A tagline for the 1992 release of “Death Becomes Her” billed the film as “Your basic black comedy.” In truth, it was anything but: A screwball mélange of satire, slapstick and gonzo body horror, the movie would have been notable enough for starring two Oscar-winning actresses, Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn, as lifelong frenemies who find immortality — and all the curses that come with it — via a magic elixir. (And for the fact that Bruce Willis, a die-hard paragon of broody masculinity, played the hapless, bumbling cuckold caught between them.)
Reviews were mixed; The New York Times called it “wildly uneven.” But a series of groundbreaking visual effects — particularly unexpected in a mid-budget comedy — both shocked and awed audiences, and earned the film its sole Academy Award, along with an enduring cult following and now, a Broadway musical adaptation.
“We actually didn’t think we had a chance,” Doug Chiang, the film’s visual effects art director, said on a video call, of the Oscar win he shared with three collaborators. “Because we were going up against two stellar projects, ‘Batman Returns’ and ‘Alien 3,’ and ours by comparison was rather small in scale.”
“Small-scale” was hardly a byword for the director Robert Zemeckis, who at the time was fresh off a blockbuster run of three “Back to the Future” films and the pioneering live action-animation hybrid “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” So David Koepp, then a little-known 28-year-old screenwriter, didn’t expect the spec script that he and his fellow writer, Martin Donovan, had submitted under contract at Universal Pictures to land in Zemeckis’s hands.
“We envisioned it as, if we were lucky, a $5 million independent movie, so we wanted some grotesquerie,” Koepp said by phone. “But our inspirations were like, ‘The Evil Dead’ and ‘The Vikings.’” “The Vikings,” a gleefully hammy 1958 swashbuckler starring Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas, featured a fight sequence between its two leads that Koepp said inspired one of the most indelible setups in “Death Becomes Her.” In it, Streep’s character, a fading but indomitable Hollywood actress named Madeline Ashton, is reunited with her old friend, Hawn’s wallflower novelist Helen Sharp.
Madeline, a blond apex predator in evening gowns, has stolen Helen’s plastic surgeon fiancé, played by Willis; Helen, a drab little dormouse until she suddenly isn’t, has spent years plotting her revenge. Both women’s worst instincts are unleashed when a shared quest for midlife rejuvenation leads them each separately to a mystery woman (played by Isabella Rossellini as a slinky, purring sorceress seemingly allergic to undergarments) who offers the promise of eternal beauty.
But there is, as in all cautionary tales, a catch: Those who drink her youth-extending elixir can technically be killed, but they cannot die. Cue the staircase shenanigans and epic catfights that lead to, among other things, a gaping hole in Hawn’s character’s torso and Streep with her head on backward.
“This was before the term ‘C.G.I.’ was even coined,” said Tom Woodruff Jr., a body effects designer on “Death Becomes Her” who also shared the Oscar, beating out his own work in the same category for “Alien 3.” While Chiang and the rest of the team from George Lucas’s storied effects studio Industrial Light & Magic oversaw aspects including digital manipulation and building out miniatures, Woodruff’s crew was tasked with crucial practical (or non-computer-based) effects.
That included Madeline’s supernaturally twisted neck, after she has taken what should have been a fatal tumble down the stairs. “We had created a Meryl puppet and installed motors,” Woodruff said. “So if you picture the silicone head of Meryl Streep, we were able to program all these little servo motors so that her eyes move, her cheeks move, she blinks and she can grimace. Then we prerecorded the movement of the lips to a CD of her actual dialogue.”
For the I.L.M. team, “the challenge was to do organic skin,” Chiang said, adding, “I had worked on ‘Terminator 2,’ but that was a stylized liquid metal.”
When it came to designing the increasingly outlandish injuries described in the screenplay, Chiang went on, “my first attempts were very real. Like, what would happen if you actually use a shotgun on a person? I imagine it would blow away the soft tissue, leaving the spine, and I realized that was too gruesome. That was a horror version, and this is a dark comedy. So in the next round, I embraced that and literally turned cartoon into live action. But then you layer it with fine textures, and you light it as if it was photo-real.”
The Broadway adaptation doesn’t concern itself too much with realism: The fast-and-fizzy banter flies, the spangled costumes shimmer and the film’s macabre effects are largely reproduced with clever wire work and basic stagecraft.
But onstage and off, the berserk spirit of “Death” endures. “It’s great to see people get what you were doing and appreciate it,” said Koepp, who went on to co-write the screenplays for “Jurassic Park” and “Mission: Impossible,” among others. “Even if it’s in a slightly different way than you expected.”
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