The sweet charm of black humor: unknown facts about the history of the Addams family

World cinema has given us a lot of bright and unforgettable films that we grew up on. Portal Film.ru in the most detailed way, he tells about one of his favorite childhood films.

The Addams family has the most common American surname, but this is absolutely not an ordinary family. The Addams look like vampires, love everything dark and bloody, and take pleasure in scaring or killing others. The Addams first appeared in magazine comics and became popular thanks to the sitcom. When Barry Sonnenfeld made his directorial debut in 1991 with a delightful comedy about the Addams, the clan became famous all over the world. Sonnenfeld's film was simply called "The Addams Family".

The Gothic style in its modern sense has many fathers. But if you ask who came up with comic Gothic, the answer is unequivocal-the cartoonist Charles Addams, who in 1938 began publishing comic pictures about a "gothic" family in the popular intellectual magazine The New Yorker. Over time, Addams gave this clan his own surname.

The latter was not a manifestation of a lack of imagination. Addams simply emphasized how much the humor of the cartoons about the Addams is close to him personally. When the artist was at the height of popularity, the most incredible rumors were circulating about him, and many of them (in particular, about Addams ' psychopathy and his regular treatment in a mental hospital) were idle speculation. But we know for sure that Charles was interested in death, cemeteries, skeletons as a child, and that he was happy to depict all this when he became interested in drawing. Over the years, he began to stick out his image as a fan of macabre (wearing appropriate clothes, being photographed in the appropriate environment, and so on), but this was not a purely advertising pose. He was really attracted to what others were repelled by. Although at the same time he was a completely balanced, friendly, peaceful person, and this was reflected in his peculiar work, at the same time gloomy and touching.

Addams invented The Addams Family as a satirical inversion of an ordinary American family. The Addams were rich aristocrats, they lived in an old mansion, wore gloomy clothes, looked bizarre, behaved eccentrically and did not worry at all about what they seemed from the outside, in the eyes of their neighbors. At the same time, there was nothing villainous about the Addams. They loved each other and did not cause any special harm to strangers. Although they looked like monsters from horror movies. In a sense, the Addams family was a parody of migrants from distant countries who behave strangely and frighten new neighbors, but in fact they are completely harmless.

Readers of The New Yorker gladly accepted the new comic series, and Addams drew the family until his death in 1988. When television spread to the United States after the war, family sitcoms began to flourish, and over time, screenwriters got tired of writing stories about standard middle-class families. Therefore, in 1964, two sitcoms about macabre clans were released simultaneously — "The Monster Family" with variations on the theme of Frankenstein, Dracula and the werewolf and "The Addams Family", inspired by Addams ' comics.

To turn the Addams into full-fledged characters (short comics did not require fine character development), the cartoonist, at the request of the creators of the TV show, came up with names for his characters and deepened their images. So there were a married couple Gomez and Morticia Adams, children Pugzli and Wednesday, Grandma Addams, Uncle Fester, the butler Lurch and a magical disembodied Hand that performs the functions of a servant and companion of Gomez. Each of them was comical and bizarre in its own way. Gomez threw knives and wrecked toy trains, Morticia grew carnivorous plants and cut flowers from roses, leaving only thorns, Fester played with dynamite and slept on nails, and grandma brewed magic potions.

The most striking difference between the Addams and ordinary television families was not their Gothic outfits, not their attachment to torture instruments and not their grotesque humor. Gomez and Morticia were unique in their passionate relationship. They were the first American television spouses who could definitely be said to be making love. All the other telesamilies behaved as if they had sex in the past and now they were just close friends living together. A paradox? No, just television before the era of the sexual revolution, which made passionate love the norm, and not the lot of eccentric TV "monsters".

Like "The Monster Family", "The Addams Family" did not set rating records and was closed after only two seasons. But it was not forgotten, because it did not disappear from the screens. The show was regularly repeated, and it gradually acquired new fans from among the connoisseurs of non-standard and risky on-screen humor. And few of those who watched the "Family" with pleasure could forget its peculiar screensaver song, played on the harpsichord and accompanied by finger clicks. The song was composed by TV composer Vic Mizzi.

