LITTLE SHOP - A New DVD At Last?

Online sources are reporting that Little Shop of Horrors may finally be getting the special edition treatment. It's about time! After the jump, a quick history of the now-legendary "deleted" special edition, and my wish-list for a new release.

The first Little Shop of Horrors DVD contained a black & white work-print copy of the original ending. This was pulled from the shelves at the request of producer David Geffen. Whereas Warner Brothers distributes the film, Geffen controls the unused footage. "David was upset, because the DVD used a black & white work print of the ending," Frank Oz told the Los Angeles Times. "He's a caring producer - he put his guts into the movie - and after the DVD came out, he called me and said, ‘I have the color version. This could be better.’ David either wants to re-release the movie [with the original ending] in theaters, or at least have a better DVD." There is a great post about this whole controversy at the DVD Savant.

Little Shop deserves to be seen in all its gory glory, and the artists who labored over the beautifully conceived and executed original finale deserve to have their work appreciated. With the film’s 2006 20th anniversary now gone, Little Shop of Horrors missed a great opportunity for revision. However, the film may yet reward another public airing. The interest seems to be there - the cancelled DVD regularly sells for upwards of $100 on EBay.com and the deleted footage can be viewed on YouTube. Movie musicals are back in vogue, with Chicago, Hairspray, High School Musical and the gloriously bloody Sweeney Todd (Little Shop was once affectionately dubbed “Sweeney Pod”). The current vogue for "director's cuts" and "special editions" has generated good box-office and critical results for such films as Star Wars, Blade Runner and The Exorcist. As paint-by-numbers digital creatures become ever more banal, modern movie-goers may be ready for Audrey II unbound. The Cloverfield monster might be larger, but it can’t carry a tune.

Let's keep our fingers crossed that this special edition DVD with all the trimmings comes to pass. In the meantime, here is my DVD wishlist. Please note that even with a "Director's Cut" on disc, the black & white rough cut must be included. It's a fascinating look at a film's middle stages - no sound effects, demo versions of the songs, and a final sequence containing much, much more footage than could ever be included in the final cut. Keep that rough cut, please!

A remastered version of the soundtrack album would also be welcome, especially if the opening verses of “Don’t Feed the Plants” were included and some of the overly 80s gloss removed.

DVD WISHLIST

• Anamorphic widescreen high-definition re-mastering
• Dolby 5.1 soundtrack

FROM THE ORIGINAL DVD:

• Original Theatrical Cut with Frank Oz commentary
• Rough cut of original ending, plus optional Oz commentary
• Trailers and TV Spots
• Promotional documentary
• Out-takes & bloopers with Oz commentary

NEW FOR THE SPECIAL EDITION:

• Director’s Cut with new commentary by Alan Menken and Ellen Greene
• “The Meek Shall Inherit” dream sequence
• Howard Ashman retrospective
• Gallery of Mike Ploog’s storyboards
• “Evolution of Audrey II” design featurette
(with input from Lyle Conway, Roger Corman and Martin P. Robinson)
• Levi Stubbs singing "Mean Green Mother" on the 1987 Oscar telecasts
• Photo gallery
• PDF or Screen Shot versions of the FX articles from Cinefantastique and Cinefex (like those included with Cronenberg’s The Fly)
• Isolated music option to showcase the songs and Miles Goodman’s score.
• Any video footage – TV commercials and the like – of the Off-Broadway musical that can be found

LITTLE SHOP - Sex and the Single Vegetable

Sexually speaking, there is something rich and strange going on in Little Shop of Horrors. Aside from the relentless oral fixation of the whole piece, frustration, abusiveness, and sexual mis-matching abound: Seymour loves Audrey, but in lieu of her attention, nurtures the plant he names in her honor. Audrey chastely loves Seymour, but is trapped with the overbearingly sexual Orin Scrivello, DDS. Orin is Seymour’s evil double – the cool, successful guy Seymour wishes he could be ("Gee, I’d like a Harley machine," he muses, "toolin’ around like I was James Dean!")

Even the hilarious interlude with the masochistic patient is a parody of clashing desires: the patient’s giddy pleasure completely undermines the dentist's sadistic dominance. And isn't it odd that the Dentist, who makes his living excavating and torturing others' mouths, meets his end in the toothy maw of a creature named for his abused girlfriend?

