#How Scream’s Editor Saved The Movie From The Weinsteins

Apparently, Dimension Films didn’t think the mask was scary enough. This story has been floating around for a while now, but in an incredible oral history of “Scream” for The Hollywood Reporter, crew members get into the weeds of exactly what went down that day. The now famous opening scene, which introduces the Ghostface mask and sees the killer chase down Drew Barrymore’s Casey Becker, wasn’t popular with the Weinstein brothers, the co-founders of Dimension Films. Franchise writer Kevin Willamson set the scene, saying:

“We were sitting in the parking lot of the grocery store and we were filming the news footage of Liev Schreiber walking out and being put into a car and ushered away. Wes got the phone call from the studio and I was sitting behind him in my chair and I just saw his back slump. He just started sliding down the chair. They didn’t think anything about it was good. They didn’t understand the lack of footage and they didn’t see his vision for that sequence at all.”

Dimension was displeased with the dailies, and most notably, with the mask. According to producer Cathy Konrad:

“The controversy, which is pretty notorious, had a lot to do with the ghost mask. They felt like things looked flat. They felt like things were unexciting, that the mask wasn’t scary. I was getting calls early in the morning that were very demanding about ensuring that things change.”

Her fellow producer Marianne Maddalena added that the pressure was intense because it came directly from Bob Weinsetin, and the entire crew was aware. She added “We were traumatized because we were working really hard and we thought we were doing great work.” The whole process was especially frustrating because it was based on dailies — the unedited footage. As Konrad said, “you cannot see these movies for what they’re going to become without the tension being built into the cutting.”