idea ·After Hours (1985)

Michael Powell wrote the ending

The director of The Red Shoes, by then married to Scorsese's editor, saw a cut of After Hours with Scorsese's father, hated the ending, and suggested the one in the film. He also mentioned Kafka, whom Scorsese had never read.

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The first cut of After Hours ended with Paul still inside the statue, driven off in the burglars' van. Scorsese screened it for two men he trusted:

After a screening which Michael Powell and my father attended, they both got very angry that I had just ended the film with Paul being driven off by Cheech and Chong. Michael said, 'That's outrageous, you can't do it, we want to know what happens to him.'

— Scorsese on Scorsese, sos 100

"Then he said something about Paul falling out of the truck and winding up back at work and he mentioned Kafka. I said that I'd never read Kafka and didn't know anything about that" (sos 100). They showed the film around. Terry Gilliam and Steven Spielberg "agreed on one thing — that he should fall out of the truck!" (sos 101). Then: "Through a process of elimination we found ourselves with him winding up back at work. So we ended up with what Michael had originally suggested" (sos 101).

Powell was not a passing guest. Schoonmaker, Scorsese's editor: "Between The King of Comedy and After Hours, my life changed. I married Michael Powell in 1984" (Kelly, unpaged). Dunne remembers him on set "no matter how late, this elderly man in a butterscotch plaid suit and bright red tie", who called him "Boy" (Dunne on After Hours (2024)).

Two things make this a good story. The man who complained ten years earlier that Mean Streets had too much red (Too much red) ended up writing the ending of a Scorsese film. And the ending critics call the most Kafkaesque thing in it came from someone who had read Kafka, passed to someone who had not. When a critic says a film is "Kafkaesque", ask whose idea the Kafka was.

See After Hours — back at work and Michael Powell.

Go on, then

scene After Hours — back at work A plaster statue falls out of a burglars' van at dawn, cracks open, and the man inside walks through the gates of his office and sits down at his terminal. Rescue or sentence? The film was shot without an ending, and it shows the seams on purpose.
idea Paul was nearly born on the West Side Highway One planned ending had Paul climb inside June to hide from the mob and be born again, naked, on a Manhattan street. David Geffen, who was paying, asked if they had lost their minds.
idea The first half hour came from a radio monologue The diner, the bagel paperweights, the $20 out the cab window: Joe Frank had broadcast them in a radio piece called Lies. The screenwriter admitted it decades later, and the settlement was about $30,000.
idea Nobody agrees whether Johnny Boy dies A gunman played by Scorsese empties a pistol into the car. Critics have him killing Johnny Boy, sparing him, or leaving it open. The film doesn't say.
scene After Hours — the diner A man alone with a Henry Miller paperback, a woman at the next table who knows the book, and a camera that pounces. Ten minutes that set up the whole night, and borrowed more than anyone admitted at the time.
film After Hours (1985) A word processor goes downtown for a date, loses his last $20 out of a cab window, and cannot get home. Scorsese's comedy of paranoia, shot in forty nights for $4 million after Paramount killed The Last Temptation of Christ.