Edward Scissorhands

Edward Scissorhands is a 1990 American fantasy gothic romance film directed by Tim Burton. It was produced by Burton and Denise Di Novi, written by Caroline Thompson from a story by her and Burton, and starring Johnny Depp, Winona Ryder, Dianne Wiest, Anthony Michael Hall, Kathy Baker, Vincent Price, and Alan Arkin. It tells the story of an unfinished artificial humanoid who has scissor blades instead of hands that is taken in by a suburban family and falls in love with their teenage daughter. Burton conceived Edward Scissorhands from his childhood upbringing in suburban Burbank, California. During pre-production of Beetlejuice, Caroline Thompson was hired to adapt Burton's story into a screenplay, and the film began development at 20th Century Fox after Warner Bros. declined. Edward Scissorhands was then fast tracked after Burton's critical and financial success with Batman. The film also marks the fourth collaboration between Burton and film score composer Danny Elfman, and was Vincent Price's last major role. Edward Scissorhands was released to a positive reception from critics and was a financial success, grossing over four times its $20 million budget. The film received numerous nominations at the Academy Awards, British Academy Film Awards, and the Saturn Awards, as well as winning the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. Both Burton and Elfman consider Edward Scissorhands their most personal and favorite work.

## **Plot**

One evening, an elderly woman tells her granddaughter the bedtime story of a young man named Edward who has scissor blades for hands.

Many years earlier, Peg Boggs, a local door-to-door Avon saleswoman, tries to sell at the decrepit Gothic mansion where Edward lives. The creation of an old inventor, Edward is an ageless humanoid. The inventor homeschooled Edward but died from a heart attack before giving Edward hands, leaving him unfinished. Peg finds Edward alone and offers to take him to her home after discovering he is virtually harmless. Peg introduces Edward to her husband Bill, their young son Kevin, and their teenage daughter Kim. Edward falls in love with Kim, despite her initial fear of him. As their neighbors are curious about the new houseguest, the Boggs throw a neighborhood barbecue welcoming him. Most of the neighbors are fascinated by Edward and befriend him, except for the eccentric religious fanatic Esmeralda and Kim's boyfriend Jim.

Edward repays the neighborhood for their kindness by trimming their hedges into topiaries, progressing to grooming dogs and later styling the hair of the neighborhood women. One of the neighbors, Joyce, offers to help Edward open a hair salon. While scouting a location, Joyce attempts to seduce him, but scares him away. Joyce lies to the neighborhood women about it, reducing their trust in him. The bank denies Edward a loan as he does not have a background or financial history.

Jealous of Kim's attraction to Edward, Jim suggests Edward pick the lock on his parents' home to obtain a van for Jim and Kim. Edward agrees, but when he picks the lock, a burglar alarm is triggered. Jim flees and Edward is arrested. The police determine that a lifetime of isolation has left Edward without any sense of reality or common sense. Edward takes responsibility for the robbery, telling Kim he did it because she asked him to. Consequently, he is shunned by the entire neighborhood except for the Boggs family.

At Christmas, Edward carves an angelic ice sculpture modeled after Kim; the ice shavings are thrown into the air and fall like snow, something that never happened before. Kim dances in the snowfall. Jim arrives suddenly, calling out to Edward, surprising him and causing him to accidentally cut Kim's hand. Jim accuses Edward of intentionally harming her, but Kim, disgusted and fed up with Jim's jealous behavior towards Edward, breaks up with him. Meanwhile, Edward flees in a rage, destroying his works and scaring Esmeralda until he is calmed by a wandering dog.

Kim's parents go out to find Edward while she stays behind in case he returns. Edward returns, finding Kim there. She asks him to hold her, but Edward hesitates, afraid of hurting her. Jim's drunken friend drives him to Kim's house and nearly runs over Kevin, but Edward pushes Kevin to safety while inadvertently cutting him. Witnesses accuse Edward of attacking Kevin; when Jim assaults him, Edward defends himself, cutting Jim's arm before fleeing to his mansion.

Kim races after Edward while Jim obtains a handgun and follows Kim. In the mansion, Jim ambushes Edward and fights with him. Edward refuses to fight back until he sees Jim slap Kim as she attempts to intervene. Enraged, Edward stabs Jim in the stomach and pushes him from a window of the mansion to his death. Kim confesses her love to Edward and kisses him before she departs, leaving Edward alone. As the neighbors gather, Kim convinces them that Jim and Edward killed each other.

