The following notes on Little Shop of Horrors were written by Samantha Janes, PhD Student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. Frank Oz' Director's Cut of Little Shop of Horrors will screen as part of the 1980s Fan Favorites series on Saturday, October 14 in the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is free!

By Samantha Janes

If you take a trip down to Little Shop of Horror’s Skid Row, you are bound to find a wandering Greek chorus that looks suspiciously like a Phil Spector girl group, a bespectacled exotic plant collector, and one mean green plant from outer space. Frank Oz's journey to bring Little Shop to the big screen began in 1985 when he signed on to direct a movie version of the hit off-Broadway musical of the same name. However, Oz was not the first choice to direct the movie, which was released at the end of 1986. Though he was well-known for performing several beloved characters on The Muppet Show and various Muppet films and for puppeteering the scene-stealing Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), it was only after a series of stalls in pre-production that producer David Geffen began to woo Oz to the project. For Oz, it would be his first project as a director without his frequent collaborator Jim Henson, and with fourteen songs, a 1960s setting, and a rapidly evolving man-eating plant, it would make for a complex and ambitious feature debut. Thankfully, Oz, with the help of Howard Ashman, the writer of the book and lyrics for the 1982 off-Broadway production, was able to craft a script that would translate stage-bound theatrical elements from the musical onto the screen in a more cinematic manner.

The film presents the simple story of Seymour Krelborn (Rick Moranis), a young exotic plant enthusiast in love with his coworker Audrey (Ellen Green). After a “total eclipse of the sun,” Seymour finds a strange plant that eventually becomes a more consuming project than he could have ever imagined. Audrey II, the bloodthirsty, man-eating plant that grows to tremendous size over the course of the film, became of particular importance to Oz, who wanted to create the creature practically and without the aid of blue screen or other optical effects. Oz brought all his knowledge and experience of puppetry to bear for the plant’s design, employing extensive animatronics operated by a crew of puppeteers he knew from his previous Henson days. With a new song written by Menken for the film called “Mean Green Mother From Outer Space,” Oz and the crew were tasked with creating a perfect lip-sync for the gigantic creature. Since the largest version of Audrey II required 20 to 30 people to operate, Oz realized that by shooting the plant’s scenes in a slower frame rate—12 or 16 frames per second, depending on the scene—he could speed it up in post-production without the crew needing to match the speed of the song. The resulting effect is essentially seamless.

Despite Oz’s achievements in bringing the film’s most famous creation to life, the film’s complex production was clouded by legal battles, budget concerns, and drastic revisions that cost the film its originally planned summer release date. The cinematic version of Little Shop of Horrors eventually made its way to theaters in December of 1986, making a modest profit before becoming a lucrative success on home video. However, the director’s cut of the film, one that included the original ending of the off-Broadway show, would remain lost to the world until 2012.

The history of the director’s cut of Little Shop of Horrors dates back to 1960 and the work of director  Roger Corman. Corman, known for his low budget genre films with American International Pictures (AIP) such as It Conquered the World (1956) and House of Usher (1960), worked with screenwriter Charles B. Griffith on developing The Passionate People Eater, later renamed The Little Shop of Horrors (1960). The Little Shop of Horrors was shot during the last week of 1959 with mostly stock actors, including a pre-fame Jack Nicholson as the masochistic dental patient. Shot on a budget of $30,000, the film was re-released numerous times over the next few years to increasing success. But it was twenty years after the Corman film's original release that the story of Seymour and Audrey II would be revived into a production that would take off-Broadway by storm.

In 1982, writer Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken premiered their musical version off-off-Broadway (that’s two ‘offs’) to wondrous success. The stage production changed the story’s location from Los Angeles to New York, omitted certain characters, and created the trio of girls modeled and named after 1960s girl groups to act as the show’s Greek chorus. The biggest change was to the original film’s ending. In Corman’s film, Audrey II is ultimately defeated, though it costs Seymour his life. Without spoiling for those who haven’t seen it, the stage show and director’s cut of the film instead end on a note of apocalyptic cataclysm. While the ending was well received on stage, the use of the ending in Oz’s film adaptation would become a major bone of contention between Oz and his producer David Geffen.

While Oz had the support of Ashman in keeping the musical’s ending, Geffen warned Oz against leaving the audience on such a down note. As the film was in its final stages of production in spring of 1986, a test screening in San Jose cast a deep shadow of doubt of the film’s projected success. The original ending flopped with audiences and the negative response was enough to cause an upheaval in filming. Despite extravagant special effects that brought the show’s ending to life in ways impossible on stage, test audiences were still unhappy with the conclusion to Seymour and Audrey’s story. With the production already an expensive investment for Warner Bros., the final scenes were reshot to include a more traditional happy ending pairing off Seymour and Audrey in a vision of domestic bliss, as Audrey’s earlier song envisions, in a tract house that they share somewhere that’s green. For decades, Oz’s original ending was only the stuff of cinematic legend, briefly appearing in unfinished black and white form as a special feature on a 1998 DVD release, before being recalled from shelves at the request of producer David Geffen. In 2012, Warner Brothers finally released the original cut of the film, with the ending restored from the original color negatives and abiding by Frank Oz’s original production notes. While there is still debate among the Little Shop faithful over which cut of the film is superior, new and old fans alike can now experience the film in both of its permutations and decide for themselves how Frank Oz’s weird and wild sci-fi musical should have ended.