Flowers in the Attic (film)

Flowers in the Attic
Theatrical release poster by Tom Jung
Directed by	Jeffrey Bloom
Produced by	Sy Levin & Thomas Fries
Screenplay by	Jeffrey Bloom
Based on	Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews
Narrated by	Clare Peck
Starring	Louise Fletcher Victoria Tennant Kristy Swanson Jeb Stuart Adams
Music by	Christopher Young
Cinematography	Gil Hubbs
Distributed by	New World Pictures(theatrical) MGM Television 20th Century Fox Television(Television)
Release date(s)	20 November 1987
Running time	93 min
Country	USA
Language	English
Box office	$15,151,736 (USA)

Flowers in the Attic is a 1987 film starring Louise Fletcher, Victoria Tennant, Kristy Swanson, and Jeb Stuart Adams. It is based on the 1979 novel of the same name by V. C. Andrews. Despite the success of the book on which it is based, the movie was poorly received by both critics and fans.

At one point Wes Craven was scheduled to direct the film, and he even completed a screenplay draft. Producers were disturbed by his approach to the incest-laden story, however, and Jeffrey Bloom ended up with writing and directing duties.

Plot

After the sudden death of their father, four children — teenagers Chris and Cathy and 4-year-old twins Cory and Carrie — find themselves penniless and forced to travel with their mother Corinne to live with her wealthy parents (whom the children had neither met nor been told about before). Corinne informs her children that there has been tension between herself and her parents for many years, but does not elaborate and simply says they had cut her out of their lives for something she had done that they disapproved of. The children trust her, though Cathy is skeptical at times.

Corinne's mother Olivia, a religious fanatic, takes her daughter and her children into her home, though with the harsh condition that the children must be sequestered away in a locked room so that her husband Malcolm (who is dying) will never know of their existence. To that end, the children are shut up in one bedroom in the mansion, only with access to the mansion's attic via a secret stairway. It is on their first day there that the grandmother reveals the shocking truth: Corinne and her husband were really uncle and niece, making their love incestuous and their children the product of said incest. When Corrine finally returns to the children that night, she is forced to show the children that she has been savagely horsewhipped by her mother as a punishment for her incestuous relationship. Corinne admits to the children that she and their father were uncle and niece, and the children do not say anything but seem to accept it. Corinne tells the children that their confinement will only be for a short time: her father is deathly ill, and once she is able to convince him to secure her inheritance, when he dies they will be free.

The film focuses on the children's ordeal as shut-ins and their clashes with the ultra-religious grandmother, who loathes the children due to their incestuous conception. The children struggle to survive, even as their mother's visits quickly taper off. In particular, Olivia becomes obsessed with Chris and Cathy, out of the warped belief that they have become lovers. Discovering them sleeping in the same bed one morning, the grandmother smashes Cathy's ballerina music box, given to her by her deceased father, and after she discoveres the two innocently talking while Cathy is bathing, she calls them sinners. Chris manages to chase her out, but later on Olivia ambushes Cathy in the bedroom, locks the door to the attic so that Chris cannot help Cathy, and hacks off her hair with a pair of scissors. She then starves them for a week, and Chris is forced to feed Cory his own blood so he doesn't die of starvation.

As time goes on, the children are often sick, especially the younger ones. Chris and Cathy manage to secretly remove the hinges from their locked door on a few occasions to sneak out of their room, and discover that their mother has been living a life of luxury as well as dating a young lawyer. She does eventually come to visit them again, and they confront her about leaving them there to suffer and ignoring them. Corinne is very defensive and acts insulted, cries that they are cruel to think that she is deliberately neglecting them, or enjoying life while they are locked up. She storms out. Shortly after, Cory becomes deathly ill. The children ask Olivia and Corinne to take Cory to the hospital, which they do, but later Corinne returns to inform them Cory has died. The children are devastated, but not long after they start to suspect that Olivia has been poisoning all of them with arsenic (mixed in the sugar on the cookies they are served with the breakfast) when their pet mouse Fred is found dead after eating part of a cookie. The remaining siblings decide to leave the attic once and for all.

Chris sneaks out to steal money before they escape and discovers that their mother is planning to wed her new boyfriend at the mansion the next morning. Though upset, he suggests to Cathy they dress up in fancy clothes from the attic, and use the wedding as a cover to sneak out of the house. When the grandmother secretly enters their bedroom the next day, hoping to catch them once more doing something "evil", Chris takes her by surprise and beats her unconscious with a bedpost. As they are leaving, Cathy decides they should reveal themselves to their grandfather (whom they had a brief run-in with earlier in the film, while investigating their mother's absence). However, when they enter his room, they find it empty, with the bed dismantled: the grandfather has been dead for months. They also find a copy of his will, which connects the final dots -- Corrine's father, still suspicious of his daughter, put a clause in his will which states that if it is ever revealed that she had children from her first marriage, she will be disinherited and lose all of her money. They realize that their mother was the one poisoning the cookies.

The children crash the wedding ceremony and expose their mother to the guests and the groom; Corinne refuses to acknowledge the children as her own or to admit to poisoning Cory. Cathy offers her an arsenic-coated cookie as a wedding present, and in fury tries to force her mother to eat it, chasing her out to a balcony, where after a brief struggle, Corinne falls and is killed when her veil is caught on a trellis, breaking her neck. Afterward, the children leave the mansion as their grandmother looks on with scorn; the narrator (an older Cathy's voiceover) explains that the children did manage to survive all by themselves although Carrie was 'never truly healthy'. She wonders aloud if her grandmother is still alive, anticipating Cathy's eventual return to claim the family's fortune.