It was Mizzy's song many years later, in 1986, that inspired producer Scott Rudin, who at that time was the president of the Fox studio for production, to start shooting the film version of The Addams Family. One day, Rudin, along with his colleagues-superiors, was driving from a viewing in a large car. The trip was long, the passengers were bored, and when the son of one of the bosses suddenly sang a song from the "Family", everyone picked it up in chorus. After that, the Fox bosses looked at each other and, without collusion, realized that if the series is remembered and loved twenty years after its completion, then it is worth shooting something new on its topic. The very next day, Rudin held a working lunch about the project and received full support.

However, then it did not go further. The catch was in the screening rights to the Addams Family, which belonged to the Orion studio. This company itself wanted to make a remake of "The Family", and it refused to cede the rights to Fox. On the side of Orion was also Barbara Colyton, Addams ' second wife, who received part of the rights to the characters of her ex-husband when the couple divorced (the former Mrs. Addams was a very clever lawyer and an enterprising businessman). Nevertheless, while Rudin was trying to negotiate with Koliton, he made a favorable impression on her. So, when the producer left the Fox studio a couple of years later, Coliton insisted that Orion assign Rudin to work on the film version of "The Family". The option of a television relaunch of the "Family" was also considered, but it seemed more interesting and potentially more profitable to make a movie.

Who could pay tribute to the humor of Addams ' comics and the style of the TV series? The obvious candidate for the position of director was Tim Burton, and Rudin brought in the co-author of the Beetlejuice script, Larry Wilson, and the screenwriter of Edward Scissorhands, Caroline Thompson, to write the script for the Addams Family, while he was negotiating with the director of these gothic paintings. However, Burton had other plans and obligations at that time,and he refused the project, although he later regretted it. Judging by the fact that in the early 2010s, Burton tried to organize the shooting of a puppet film version of the Addams Family. Rudin was also rejected by the obvious candidate number two — the British eccentric Terry Gilliam, who is not inclined to Gothic, but appreciates humor in the style of "Family".

Sonnenfeld did not immediately take up the "Addams Family". He did not like the script that Rudin had at that time, and the producer had to promise that the text would be significantly improved. This work was entrusted to the theatrical playwright Paul Rudnick, who was famous for his wit and, being gay, saw in the Addams kindred "unconventional" souls.

Rudnik's main contribution was that he replaced flat, obvious gags with more sophisticated verbal jokes. Sonnenfeld did not want his debut tape to turn out to be vulgar, and Rudin agreed with him.

The main storyline of the film was the return to the family of Uncle Fester, who disappeared for many years, who was announced in the film as Gomez's brother (in the TV series, this is Morticia's uncle). Fester turned out to be the "Trojan horse" of an elderly fraudster who passed off her son Gordon as a relative of the Addams in order to get their fortune and estate (as the older brother, Fester was the heir to the Addams ' wealth). However, later it turned out that Gordon was really Fester, who had lost his memory. So the villain got what she deserved, and the family was reunited.

Note that for a long time it was not clear from the script whether Gordon was a Fester or not. But during the filming, the actors demanded that Gordon still turn out to be Fester, and Sonnenfeld admitted that this would make the finale more soulful.

What actors played Sonnenfeld? Initially, they wanted to assign the role of Morticia Addams to the pop star and actress Cher, who had an eccentric style similar to Morticia. But they could not agree with the singer, and the role was given to Angelica Houston-the daughter of the famous director John Huston and an Oscar winner for the crime comedy "The Honor of the Prizzi Family".

Being a Hollywood aristocrat, Houston brought her aristocracy (of course, comically pointed) to the image of Morticia, and this became a kind of tuning fork for tuning the whole picture. If Cher had been in the place of the actress, the tape could have turned out to be more trashy and farcical. Although, of course, first of all, the style of the "Family" was the merit of the director.

