CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 09/28/07

Anatomy of an Ending:
1408's Scott Alexander, Matt Greenberg,
and Larry Karaszewski

By david michael wharton

As the movie adaptation of Stephen King's terrifying short story 1408 prepares to hit DVD next Tuesday, CS Weekly brings you writers Scott Alexander, Matt Greenberg, and Larry Karaszewski with a look at what goes into finding just the right ending.

Our July/August issue of Creative Screenwriting Magazine featured an interview with screenwriter Matt Greenberg (Reign of Fire) and the writing team of Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (Man on the Moon), the scribes tasked with bringing Stephen King's haunted hotel room story 1408 to the big screen. That story follows paranormal writer Mike Enslin (John Cusack), a weary and cynical nonbeliever who makes a living penning purple prose about supposedly haunted locales. When he receives an anonymous postcard warning him not to enter room 1408 of New York's Hotel Dolphin, he figures it's just a promotional stunt by the management, and heads off to meet the challenge. Once he arrives, not even the most fervent warnings and pleadings by the hotel's manager (Samuel Jackson) sway Enslin from insisting on spending the night in a room with a history of murder, suicide, and madness. Locked in the room, Enslin comes to realize 1408 is not just another quaint bit of local color, but something truly evil, and something which will not let him leave.

Alexander and Karaszewski were the final writers on the film, coming on to rewrite Matt's original adaptation. Undercutting the Hollywood cliché of the contentious rewrite process, the three became friends and stayed in close contact throughout the production, proving that getting rewritten doesn't have to be the negative experience it often is. Now, as the film prepares to hit DVD, CS Weekly brings you an unpublished segment of that interview. Here, 1408's three screenwriters talk about multiple endings, fun with test screenings, and undercutting audience expectations.

Warning: The ending(s) of 1408 are discussed in detail here, so if you haven't seen the movie yet, hold off if you don't want to be spoiled!

So, I know there were supposedly several different endings you guys went through before you got to the one in the final film. Tell me a little bit about that evolution.
Matt Greenberg: In my original script, it ended with Enslin getting out of the room, being kind of fucked up but sort of sadder but wiser. There's a moment at the end—it is actually a nod to Kubrick's The Shining—where he's walking on a beach with his wife and he looks out at the ocean and sees this strange sailing ship, which you have seen again and again in the pictures. Then you cut back to the Dolphin and a new guest is being shown into 1408. She comes in and is setting up, much like Enslin did, and she passes by that picture of the ship. On the picture, you see the ship off the beach, and on the beach there are two people, one of whom could be Mike Enslin. You know, that last image of The Shining, the picture of Jack Nicholson from that black-and-white photo from the '20s, and people are like, "What the fuck is that?" That was not particularly satisfying to the powers that be. Then the epic saga goes to Scott and Larry.

Larry Karaszewski: We came on the movie and, like Matt says, his ending was very true to the spirit of the Stephen King story, and certainly you can say, "What's wrong with that?" But we started feeling very empowered as we started working on it, and started thinking, "This is actually something we're really gonna be proud of, so let's put our stamp on it. Let's do something completely nasty that nobody sees coming. Let's kill the fucker." And this is sort of a shocking thing to do, because if the studio doesn't ask you to kill the lead actor, who are you to do such things? He starts off very disengaged and jaded, then he sort of learns about himself while he's having this horrible experience, then he sort of teaches the room a lesson at the end, and then he can blow up good! Then you burn him up and he's dead. It felt proper. It felt like this was the logical trajectory of the movie.

Scott Alexander: It was about sacrifice. He dies in a selfless act. He lives the life of a selfish man and he dies in a selfless act so that he can kill the room. The thing with this ending, though, was that we killed him but we also gave it a little bit of a "the end?" kind of thing. There's a part in the film early on, toward the midway point, where he gets out of the room for a while, and while he's out of the room, he actually writes a book. Later, you're not sure if that all really happened, but the book that he wrote during that sequence winds up showing up at his agent's office in the final scene of the film. It winds up being this weird thing where, even though he's dead, that book he wrote in that dream sequence earlier, there is some weird back-and-forth from the afterlife to this life. We thought that ending was really stony and interesting, and it was probably too stony for its own good.

Karaszewski: Right before production, Bob Weinstein called up and said, "Guys, do me a favor. No big deal, I love the ending, we're all behind it, but cover my ass: give me an alternate where he lives." And we groaned and started heckling Bob, saying, "You're selling out! You're going for the nice ending!" And he said, "No, no, no, it's not that at all. It's just about options." What was interesting was that the production and post on this movie has been more of an experimental learning curve than any movie we've ever worked on. There were no right or wrong answers. It wasn't even that we became beholden to the focus-group numbers, or what people would say specifically. It just became a matter of finding what felt right. Bob had us slap on an alternate last three pages, which we tacked on very half-heartedly, where now [Enslin] lives!

