Anyone seen The Box? It’s the new film from Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko). I’m trying to decide whether to go see it, and the reviews are pretty mixed.
It’s an adaptation of one of my all-time favorite TV episodes, “Button, Button,” part of the ’80s Twilight Zone revival that I used to watch all the time as a kid. The premise is that a mysterious man appears at the door of a married couple in financial difficulty and offers them a box with a button on it. If they press the button, they get a huge sum of money and a total stranger — they don’t know who — dies. It’s one of the best pure “idea” stories I’ve ever seen, and the ending is perfect.
Years later I read a Richard Matheson collection and came across the short story that inspired the episode, and was very excited … until I got to the end. The ending of the short story is completely different and it’s HORRIBLE — a totally lame cop-out of the worst kind. I just assumed that Matheson had had a brilliant premise for a story but hadn’t been able to come up with a good ending, and that example has always stood for me as a warning against plucking an idea before it’s ripe. Since Matheson has done so much work in Hollywood, I figured he likely wrote the Twilight Zone episode, and, having had a decade to mull it over, had finally come up with the right ending for his story.
So I was just reading about “Button, Button” on Wikipedia, which states that Matheson actually prefers his original ending, and was so upset by the change that he had his name taken off the episode. Wow. I just don’t get that at all. Incidentally, this is the second example I’ve seen of a filmed version greatly improving on Matheson’s original. The film version of Stir of Echoes is a dramatic improvement over the novel. The novel is kind of a mess structurally, and whoever wrote the screenplay did a very clever job of drawing connections between the different events of the story so that they actually tie together. Incidentally, Stir of Echoes is a pretty good movie, and worth watching. It came out around the same time as the very similar and much better known The Sixth Sense, and got completely buried, which is too bad.
And if you don’t know, Richard Matheson also wrote the brilliant, must-read novels I Am Legend (which has most emphatically not been improved on by the filmed versions) and The Shrinking Man. Both are extremely powerful evocations of loss and loneliness in a hostile, strangely-altered world.
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