Unlike statuesque brunettes, passionate Latin American actors at that time did not walk in Hollywood in a formation. So, choosing a performer for the role of Gomez Addams, Sonnenfeld quickly settled on Raula Julia-a native of Puerto Rico, who was primarily known as a theater actor. However, in the 1980s, he regularly starred in films. In particular, Julia played in the arthouse prison drama "The Kiss of the Spider-Woman", which earned him a Golden Globe nomination.

The role of Julia in the role of Gomez was in many ways similar to how the father of the family was played by John Austin in the TV series. On the contrary, Houston did not try to imitate Caroline Jones in the role of Morticia, as she considered this game to be flawless and not amenable to copying. The actress tried to create her own interpretation of Morticia, which is perhaps closer to the original vision of Addams than the too "warm" image created by Jones. Houston drew inspiration from the 1975 documentary "Gray Gardens", which told about the reclusive life of Edith Bouvier-Beale — the cousin of Jackie Kennedy, the widow of President Kennedy.

If Jackie Coogan (once one of the first famous child actors in Hollywood) played the bald and half-mad Fester in the TV series, Sonnenfeld assigned this role to Christopher Lloyd, an expert in portraying charming madmen. Before Lloyd, the role was offered to Danny de Vito and Bob Hoskins, and Fester ended up being much taller than the director's idea of this hero. However, Lloyd did not have to be particularly hunched, since his partners Julia and Houston also ate a lot of porridge as children and grew taller than the average Hollywood height.

In the film, the special effects were more advanced than in the series, and it was possible to show how the Hand runs on the floor, flies through the air, and so on. The Hand was portrayed by the Canadian magician Christopher Hart, the owner of long and trained fingers. His work was by no means simple, since the Hand is a significant character, and Hart needed to convey a variety of emotions with the movements of his fingers. The script didn't say much about this, and Hart had to independently come up with a role for himself according to the stingy instructions in the text and the director's comments.

The role of the little unsmiling sadist Wednesday Addams was given to 10-year-old Christina Ricci, who previously played the youngest daughter of the heroine Shar in the tragicomedy "Mermaids". In the performance of Richie Wednesday, it turned out to be much more memorable and frightening than in the performance of Lisa Loring in the TV series. This was due to the fact that the creators of the film were able to go further in the image of the "strange girl" than the authors of the television series bound by the censorship framework.

The role of the well-fed Pugsley Addams, the brother of Wednesday, was given to the debutant Jimmy Workman. It was a pure accident — the boy was noticed because he came to the studio "for company" with his sister Chanel, who was auditioning for the role of Wednesday. By the way, the most famous in their family eventually got Ariel Winter-the sister of Jimmy and Chanel, who became a notable television and voice actress. Now she is working on the sitcom "American Family" and the animated series "Sofia the Beautiful", where she voices the main character.

The elderly star of the American political theater Judith Malina played grandma Addams, and the veteran of theater and Hollywood Elizabeth Wilson portrayed the fraudster Abigail Craven, because of which the plot is tied. Former "Commando" villain Dan Hedaya got the role of lawyer Tully Alford, and "little" actor John Franklin played a short cousin of Itt, who looks like an incomprehensible creature completely overgrown with hair. Also in the film, the host of the talk show Sally Jessie Raphael starred in the role of herself.

The filming of the "Family" was relatively simple by Hollywood standards. The action was mostly spoken, and the work was carried out in the comfort of the pavilions of the Hollywood Center Studios (now Sunset Las Palmas Studios), one of the oldest and largest in Los Angeles. Harold Lloyd, a classic of a little cinema, also worked at this studio! Street filming took place in Los Angeles. Production designer Richard McDonald ("Jesus Christ is a Superstar", "Trip to America") and art director Margie Stone Mcshirley ("Back to the Future"trilogy) were responsible for the visual solution of the tape.

