Neil Jordan had already established his art house credibility with The Company of Wolves, and Mona Lisa, he was one of the most interesting directors working in the British Isles, and Hollywood took notice.
But of course, Hollywood being Hollywood, it snatched an indie director with real potential and handed him a big commercial production. I think you know where I’m going with this.
Jordan wrote High Spirits himself, inspired by an Irishman who advertised ghost tours to American tourists, and he wanted to explore the mutual preconceptions Americans and Irish have about each other. And that’s a really interesting idea for a movie, so of course much of that didn’t make it past the first stack of studio notes. But still, his original vision was darker and more character-driven, whereas Tri-Star wanted something more farcical, so Jordan was locked out of the editing room after the studio saw his original cut. What survived is a film that could be marketed to the same people who helped make Beetlejuice one of the year’s biggest sleeper hits.
High Spirits got their Furst. Production designer Anton Furst, who’d done Company of Wolves with Jordan and Full Metal Jacket with Kubrick, actually chose High Spirits over Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice because it was shooting in England. Ironically, The following year Furst won the Oscar for designing Gotham City for Burton’s 1989 Batman.
And no, Beetlejuice and High Spirits aren’t twin films in the Armageddon/Deep Impact sense, though. I don’t think anyone stole anyone’s pitch. But in the mid-to-late 80s, supernatural rom-com hijinks were simply everywhere and Hollywood was filling the shelf as fast as it could after Splash with Mannequin, All of Me, Date with an Angel, My Demon Lover, Hello Again, Made in Heaven, Scrooged, Chances Are, and probably a half dozen more, I’m just too lazy to write them all.
Still, Beetlejuice came out in March of 1988, and High Spirits in November, both on fifteen million dollar budgets. Beetlejuice made seventy-five million and became the 10th biggest earner of the year, whereas High Spirits made eight and a half. And even the people who don’t care for the film say Furst’s practical set dressing and design hold up. It’s a visually striking film.
The cast too, in retrospect, is ridiculous: Peter O’Toole, Daryl Hannah, Steve Guttenberg, Beverly D’Angelo, a scene-stealing Jennifer Tilly, Liam Neeson before anyone knew what a Liam Neeson was, and Peter Gallagher – who starred with Hannah in Summer Lovers, a film John Waters praised as being “about being young, rich, stupid and nude.” A late night cable classic, most assuredly. Anyhoo.
Most of its audience didn’t find it in theaters. They found it on HBO, on repeat, on rainy Saturday afternoons, the way we found a lot of would-be-cult movies in the late 80s and early 90s.
And Hollywood kept throwing indie darlings at these projects.
Hello Again was directed by Frank Perry, the guy who made The Swimmer and Diary of a Mad Housewife, and he ended up making a Shelley Long supernatural comedy for Touchstone. These movies usually end with soft disasters that send the directors back to margins vowing to never work in Hollywood again. Think Rocky Morton & Annabel Jankel or Kinka Usher. Jordan was that same story. After High Spirits, he made We’re No Angels with De Niro and Sean Penn, and that crumbled too.
So he went home to Ireland, and worked on smaller personal work. In 1992, he wrote and directed The Crying Game, which won him the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. I doubt he was locked out of any editing room after that.
-Pop
High Spirits arrived on home video this week in 1989, after a November 18th, 1988 theatrical release.