REALITY'S CUTTING EDGE

By Lizzie Francke

From The Independent (London), 04.12.1991

"My parents brought me to Disneyland in 1964 and from then onwards I always knew I wanted to return to L A." The candy-coloured pleasure park complete with its underground labyrinth, down which Mickey Mouse and Tinkerbell scuttle to jostle with the tourists would seem a suitable childhood memory for screenwriter Caroline Thompson. It's part of the bizarre American landscape that she likes to explore.

Edward Scissorhands, her debut script for director Tim Burton, is set in just such outlandish territory. The film is a comic gothic fairy-tale about an outlandish boy cursed with a bristling bunch of assorted blades for hands who is rescued from his crumbling castle by the local Avon lady and taken to live with her family in their pastel home. It's a garish clash of styles, as if MGM had decided to make a horror film, with the Grimm-style story dragged into an America preoccupied with shopping malls, make-overs and Bar-B-Qs.

For Thompson, however, it is a lighter version of a theme that she explored in her first novel, "Firstborn." "It was about an abortion that doesn't work, which then comes home. It wasn't meant to be an anti-abortion story by any means--rather the story of the ultimate outsider."

The story left her out on a limb: "My agent couldn't figure what to do with me at all, so he was doing his best to introduce me to people who I might be able to work with. Tim had just directed Pee Wee's Big Adventure, so we were each sent a copy of the other's work and then given a lunch date."

Over lunch, Burton gave her the germ of the idea for Edward Scissorhands: "Tim told me about an image that he had of a boy with scissors for hands. We never talked about him as a creation--that's all he said. But I was really struck by the power of that image and what it meant, the thought of someone who can't touch anything without harming it."

The first idea was to do the story as a musical: "Tim was filming Beetlejuice at the time and was getting a lot of flak about the 'realism' of the piece. We thought that if it was a musical no one would question the 'realism' of Edward. So I wrote a treatment and some songs. Tim was so happy with the sample dialogue that I had whipped into the treatment that I went straight ahead with the script. The first draft took me three weeks and essentially it is that draft that you see on the screen." The film is, however, no longer a musical.

Thompson is the first to admit that such a smooth ride for a first time writer is "amazing". Her only other experience had been with Surburbia director Penelope Spheeris, who had optioned Firstborn and subsequently discovered that it wasn't a subject that Hollywood wanted to grapple with. Thompson learnt enough from Spheeris about screenwriting, however, to feel that the time had not been wasted.

As associate producer as well as writer, Thompson enjoyed an unusual involvement in the production of Edward Scissorhands. Her own approach to the material worked well with the consummate stylist Burton. "I think it's an insult to a director to give him or her stage directions--it's none of my business."

She was delighted with the final look of the film: "What we were all after in the pastel houses and hilarious Sixties costumes was a memory of childhood, not literally a period piece, but what it would have felt like to us, our sweetest and sourest memories. I am from a neighbourhood emotionally very like that one, an American suburban vision of the world which is essentially a world run by women into which the men are invited as guests for overnight stays."

Thompson now finds herself pegged as a comic gothic writer. "Of all the pigeon-holes that is certainly the right one for me," she says. "I am much happier when things are pushed to the extreme, whereas the darkness seems to frighten most people off. I am interested in the humour that can erupt out of those sort of situations, it's much more fun than the earnest, noble type of stories." She prefers dealing in metaphors since it is a "cleaner, neater way of saying things."

The revival of interest in the American pop gothic tradition seems to indicate that there will be plenty of work around. Indeed, along with Larry Wilson, writer of Beetlejuice, she was drafted into scripting the film version of The Addams Family. Unfortunately both writers were dumped three weeks prior to production. "It was hard, but since it was an assignment I didn't feel as if it were bits of my blood in that film." Typically, she found her perception of Charles Addam's drawings differed from the usual: "To me they were such witty allusions to the decaying WASP culture of New England--all those American aristocrats."

Her own projects include a script about a man who thinks he's a chicken. "Everybody wants to rehabilitate him and he goes along with it for a while, but ultimately he reverses because he knows what he is doing." She also has plans to direct with a script that she was most secretive about. "Part of it takes place in the 1920s, since it is a period that fascinates me so much. I read this statistic that between 1910 and 1922 women shed 80 per cent of their underclothing--that's about 12 pounds of underwear, imagine what that must have felt like. I would really like to explore that."

The story came to mind when she was exploring the attic in the family house where the paraphernalia of four generations is stored: "I've found the weirdest icons up there." It sounds like an analogy for her imagination, which rattles with references to Minnelli musicals, the Iliad and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Thompson is a collector of the eccentric and the sinister, and her country provides plenty of material. "I don't think that there is a place more repressed than America. I love the way that it leaks out: it has to."

Edward Scissorhands will be released in July.