Though it's an iconic scene in film history now, director Wes Craven was nearly fired over the opening sequence of Scream, which sees Ghostface brutally kill Drew Barrymore. These days, the Scream franchise is one of the biggest in the horror genre, but when the first movie came out in late 1996, it was far from an immediate hit. The story about a town terrorized by a serial killer and the daring final girl who manages to come out on top (Neve Campbell's Sidney Prescott) gradually won over audiences to earn over $173 million on a much smaller budget, thus kicking off a brand new genre-changing series.
One of the key parts of Scream's success is its opening. At the time, Barrymore was one of the most popular stars in Hollywood, and fans were stunned to learn she doesn't live past the first 10 minutes. Barrymore plays a high schooler with an interest in horror movies, Casey Becker. When Scream's opening scene begins, she's in the process of making popcorn when she gets a phone call from a mysterious stranger. What starts off as harmless fun becomes far more menacing when Casey realizes this stranger is on her property and means her harm. It's a brilliant, shocking opening, but not everyone felt so when making Scream.
As part of a special oral history for Scream's 25th anniversary, THR spoke to several people who had a hand in making the movie, and they all recalled how Craven, despite being a well-known horror director, was in danger of losing his job when the studio Dimension Films saw the dailies of the Barrymore scene. "They sent him dailies from their remake of Nightwatch and said, 'You’ve got to look at this. This is how a movie’s made,'" editor Patrick Lussier recalled. Kevin Williamson, the writer of Scream, said that one day while filming a scene:
Wes got the phone call from the studio, and I was sitting behind him in my chair, and I just saw his back slump. He just started sliding down the chair. They didn’t think anything about it was good. They didn’t understand the lack of footage and they didn’t see his vision for that sequence at all.
The pressure was on, and several executives - most notably Bob Weinstein - insisted on changes. The Scream producers negotiated a chance to prove to the execs what they were planning, and Lussier cut together the footage they had already shot. Producer Marianne Maddalena said, "After we showed Bob the cut sequence of the opening scene, he said, 'What do I know about dailies? Keep going.'" After that, the studio was much more accommodating, and the Drew Barrymore scene lived on to become one of the most famous scenes of all time.
Looking at this incident over 25 years later, it's genuinely hard to comprehend a world where a director like Craven could be fired for a scene such as Scream's opening. One might say this is an example of how studios fail to grasp what makes certain movies special, but it's clear that once Dimension Films saw how the scene was supposed to go, they backed off. Scream is gearing up for a major revival with the release of its fifth movie in January, and though excitement is high, one has to wonder if it could possibly top the brilliance of the first movie. Audiences will be able to find out for themselves soon enough.
Source: THR
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