Alexander: But it wasn't a happy ending.

Karaszewski: Yeah, it was never happy.

Alexander: Usually when you describe this to someone, they're like, "There was the happy ending where he lived and the sad ending where he died." But it wasn't that either. In both versions, it was about Mike Enslin making the sacrifice, and in one he died and in the other one he left very scarred, and it still had that creepiness to it. I remember pitching my kids the ending where he lives, and they were like, "That's the sell-out ending!" But I pitched it to them and they were like, "Wow, that's really scary." So there was a sense that we had delivered two endings where both of them worked.

Karaszewski: Nobody wanted to let the guy live. Everyone was into the old-school darkness of kill him off and don't look back. Bob said, "You've gotta cover me on this. Shoot both endings." So we shot both endings, and then we had some test screenings, and people really didn't like the ending where he died. People had gone on a journey with the character, and because Cusack is in every frame of this movie, they liked the guy. They'd gotten to love him and all his freaky quirks. They just didn't want to see him buried at the end. There were a lot of test screenings…it was always funny seeing the overnight reviews showing up on Ain't It Cool News. The fans generally really liked it, but what we thought was hilarious was, they didn't realize they were seeing different movies. We were having seven o'clock screenings where he died and seven forty-five screenings where he lived in the same multiplex.

Alexander: Even the versions where he lived had alternate versions. There were a couple of things that happened in that section where he lived where sometimes it plays as if it's all happening in his mind, sometimes it plays as if it's all really happening—

You guys were doing your own version of Clue.
Karaszewski: [Director Mikael Håfström] was really embracing that idea of "I will try anything." He made us cut three different versions. One version, Enslin's now crazy; one version, him and his wife are now haunted by it; one version, he almost feels like he never ever left the room and it's all a big hallucination. Then we had the ending where we killed him, and that was cut seven different ways. There was this nagging feeling that it wasn't quite right yet. One of the agendas became "Give 'em a big scare to go out on." We had this big cemetery ending where we managed to jerry-rig an ending with Mike Enslin's funeral. We decided that what was missing from the movie was mourning his death. We needed to let the audience grieve, and we didn't have that emotion. That was our mistake in the other version of him dying. So we did a new ending, and we managed to jerry-rig it where you get Sam Jackson and Mary McCormack and Tony Shalhoub and John Cusack, you get the entire cast of the movie into one scene. Which is pretty amazing when you consider how the film is laid out. The film is John Cusack alone. We got all of them into the scene, and it was really cool. Then going back to this other ending that had sort of drifted to the surface, which I think probably was the alternate ending from our first draft. What everyone said was, "We'll have two more test screenings, because this movie always gets tested in pairs. You've always got the upstairs room and the downstairs room." [Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura] said, "If they scream, we know which ending we're going with."

Then, after the screening, Lorenzo said, "I've done 157 movies, and that's the highest I've ever seen an audience fly out of their chairs. I have never seen a jump scare like that jump scare. That was friggin' unbelievable!" And then they did the focus groups, and people were having the emotional connection to the quiet ending. At the end of the day, people kept coming back to the quiet, emotional ending. They didn't want all the nonsense. They didn't want the scare. They didn't want their heads messed with. They just wanted to have a quiet moment with John Cusack with a troubled look on his face, and that was satisfying.

Greenberg: When you guys first told me that story, I was really struck. I kind of think in a weird way it's a mark of how audiences—horror audiences, audiences in general—are becoming more sophisticated to a degree to these kinds of movies. It's to their credit that they jumped, they all jumped at the scare, but what they were looking for was emotional closure. And there, again, we come to subverting genre elements. The final scare is one of the big—

Alexander: We made a pact with the audience. We weren't gonna bullshit them. They just liked the more real ending. They liked Michael Enslin and they wanted to be in his head.

Greenberg: And not to keep referencing The Exorcist—and by the way, I'm not saying we've created something equal to The Exorcist or The Shining, but if you're going to learn from something, try and learn from the greats.

I'll be quoting that out context, by the way…
Greenberg: [laughs] "Asshole screenwriter says he created something greater than The Exorcist!" If you look at the ending of The Exorcist, which is so quiet and so nice…Regan kissing that priest and driving off, and then the priest just standing and looking down at that stairwell that has come to symbolize so much in this film, from the fall of man on down, and walking away, that is such an emotional, powerful moment that you don't always get in these kinds of films. I would say this is maybe a sign that audiences are changing. They want more satisfaction beyond the visual boo and blah and blood and gore.

David Michael Wharton is the managing editor of CS Weekly and a contributing editor of Creative Screenwriting. None of his hotel rooms have ever been haunted, but he did once spot a class-four full-torso apparition in his rental car.

1408 courtesy The Weinstein Company

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