordinary thing happened. We did a film and I hope that very few people here have seen it!ĪW: It's played a lot on British television I think The main purpose of the interview was to promote BELOVED, but he says quite a bit about SWING SHIFT:ĪW: had your first big studio experience with Swing Shift, which didn't work out terribly well I think. The Sight & Sound link is fortunately cataloged permanently in, and I found another copy of the Guardian interview where Demme goes into SWING SHIFT in greater detail. Still haven't seen this, but I'm finding that a lot of links here relevant to the cut have been disappearing off the web. But it will never be seen anywhere, because now the videotape's all faded out and the Warner Brothers post-production people trashed all the out takes and our version as soon as I lost control, so you'll just have to take my word for it that it was really something!" And it went to great pains to enumerate why it was much better than what Warner Brothers had done. But then somehow a videotape of the original - the scripted movie - found its way over to SIGHT AND SOUND and an article was written saying it was very good the original way. "But there was nothing I could say about it. And I thought, my God, if my work is bad, then trash me, but this isn't even my work. This motif was running through the reviews: this guy looked as though he had some kind of promise, but looking at this thing, forget about it. "That was great! When SWING SHIFT came out the critics universally trashed it, even some of those critics that I particularly admired and even some that I had previously considered almost friends. "You must have read that article in SIGHT AND SOUND," he replied. In a four year-old interview with Britain's GUARDIAN (10.10.98), Demme was asked if fans might one day have a chance to see his cut of SWING SHIFT.
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