Budget

The third day or something, he said, this is like a stupid thing to be doing. Nobody's ever going to be able to make sense of this on paper. Let's see if they'll let us take the money and make a demo of the movie instead. They didn't care what we did with the money as long as... As long as they didn't write or do anything. Yeah. You know what I need. This was actually shot during the demo shoot. So this is the earliest piece of film that's in this collection. You look so young. That was my real hair, too. Yeah.

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was fired for sexual harassment, and his job was filled by two women. So you know that there was a no-nonsense cloud hanging over that building, at least for a couple of days, and that's when we submitted our video. This is a scene where you can see just how small our wardrobe budget was, because I think most of us were wearing our own clothes at this point. I had dredged out this strange down coat that I'd bought to wear in New York a couple years before. We really were, you know, operating on a shoestring. We had this wonderful wardrobe lady named Renee.

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Richard Donner

My name is Dick Donner, and I directed this wonderful film Scrooged. And Danny Elfman did the music. Paramount put up the money. A lot of great actors, a lot of great fun. And Scrooged was supposed to be advertised as, "You've been Scrooged." But, you know, people are chicken, and they were worried about the, you know, the right. You know which right I'm talking about. And, so we never said, "Scrooge," but I'm saying it now. And if you guys don't want to buy it, then go Scrooged yourself. How's that? Now, okay, this is a great little set. A wonderful little set. I have a lot of this at home. I know I shouldn't, but... And these are all the little people. We got little people from all over to come, and some of them turned out to really be Santa's helper. We didn't realize it and... But they showed up, because they heard about the casting and figured it would work. That... Last time a star appeared like that, it was Joel Silver. You should pardon the expression.

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Richard Donner

Now, this was tough. 'Cause how long could he hold it, without smiling or breathing or breaking it? So we were forced to cut away, as you see. We didn't have the money to make an artificial face.

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Mel Allen, his last movie. Yeah, that was a big... Another one. Wasn't that a big budget for one joke? Also buried in a dress. Big budget for one joke, correct? You had to get all those people? Well, some jokes are worth the bucks. Yeah. You have to have the courage to spend. Complete bullshit. Now, some of these scenes of Leslie and George we did on the Paramount lot later. With people just... People behind him. A section behind him and a section... You'll see that some of them were pretty close on...

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If you went over budget, if the movie is a hit, or I don't know. Probably not the same. Let me tell you, that's not true. Yeah, Bob didn't work for years after this. Yeah, exactly. After which? Yeah, the movie's a hit. Ah, another semaphore joke. Never miss with those. Yeah. Another night shot. This is what I'd call off-message to Dave. Oh, a corking the bat reference for your true love. Yeah, nobody got this.

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The zipper never worked as well as we'd hoped. If you notice, it opens at the bottom. Ah, the most unexplained bit of the film, the middle of the film. Originally, we were going to have lots of stars here saying, welcome to the middle of the film, but we couldn't afford to get them in the end. We'd hoped to have Sean Connery and Julie Andrews and people, but...

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Tim Lucas

One of the things that the script proposed as Max began to lose his footing in reality prior to the heavy-duty hallucinations was that his environment would begin to, quote, twitch video, unquote, as the script said, and it would deposit traces of video dandruff on his clothing. This was a clear instance of something that wasn't quite within practical reach of special effects at that time on his budget.

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That's a joke. Oh, ha. Well, you have to tell people because it's difficult to see, isn't it? Because it's kind of hazy and white and it could easily have been translights. But in fact, the skyscrapers you see outside are real. Yeah, and there's an I.M. Pei building out there. I mean, it's a really great way to build a set because you don't have to fake half of it. We couldn't afford translights on this picture. This picture was originally budgeted at $10 million. It came in slightly above that, but it was not an expensive film.

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So, Howie was never happy with the paintings of me. So he had, like, 12 of them painted different, different artists for this scene. Yeah, Paramount was not happy about the budget for the paintings. No, I don't think so.

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Gills is having a cow about her field trips. Unless you guys all pass that test, my job is Memorex. Anybody got any ideas here? Get yourself some water heads. I don't care what your files say. You guys are not that dumb. Actually, Mr. Shoop, those files are usually right on the money. You all feel that way? I do. They're all proud of being dumb. Mr. Shoop, look, we don't want you to lose your job. But think about what you're asking.

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uh... i was able to raise the money independently and uh... there were a couple of companies who wanted to make the film uh... however they were disturbed by the ambiguity of the approach that i wanted to insist on uh... in being faithful to uh... whitley's book which is that we don't know the answer to this uh... the

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