Alternate Endings

In real life, we call it "what might have been." Sometimes we reach a little further and call it "if only." Circumstances don't always play out the way we plan, or sometimes they do, but then we revise the plan in hindsight and wish that we had made different plans in the first place. This comes as hard news for those of us who stand hard and fast by the space-time continuum, If we really want to change the past, we're going to have to accelerate past the speed of light in order to curve back around to those things for which we wish we had another shot. Until then, we stack up our regrets and hope that our kids make better choices than we do.
But speaking of light, it does make me pine just a little for those in Hollywood. The place where alternate endings are a real thing. In the book "The Natural," Roy Hobbs doesn't bring down the lights in his final game with a mammoth home run, he strikes out. Thanks, Hollywood. Thanks to focus groups and preview screenings, Molly Ringwald didn't end up with Jon Cryer, her best friend and soulmate, she walks out into the parking lot with richie rich Andrew McCarthy. And you can thank Alfred Hitchcock for not giving us the final scene of "The Birds" perched on every square inch of the Golden Gate Bridge, too expensive in the pre-CGI days. That thought of leaving viewers with some shred of hope was also behind the revision of Don Siegel's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," where a hastily added coda allowed us to believe that the pod people could be stopped. Don't worry, the police will take care of it. And don't I wish I could have seen the pie fight that was supposed to be the coup de grace of "Dr. Strangelove," even though the mushroom clouds choreographed to "We'll Meet Again" still marks a level of dark humor I can only admire from afar. Whether you take the happy road or the sad, you can always imagine improving on real life, but the reshoots are so incredibly expensive.
Like the ones that it would have taken to get my college roommate and I out to Hollywood to write and star in the Bruce Springsteen biopic that we had imagined on all those nights when we were out of our minds on this or that and creating the world we wanted to be ours. That could have been, but it lacked exposition, which is really the trick with those endings. If you don't put in your time on story and character in those first reels, you can't expect it to pay off any old way. It would be silly to suggest that Rhett and Scarlett would just patch things up and get on with their lives. Not without a lot of counseling.