CS Daily Archive > DVD of the Day > After Hours

Night Writer

by Jeff goldsmith

After Hours successfully intermixes comedy and tension in a way that few other films have matched. The entire film takes place in one night, chronicling what happens to an average Joe who's caught out of his element amongst New York City's strange places and people. Screenwriter Joseph Minion's secret to success lies in the fact that in his telling of such a wild tale, he remembered to center it around a solid everyman character.

After Hours

Joseph Minion

After Hours tells the tale of bored, buttoned-down word processor Paul Hackett (played by Griffin Dunne) who sets out on a late-night date but instead becomes the punch line of a giant cosmic joke. After Paul loses the only cash he has on him on his way to the date, he decides his date (Rosanna Arquette) is too creepy to waste his night with and stumbles into a series of 'wrong place, wrong time'-style scenarios ranging from crazier single women to an angry lynch mob who've mistaken him to be a burglar. Strangers offer him near worthless advice on his journeys and as a character we see him grow from a pushover at the beginning of the film to a more confident man by the end of the film. As the story continues and his character grows the central question presents itself quite quickly: Can Paul get home in one piece?

It's no surprise that Scorsese directed After Hours so perfectly, since this was the film he made following his equally genius work, The King of Comedy. But After Hours did better at the box office and found a larger audience than The King of Comedy because Joseph Minion's script has a more populist thrust to it. Of course, the film is insanely offbeat, but Minion's secret was to weave a simple tale around an everyman character. This principle of storytelling goes back as far as the great comedies of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, which always immersed everyman-styled protagonists in strange locales populated with strange people. In fact, many comedies go awry when the protagonist is also turned into a kook, because then the audience has no one to identify with.

Scorsese and cameraman Michael Ballhaus really manipulate the camera into telling the tale at a frenetic pace equal to how Minion wrote it. Iconic props and stage direction written into Minion's script become great moments in the film, ranging from the plaster of Paris bagel paperweight to Minion's description of a deadly-looking set of flying house keys. Minion's initial concept -- that people act differently late at night -- was enough to carry the entire film; the writer escaped exposition because the audience experiences this for themselves. There's almost a student-filmmaker type of freshness to the camera work, which tilts Minion's already off-balance tale another few degrees. Such integration of story and camera would again be realized by the Coen brothers with Raising Arizona two years later, but just throw in this DVD if you're looking to see what film presumably influenced the Coen brothers the most.

After Hours' other strength is that Minion keeps you guessing as to where Paul's journey will lead him. We see our hero whisked around from punk rock clubs and empty bars to a few lonely bachelorette pads. And rather than running around SoHo, Minion economically begins reusing odd locations and characters midway through the movie. In fact, it's the repetition of these people and places that shows just how grand Minion's blueprint is.

- Commentary by actor Griffin Dunne, director Martin Scorsese, producer Amy Robinson, cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, and editor Thelma Schoonmaker
- Filming For Your Life: Making After Hours
- Deleted scenes
- Theatrical trailer

This is an excellent war chest of extras. The commentary is great, and told from enough perspectives that both filmic and storytelling issues are equally addressed. This is also a wonderful way for screenwriters to see into the decision-making process of cinematographers, actors, producers, directors, and editors, and the ways in which they interpret the story and use their talents to reinforce it.

The Filming For Your Life documentary is also a great extra. It never overstays its welcome and chronicles how such an offbeat script found its way to the screen -- at one point, Tim Burton (fresh out of Cal Arts) was tapped to direct. And there's the fascinating perspective of just how important After Hours was for Scorsese: he really did feel like he was filming for his life, since his last two projects had failed (The King of Comedy wasn't a commercial success and The Last Temptation of Christ had just fallen apart). The proposed alternate ending discussed in the documentary is hilarious; it's interesting to see just how experimental Scorsese, Minion and company were willing to go.

The deleted scenes are about eight minutes' worth; nothing eye opening, but generally interesting and in a few places funny. They're a nice bonus that really shows some of the false starts and scenes that ultimately weren't needed for the finished film.

After Hours is an experimental dark comedy that completely succeeds. Yet, beyond being experimental, its success stems from its adherence to comically positing a simple central question to an everyman-styled protagonist. It's a film worthy of further study and a classic blueprint for writers looking to push the boundaries of a genre while at the same time being polite enough to take their audience along with them on that journey rather than leaving them behind in the dust.

After Hours

Warner Home Video
Rated R; 97 min.

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Jeff Goldsmith is a regular columnist for Creative Screenwriting magazine and serves as the Los Angeles Events Coordinator in charge of the Creative Screenwriting screening series.

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