idea ·After Hours (1985)

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.

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production

Scorsese started shooting without an ending. The one in Minion's script, Paul going out to buy ice cream for June, felt thin: "I felt something was missing there and we needed an ending that had magic" (sos 100). Minion's answer had magic:

So Minion came up with June in the basement suddenly growing in size while people were banging on the door shouting, 'We'll kill him, we'll go get him.' We weren't going to use trick photography

— Scorsese on Scorsese, sos 100

Instead, "He just disappears off the bottom of the frame — you don't see any Tin Drum stuff — and then you cut to him born naked, curled up on the cobblestones in the middle of 57th Street" (sos 100). Griffin Dunne, who would have played it, puts the birth somewhere else: "she gives birth to me on the West Side Highway, and I roll out covered in placenta, naked" ([[Dunne on After Hours (2024)]]). Ebert, quoting IMDb, also says the West Side Highway (Ebert, unpaged).

Then they told the man with the money. Scorsese: "when David Geffen read this ending, he said, 'Marty, come on!'" (sos 100). Dunne's version is ruder: "He takes a beat, and goes, 'Have you lost your fucking minds?' And, uh, I guess we had" (Dunne on After Hours (2024)).

Geffen's objection was a good note, and Scorsese admits it: "David felt we had to find a natural solution that flowed from the style of the rest of the picture" (sos 100). Everything else in the film is improbable but possible. A birth from a sculptor is neither. It would have broken the rules the film had kept for ninety minutes.

A case for Structure: an ending has to belong to the same world as the film. See After Hours — back at work and Michael Powell wrote the ending.

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 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.
idea 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.
idea Killing the protagonist at minute 47 Psycho spends its first act building a protagonist by the book, then murders her at the mid-point of act two.
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.
scene Alice — the prologue Ninety seconds of counterfeit 1940s Hollywood, built at real 1940s expense, existing to be destroyed by one cut.