The elderly woman, revealed to be Kim, finishes telling her granddaughter the story and says that she never saw Edward again, so that Edward would remember her as she was in her youth. She believes he is still alive because it would not be snowing without him. Edward is then seen carving ice sculptures of his experiences with Kim, with the bits of ice floating as snow in the wind.

## **Cast**

* Johnny Depp as Edward Scissorhands
* Winona Ryder as Kim Boggs
* Dianne Wiest as Peg Boggs
* Anthony Michael Hall as Jim
* Kathy Baker as Joyce Monroe
* Vincent Price as The Inventor
* Alan Arkin as Bill Boggs
* Robert Oliveri as Kevin Boggs
* Conchata Ferrell as Helen
* Susan Blommaert as Tinka
* Caroline Aaron as Marge
* Dick Anthony Williams as Officer Allen
* O-Lan Jones as Esmeralda
* Nick Carter as Slip 'N Slide Kid (uncredited)

## **Production**

### **Development**

The genesis of Edward Scissorhands came from a drawing by then-teenaged director Tim Burton, which reflected his feelings of isolation and being unable to communicate to people around him in suburban Burbank. The drawing depicted a thin, solemn man with long, sharp blades for fingers. Burton stated that he was often alone and had trouble retaining friendships. "I get the feeling people just got this urge to want to leave me alone for some reason, I don't know exactly why." During pre-production of Beetlejuice, Burton hired Caroline Thompson, then a young novelist, to write the Edward Scissorhands screenplay as a spec script. Burton was impressed with her short novel, First Born, which was "about an abortion that came back to life". Burton felt First Born had the same psychological elements he wanted to showcase in Edward Scissorhands. "Every detail was so important to Tim because it was so personal", Thompson remarked. She wrote Scissorhands as a "love poem" to Burton, calling him "the most articulate person I know, but couldn't put a single sentence together".

Shortly after Thompson's hiring, Burton began to develop Edward Scissorhands at Warner Bros., with whom he worked on Pee-wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice. However, within a couple of months, Warner sold the film rights to 20th Century Fox. Fox agreed to finance Thompson's screenplay while giving Burton complete creative control. At the time, the budget was projected to be around $8–9 million. When writing the storyline, Burton and Thompson were influenced by Universal Horror films, such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Frankenstein (1931), and Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), as well as King Kong (1933) and various fairy tales. Burton originally wanted to make Scissorhands as a musical, feeling "it seemed big and operatic to me", but later dropped the idea. Following the enormous success of Batman, Burton arrived to the status of being an A-list director. He had the opportunity to do any film he wanted, but rather than fast track Warner Bros.' choices for Batman Returns or Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian, Burton opted to make Edward Scissorhands for Fox.

### **Casting**

Although Winona Ryder was the first cast member attached to the script, Dianne Wiest was the first to sign on. "Dianne, in particular, was wonderful", Burton said. "She was the first actress to read the script, supported it completely and, because she is so respected, once she had given it her stamp of approval, others soon got interested". When it came to casting the lead role of Edward, several actors were considered; Fox was insistent on having Burton meet with Tom Cruise. "He certainly wasn't my ideal, but I talked to him", Burton remembered. "He was interesting, but I think it worked out for the best. A lot of questions came up". Cruise asked for a "happier" ending. Tom Hanks and Gary Oldman turned down the part, Hanks in favor of critical and commercial flop The Bonfire of the Vanities. Oldman found the story to be absurd, but understood it after watching "literally two minutes" of the completed film. Jim Carrey was also considered for the role, while Thompson favored John Cusack. Elsewhere, William Hurt, Robert Downey Jr. and musician Michael Jackson expressed interest, although Burton did not converse with Jackson.