It would seem that work and be happy. But Sonnenfeld, who directed the shooting for the first time, was not happy. He was terribly nervous — just like when he made his debut as a director of photography, shooting "Just Blood"for the Cohen brothers. The director was periodically sick, and he lost several kilograms during the filming. And three weeks after the start of work, Sonnenfeld fainted on the set. Rudin decided that the director should be given a rest, but when Sonnenfeld came to his senses, he convinced the producer that he could continue working. The director understood that for the sake of his career, he must at all costs pull the tape and not let his colleagues down.

All this time, Sonnenfeld was worried about his family, who lived in New York. As it turned out, he was not worried in vain. When the shooting was still a few weeks away, Mrs. Sonnenfeld was hospitalized, and the director had to return to the East Coast for a while. Fortunately, the doctors coped with the disease, and the shooting was not overshadowed by the tragedy. By the way, this is why Sonnenfeld insisted years later that "Men in Black" be filmed in New York. If possible, he did not want to leave his wife and children for a long time, and he was not going to move to California.

Also during the filming, Raul Julia missed several days because a blood vessel burst in his eye. The group had problems with the facade of the Addams mansion. The producers found a suitable old house in the vicinity of Yale University in Connecticut, but the abandoned building burned down, and they had to build a "Potemkin" facade on a vacant lot in California.

Perhaps the biggest "squiggle" happened when the picture was three-quarters removed. Orion studio had big financial problems at that time, and it sold the "Family" to Paramount Studios. Moreover, Rubin learned about this from journalists, and not from studio bosses. Fortunately, Paramount did not let the project wither away and paid all the additional expenses that were formed due to filming delays. But this did not happen immediately, and the authors of the film had to worry a lot. Sonnenfeld even joked sadly that he might have to mount a trailer with a request to the audience to send money to complete the picture.

If we talk not about force majeure and not about experiences, but about everyday work,then Angelica Houston had the hardest time. To create an" impossible " figure of Morticia, the actress was clamped in a metal corset, in which she could neither lie nor sit. So a full rest between takes was excluded. Also, the actress had to endure a difficult makeup on her face. By the end of the shooting day, she had severe migraines from all this.

The last significant edits were made to the picture after the filming was completed. In particular, the musical number of Gomez and Fester was significantly reduced. This was done based on the results of the preliminary screening, when it was determined that the scene slows down the narrative and the audience — mainly young guys — begin to get bored. Perhaps the episode would have been completely preserved in the montage if the audience of that show had been different.

The shooting of the tape lasted 106 days. It took several more months for the installation. In total, $ 30 million was spent on the Addams Family, and the picture quickly paid off when it was released on November 22, 1991. The American rental gave 114 million dollars, and the total world-192 million dollars. The picture was included in the top ten most successful films of 1991.

Critics were moderately favorable to the" Family". They wrote that the tape turned out to be funny, but that's all, without any other advantages. But what else could you expect from an eccentric comedy? Anjelica Huston was nominated for a Golden Globe, and the film's costumers were nominated for an Oscar. Rapper MC Hammer received a "Golden Raspberry" for the song Addams Groove, which, undoubtedly, did not fit the tone of the tape at all, sounding on the final credits. She was included in the project only because rap was in great fashion at that time.

Two years later, in 1993, Sonnenfeld released the sequel "Addams Family Values". Opinions about it have diverged. Some find the film worse than the original, while others find it noticeably better. Anyway, the picture failed at the box office, and the film history of the cycle ended there. There was, however, the film "The Reunion of the Addams Family" released on video, but it was a full-length pilot of the TV series created in Canada, which had practically nothing to do with the Sonnenfeld tapes. At the same time, a new TV show about the Addams was never filmed.

Now in Hollywood they are working on a full-length cartoon about the Addams, but this is a completely different story. New game Addams are not yet expected. However, it is not at all outdated Sonnenfeld films that are quite enough. They are still as funny and bizarre as they were in the early 1990s.