1992’s Sneakers is a much-loved ensemble crime caper, that needed a reshot ending. An ending that cost just $21….
The 1992 crime caper Sneakers is the kind of film that sits on the In Bruges pile: in short, amongst those that have watched it, few take against it. That there are people who really like Sneakers, and there are people who haven’t seen it.
It’s a film I’ve covered before on this site, in a podcast episode here. Furthermore, it marked the maiden Blu-ray release for Film Stories and Plumeria Pictures’ Blu-ray collaboration. Don’t worry though: not using this article to try and sell you a copy. The disc has sold out. Here’s the trailer, though.
Still, there’s a lovely bit of film trivia about the movie that I unearthed during conversations with its director, Phil Alden Robinson. That is that the final scene in Sneakers cost less than $21 to make.
A bit of context. Sneakers was a Universal Pictures production, and not one short of star Wattage. With Robert Redford leading a terrific ensemble cast, the bill for the film’s negative was in the $20-30m range. Not a massive amount by modern day standards, granted, but a reasonable whack of change in the early 1990s (although a third of the cost of, say, 1990’s Die Hard 2: Die Harder).
The film’s screenplay had been in development for around a decade before it went before cameras, with Walter F Parkes, Lawrence Lasker and the aforementioned Phil Alden Robinson working through numerous drafts as they each moved in and out of other projects. By the time they got to a final shooting script, dozens of drafts had been produced, and the core ideas of the movie had been well, well worked through.
Surprisingly though, what the movie lacked was a working ending. And this is where this article inevitably has to go spoiler rich. Once you get past Cedric the Spoiler Squirrel, please note that we’re going to be talking about the finale of Sneakers, and going spoiler-heavy.
Still here? Right then.
The shooting script of Sneakers saw the unlikely collection of Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, Dan Aykroyd, Mary McDonnell, David Straithairn and River Phoenix successfully complete their task. The mysterious box is retrieved, and there’s a delightful scene where along comes James Earl Jones for a cameo he shot in a single day. There, he gets increasingly aghast as the assorted sneakers list their respective price for handing the box over.
But also in the script – and this sequence was shot – was a very final scene.
It saw the group get the chip back from the NSA, and then the movie would have cut to the next morning. The characters are assembled at the end of a pier, pre-dawn, in San Francisco. As Phil Alden Robinson explained to me “The Sneakers walk to the end of the pier, looking forlorn. Bishop [Robert Redford] takes the chip, and tosses it into the water. We then had a slow motion shot of the chip tumbling in, hitting the water and disappearing under the surface. The Sneakers, sadder but wiser, turned and walked into the sun rising. Mary [McDonnell, as Liz] says to Bishop ‘we’re not getting back together’, and he says ‘yeah right’, and puts his arm around her. As they’re walking away, Carl [River Phoenix] puts his arm around Crease [Sidney Poitier], who knocks it off. And they walk off. It was beautiful”.
The problem? “It was boring”.
Still, that was the original version that all concerned believed in, to the point of locking it into the original cut of the movie. This was the version that was then shown to the studio for the first time.
It was a generally pretty successful screening, too. The film was really playing well, right up to the point at the end where, well, it wasn’t. The original ending was landing with a thud, and there was no hiding the fact that it wasn’t working at all. As beautiful as the sun-drenched shot looked on screen, Robinson knew straight away, as he saw the movie through the eyes of others, that he had a problem.
They needed a plan B, as little changes being attempted in the editing room weren’t working. What they didn’t really have at this point was much in the way of time or resource. Robert Redford for one was already deep into editing his film A River Runs Through It, that he’d put on pause to fit in the Sneakers shoot (notably having his editing suite close to the set).
Talking therefore to editor Tom Rolf, Robinson lamented that he didn’t care that the group threw the chip away, and he wanted an ending he cared about more. What Rolf suggested was a finale instead where they used the chip for something.
Robinson joked that “the Republican National Committee just announced they’re bankrupt” as a fake news story that could result from its use. The pair laughed. Robinson kept coming up with headlines that could have resulted from the Sneakers using the chip themselves. Ten minutes later, the pair looked at each other. They had something. This, out of the blue, was working.
Robinson thus put in a call to Casey Silver, the-then president of Universal, and told him that he was intending to reshoot the ending of the film. Silver asked how much that was going to cost, expecting a bill in the region of $750,000. Robinson promised to work up a budget, hot-footed it back to his office, and called the TV station he’d worked for when he was in college.
The anchorman there, the late Ernie Tetrault, was an old friend of Robinson’s, still working for WNYT in New York. Robinson asked him to read a few lines he’d scripted once Tetrault had completed reading that evening’s 11 o’clock news, and duly faxed over some copy. Tetrault happily agreed, read the lines to camera, which were captured by the studio team that was already set up and in place. The tape of that recording was then sent via FedEx to Robinson, and that was the only cost involved: $21.
Again: a reshot ending of a Hollywood movie cost just $21.
“The first time we showed it to an audience, it got a huge laugh”, remembered Robinson. “There’s nothing better. To end with something that’s emotionally satisfying, or really funny and surprising, it’s a lovely thing”.
And that was the ending that Universal liked too, at a price tag – much to the relief of Casey Silver – that it couldn’t really argue with.
It’s unusual to have a third act of a movie stack up quite so well, but there’s little quarrel with the fact that Sneakers’ finale absolutely delivers on its build up. As for that original ending footage though? Likely locked in a vault somewhere, and requiring a very special chip to retrieve it all…
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