Though Burton was unfamiliar with Johnny Depp's then-popular performance in 21 Jump Street, he had always been Burton's first choice. At the time of his casting, Depp was seeking to break out of the teen idol status which his performance in 21 Jump Street had afforded him. When he was sent the script, Depp "wept like a newborn" and immediately found personal and emotional connections with the story. In preparation for the role, Depp watched many Charlie Chaplin films to study the idea of creating sympathy without dialogue. Fox studio executives were so worried about Edward's image, that they tried to keep pictures of Depp in full costume under wraps until release of the film. Burton approached Ryder for the role of Kim Boggs based on their positive working experience in Beetlejuice. Drew Barrymore previously auditioned for the role. Crispin Glover auditioned for the role of Jim before Anthony Michael Hall was cast.

Kathy Baker saw her part of Joyce, the neighbor who tries to seduce Edward, as a perfect chance to break into comedy. Alan Arkin says when he first read the script, he was "a bit baffled. Nothing really made sense to me until I saw the sets. Burton's visual imagination is extraordinary". The role of The Inventor was written specifically for Vincent Price, and would ultimately be his final feature film role. Burton commonly watched Price's films as a child, and, after completing Vincent, the two became good friends. Robert Oliveri was cast as Kevin, Kim's younger brother. Nick Carter of the Backstreet Boys plays an uncredited role as the blond boy playing on the Slip 'N Slide as Edward rides in Peg's car through suburbia.

Filming

Burbank, California was considered as a possible location for the suburban neighborhoods, but Burton believed the city had become too altered since his childhood so the Tampa Bay Area of Florida, including the town of Lutz, on Tinsmith Circle inside the Carpenter's Run subdivision, and the Southgate Shopping Center of Lakeland was chosen for a three-month shooting schedule. The production crew found, in the words of the production designer Bo Welch, "a kind of generic, plain-wrap suburb, which we made even more characterless by painting all the houses in faded pastels, and reducing the window sizes to make it look a little more paranoid." The key element to unify the look of the neighborhood was Welch's decision to repaint each of the houses in one of four colors, which he described as "sea-foam green, dirty flesh, butter, and dirty blue". The facade of the Gothic mansion was built just outside Dade City. The majority of filming took place in Lutz between March 26 and July 19, 1990. Filming Edward Scissorhands created hundreds of (temporary) jobs and injected over $4 million into the Tampa Bay economy. Production then moved to a Fox Studios sound stage in Century City, California, where interiors of the mansion were filmed.

To create Edward's scissor hands, Burton employed Stan Winston, who would later design the Penguin's prosthetic makeup in Batman Returns. Depp's wardrobe and prosthetic makeup took one hour and 45 minutes to apply. The giant topiaries that Edward creates in the film were made by wrapping metal skeletons in chicken wire, then weaving in thousands of small plastic plant sprigs. Rick Heinrichs worked as one of the art directors.

## **Music**

Edward Scissorhands is the fourth feature film collaboration between director Tim Burton and composer Danny Elfman. The orchestra consisted of 79 musicians. Elfman cites Scissorhands as epitomizing his most personal and favorite work. In addition to Elfman's music, three Tom Jones songs also appear: "It's Not Unusual", "Delilah" and "With These Hands". "It's Not Unusual" would later be used in Mars Attacks! (1996), another film of Burton's with music composed by Elfman. Selections from the score had been used in the trailers for other films including The Secret Garden (1993), The Indian in the Cupboard (1995), The Master of Disguise (2002), The Ladykillers (2004), Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) and two other Tim Burton films: The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and Big Fish (2003).

## **Soundtrack**

Edward Scissorhands –  the Movie Music , Danny Elfman, MCA Records label, 1990.

1. Introduction (Titles), 2:36
2. Storytime, 2:35
3. Castle On The Hill, 6:25
4. Beautiful New World / Home Sweet Home, 2:05
5. The Cookie Factory, 2:14
6. Ballet De Suburbia (Suite), 1:17
7. Ice Dance, 1:45
8. Etiquette Lesson, 1:38
9. Edward The Barber, 3:19
10. Part Two : … Poor Edward! :
11. Esmeralda, :27
12. Death!, 3:29
13. The Tide Turns (Suite), 5:31
14. The Final Confrontation, 2:17
15. Farewell…, 2:46
16. The Grand Finale, 3:26
17. The End, 4:47
18. With These Hands, 2:43

## **Complete Score**

Edward Scissorhands – Special Edition Soundtrack, Danny Elfman, label MCA Records, 2000