Cast

• Louise Fletcher as Olivia Foxworth (Grandmother)
• Victoria Tennant as Corrine Dollanganger (Mother)
• Kristy Swanson as Cathy Dollanganger
• Jeb Stuart Adams as Chris Dollanganger
• Ben Ryan Ganger as Cory Dollanganger
• Lindsay Parker as Carrie Dollanganger
• Marshall Colt as Christopher Dollanganger (Father)
• Nathan Davis as Malcolm Foxworth (Grandfather)
• Brooke Fries as Flower Girl
• Alex Koba as John Hall, the butler
• Leonard Mann as Bart Winslow
• Bruce Neckels as Minister
• Gus Peters as Caretaker
• Clare Peck as Cathy (narrator)
• V. C. Andrews as Window-washing maid (uncredited)

Production

Pre-Production

V.C. Andrews herself demanded and, eventually, got script approval when she sold the film rights to producers Thomas Fries and Sy Levin. She turned down five scripts (the notorious, violent and graphic screenplay by Wes Craven was rejected by the producers, though), before choosing the script by Jeffrey Bloom, who would also direct. Obviously, Bloom's script was the one that was the closest to the novel, but, as he did not have full control over the matter of the film, the numerous producers and the two studios forcefully made changes in the script, thus stripping it from many plot points and themes of the novel, including the incestuous relationship between the oldest siblings. Bloom said that there was a lot of conflict in production but could do nothing to talk the producers out of the many drastic changes made in the script.

Originally, Bloom wanted David Shire to score the film, but Christopher Young was chosen by the producers instead.

Casting

Veteran actresses Louise Fletcher and Victoria Tennant were cast as the Grandmother and Mother, respectively, while the four children were played by newcomers Kristy Swanson, Jeb Stuart Adams, Ben Ryan Ganger and Lindsay Parker. Swanson once claimed that when V.C. Andrews met her, she said that Swanson was just like she pictured Cathy, however that may be a lie, as of Cathy was supposed to have soft blonde hair and blue eyes but Swanson has rough blonde hair and brown eyes.^{[citation needed]}

Being a fairly low-budget production, Bloom said, big names were not considered for any role in the film. Jeffrey Bloom had a young Sharon Stone audition for the film, but he could not convince the producers to give her the part of Corrine, the mother.

Filming

Louise Fletcher wanted to get deep inside her role, so she called Andrews one night to ask about the motivation of her character in the film. She was also so in the part, that she stayed strictly within the character of the Grandmother all the time, even when she wasn't shooting. "I couldn't let myself think about distractions like what a beautiful day or what are we going to have for lunch?" she said in an interview.

Andrews was also given a cameo as a maid in Foxworth Hall, scrubbing the glass of a window after Chris and Cathy attempt to escape from the rooftop. Anne Patty, present at the filming of Andrews's scene, said that her part is metaphorical. "The writer is a person who wipes the window clean so that the reader can clearly see into the lives of the characters".

Bloom claims that, after the filming was completed, the producers approached him to refilm a new ending, and one of the many ideas was that the siblings accidentally kill Corinne during their escape. Bloom tried to talk them out of it and when he was unable to convince them otherwise, he eventually quit. The new ending, partly inspired by the ending of Wes Craven's own screenplay, was eventually filmed by someone else.

Also, Victoria Tennant is said to have stormed off the set angrily after shooting the death of her character.

Post-production

Jeffrey Bloom had no involvement in the final edit of the film, as he had walked off the set, and the new ending was inserted. He also claimed that, regarding scenes involving the incest between Chris and Cathy, scenes were indeed cut. The original ending is said to have the children secretly escaping the mansion while their mother is getting married, without crashing her wedding.

Awards and nominations

Despite the fact that the film's reception by fans of the book and critics was mostly negative, Kristy Swanson won a Young Artist Award in 1989 for her portrayal of Cathy Dollanganger, while in 1988, Louise Fletcher was nominated for a Saturn Award for her performance as the Grandmother.

Sequel

According to Kristy Swanson herself, a sequel to the film adaptation based on the novel's sequel, Petals on the Wind, was planned but eventually it never reached production. The film would be based on the same plotline of the sequel novel, with the exception of the lack of Corinne Foxworth's character since she was killed off in the original film.

Swanson agreed to do the part one more time but she was never contacted again about the film after she was sent the script: "I was sent a script of Petals on the Wind and it never took off... I remember running into Louise Fletcher in Santa Barbara about four years ago. She asked me if I had gotten the Petals on the Wind script, which I had, and she wanted to know if I had read it. I told her I had and that they had called me about it. I was interested but then I didn't hear from them anymore. And apparently the same thing happened with her. It's like they wanted to do it but they couldn't get it off the ground... When I read the script, I wasn't too thrilled with it. I know Cathy goes through a lot in the next book, and the script was a real "sexfest." She gets pregnant and has so many affairs. There's her brother, Christopher, and then she has an affair with Julian, the dancer, and there's Paul, the doctor. I was actually kind of wondering if I should even do a sequel, you know? I just didn't know if it should be done."

Remake

First referenced as "The MGM Deal" in May 2008, Flowers in the Attic is in talks to be remade. The screenplay has been written by Andrew Neiderman (the ghost writer for all the V.C. Andrews books penned after her death in 1986) and is currently awaiting to be greenlit.

See also

• Psycho-biddy

External links

• Flowers in the Attic at the Internet Movie Database
• The Complete V.C. Andrews