idea ·After Hours (1985)

Tim Burton stepped aside

Before Scorsese, the producers of After Hours wanted a Disney animator with a six-minute cartoon to his name. They could not raise the money with Tim Burton, and then Scorsese's big film collapsed.

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Amy Robinson and Griffin Dunne optioned Joseph Minion's script and went looking for a director. They found one through a short film:

Well, he directed a tiny little line-drawing cartoon called 'Vincent,' which you may have seen. Griffin and I saw it and were really impressed with it.

— Amy Robinson, in Robinson and Dunne on After Hours (2023)

They met Tim Burton at Disney, where he was working with the animators, and he showed them his notebooks. "We felt that he would create a world, but we never got far enough," Robinson says. "Partially because we couldn't raise the money with him. Secondly, because Marty had been sent the script first, it turned out that 'Last Temptation' had fallen apart, so he was interested." Burton, she says, "was very gracious about it" (same source).

Dunne, asked by the BFI in 2024 what Burton's film would have been: "It would have had a darker visual look. Everything would have been different. God knows what I would have been wearing, or the other people. I think we would have looked like we were already dead and that After Hours was taking place somewhere in the underworld" (BFI interview, Brogan Morris, 20 March 2024). Critics have been reading Scorsese's version as a trip to the underworld since 1985 (After Hours — the keys); Burton's would have said so in the costumes.

Two things to take from it. First, the order is disputed: Robinson says Scorsese had been sent the script first, so Burton was the second choice who nearly became the first. Second, the books in the library do not mention Burton at all. This is a story that only surfaced in interviews decades later, when Burton was famous enough to make it interesting.

The what-if is a good exercise in Setting and Lighting: Burton's SoHo would have been designed, where Scorsese's was found. See The Last Temptation collapse, 1983 for why Scorsese was free.

Go on, then

idea Five set-ups a day became sixteen Scorsese drew every shot of After Hours in the script margins and found he had about 500 of them. At his usual pace that was impossible. Michael Ballhaus said he could do it.
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.
context SoHo before the money, 1984 After Hours was shot at night in a neighbourhood of artists' lofts that money was about to discover. The film catches the moment, and treats the uptown visitor as the intruder.
idea The $85,000 backdrop The Alice prologue set cost $85,000 of a $1.8M budget and shot for one day — five per cent of the film spent on announcing what the film is about.
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 keys nearly killed Griffin Dunne To get the point of view of a set of falling keys, the crew dropped a camera platform four storeys on climbing rope and stopped it just above the star's head. The footage was out of focus.