1. 20th Century Fox Logo, :13
2. Introduction, 2:32
3. Storytime, 2:34
4. Castle on the Hill, 6:20
5. Beautiful New World, :59
6. Home Sweet Home, 1:39
7. A Stranger in Suburbia, :31
8. Ballet De Suburbia (Pt. I), :36
9. Ballet De Suburbia (Pt. II) , :44
10. Esmeralda (Pt. I), :28
11. Esmeralda (Pt. II), :31
12. The Cookie Factory, 2:13
13. Etiquette Lesson, 1:38
14. The Barber Prelude, :13
15. Edward The Barber , 3:19
16. Edward Sees Kim, :51
17. Picking the Lock, :15
18. Edward’s Answer, :24
19. The Tide Turns (Pt. I), 2:48
20. Edward Returns in Shame (Pt. I), :54
21. Edward Returns in Shame (Pt. II), 1:51
22. Kim Yearns, :24
23. Ice Dance, 1:43
24. Cut Palm, :29
25. Edward on the Run (Pt. I), :42
26. Edward on the Run Pt. II (The Tide Turns Pt. III), :35
27. Edward on the Run (Pt. III), :15
28. Edward on the Run (Pt. IV), :48
29. Edward on the Run (Pt. V), :48
30. On the Sidewalk & Coming Back, 1:01
31. Death!, 3:28
32. The Tide Turns (Pt. II), 2:49
33. The Final Confrontation & Farewell, 5:45
34. The Grand Finale, 3:01
35. The End, 4:43

## **Themes**

Burton acknowledged that the main themes of Edward Scissorhands deal with self-discovery and isolation. Edward is found living alone in the attic of a Gothic castle, a setting that is also used for main characters in Burton's Batman and The Nightmare Before Christmas. Edward Scissorhands climaxes much like James Whale's Frankenstein and Burton's own Frankenweenie. A mob confronts the "evil creature", in this case, Edward, at his castle. With Edward unable to consummate his love for Kim because of his appearance, the film can also be seen as being influenced by Beauty and the Beast. Edward Scissorhands is a fairy tale book-ended by a prologue and an epilogue featuring Kim Boggs as an old woman telling her granddaughter the story, augmenting the German Expressionism and Gothic fiction archetypes.

Burton explained that his depiction of suburbia is "not a bad place. It's a weird place. I tried to walk the fine line of making it funny and strange without it being judgmental. It's a place where there's a lot of integrity." Kim leaves her jock boyfriend (Jim) to be with Edward, an event that many have postulated as Burton's revenge against jocks he encountered as a teenager in suburban Burbank, California. Jim is subsequently killed, a scene that shocked a number of observers who felt the whole tone of the film had been radically altered. Burton referred to this scene as a "high school fantasy".

## **Home Media**

2000 DVD Menu - 10th Anniversary Edition

Menus: Features

Scene Selection: 1. Main Titles

2. A Story About Snow

3. Avon Calling

4. Peg Meets Edward

5. Local Gossip

6. Edward's Talent

7. The Neighbors

8. The Inventor

9. Backyard Barbecue

10. Remembering

11. Kim

12. Show and Tell

13. More Talents

14. Edward on TV

15. A Beauty Salon

16. The Need for Money

17. Drop Your Weapons

18. A Ruined Reputation

19. The Ice Angel

20. Edward Gets Mad

21. A Christmas Past

22. Jim's Revenge

23. The Story's End

24. End Titles

Language Selection: LANGUAGES AND AUDIO

English 4.0 Dolby Digital

English 2.0 Dolby Surround

French 2.0 Dolby Surround

CAPTIONS AND SUBTITLES

English

Spanish

Extra Features: Director Commentary

Composer Commentary

Featurette

Concept Art

Special Audio Features: Isolated Music Score & Songs Only Track (presented in Dolby Digital 2.0)

Dialogue and Sound Effects Only Track (presented in Dolby Digital 2.0)

Soundbites: Johnny Depp

Winona Ryder

Dianne Wiest

Tim Burton

Caroline Thompson

Alan Arkin

Vincent Price

Danny Elfman

Trailers: Teaser Trailer

Theatrical Trailer

TV Spots: English - Romance

Spanish - Amuse You (30 Second Spot)

Spanish - Amuse You (20 Second Spot)