Twist Endings

Tuesday, March 25th, 2014

Twist endings are hard to do, George R.R. Martin finds:

I worked on the revived Twilight Zone in the mid-eighties, and the network was constantly on us, saying, “You have to have more twist endings!” And what we discovered is, it’s a lot harder to do a twist ending in 1987 than it is to do a twist ending in 1959. The audience has seen tens of thousands of more shows, and they’ve gotten far more sophisticated. We tried to remake some of the classic Twilight Zones, like Anne Francis is a mannequin coming into a store in the original, and we tried to remake that. Three minutes into it, they say, “She’s a mannequin.” Ha ha ha ha! Or the one where the woman has an operation. She’s supposedly hideously ugly and she’s having an operation to make her beautiful. But if you notice how they film that, you never see anyone’s face. You just see her with her bandages. And, of course, they take it off, and she’s incredibly beautiful, and everybody reacts with horror — and you see that they’re all idiot pig people! Well, the minute you remake that, the modern audience says, “They’re not showing us anyone’s faces.” So, trick endings are harder to do. The audience is increasingly sophisticated and wary of such things.

Comments

  1. Zippy says:

    The other reason we all know that the new Ann Francis is a mannequin and the lady with the bandages is a beautiful girl in a land of pig people is that we have all seen those episodes 83 times.

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