Read more about the weird world of sex in Little Shop after the jump.

The plant serves dual roles, both as Audrey’s twisted doppelganger, and as the embodiment of Seymour’s frustrated desires and pent-up aggression - his id made vegetable. When he’d like to be romancing, he is instead tending to the wilting little bud (which goes limp after Audrey regretfully turns down dinner, because she has a date). The Audrey II design is a masterstroke of ambiguity, both phallic and vaginal at the same time (much like Giger's Alien). Its upright stalk and veiny, bulbous head contrast with its gaping, hungry trap. With no eyes to serve as a character focus, the visual emphasis is on the mouth, with its sensuous lips, jagged teeth and labial, orchid-like interior. Though given a masculine voice and persona, the relentless orality of its behavior, coupled with the feminine name, give the plant disturbing vagina dentata associations. Cementing the link with evil femininity even further, the plant is abetted by a Medusa-like nest of sinuous vines.

Towards the beginning of the film, Seymour gazes through a window as Audrey applies makeup to her black eye, and channels his dissatisfaction into the romantic / comic ballad "Grow For Me." "Oh God, how I mist you! Oh pod, how you tease!" he moans, stroking the wilted, pouty flytrap (according to designer Richard Conway, this puppet’s pouty lips were modeled on Ellen Greene’s.) When he pricks his finger on a rose’s thorn, the answer to his dilemma appears. Sucking on the bleeding finger, he hears an answering sucking noise. Looking around, he is astonished to see the plant is growing erect, its trap making little sucking, kissing motions. In short order he discovers what the plant wants – when he tries to pet it, it snaps hungrily at his bleeding finger, but haughtily refuses to even look at the other hand. Figuring "a few drops" couldn’t hurt, he milks the blood out of his finger, which the plant eagerly laps up. Thus satisfied, it swells.

Next, Seymour is seen taking the now foot-tall plant on a radio show. While Seymour isn’t looking, the plant tries to bite the ass of a female secretary in a blood-red skirt – a liberty that shy Seymour would never attempt.

Soon afterwards, the chorus girls teasingly sing that "Seymour’s having some fun now" as we are treated to a montage of him feeding the growing plant his blood. In one particularly discomforting shot, an exhausted Seymour lets the plant greedily suck his finger, with the girls’ calypso-rock beat providing an ironic counterpoint. There is an eerie sexual ambiguity of Audrey’s vampire double suckling on Seymour’s body fluids while the real Audrey has her vitality sapped by the domineering dentist. As the audience knows, but Seymour is too self-conscious to realize, Audrey wants nothing more than for Seymour to rescue her from her situation – but he is too busy with his onanistic nocturnal bleedings to notice.



When the plant reaches five feet in height, it finally speaks, launching into the bluesy, "Rock Me Henry" style "Feed Me" number, promising fame, fortune and even Audrey’s love if he’ll only track down some unworthy soul for the plant’s consumption. The plant’s come-on is unmistakably sensual – it undulates suggestively, it strokes and tickles Seymour with its vines, and promises, "A little nookie’s gonna clean up those zits – and you’ll get it!" The plant even implies that it can hypnotize Audrey into falling for him, asking, "What’ll it be? Money, girls – one particular girl? How ‘bout that Audrey? Think it over!" Seymour is still unconvinced, so the plant goes for the hard sell, exclaiming, "A lotta folks deserve to die!" Right on cue, the greasy dentist rides up on his motorcycle, backhanding poor Audrey for some minor infraction. Duly convinced, Seymour makes his way to the dentist’s office with a gun. He cannot bring himself to shoot, but the Scrivello’s addiction to laughing-gas proves conveniently fatal. Thus, the plant gets its first taste of meat, Audrey’s desire for freedom is fulfilled, and Seymour’s romantic competition is removed.

Seymour is confused when Audrey’s reaction to the Orin’s "disappearance" isn’t one of immediate joy. She feels guilty rather than relieved: "If he met with foul play or some kind of terrible accident, then it’s partly my fault, you see, because...secretly, I wished it." She painfully tells Seymour that her poor treatment was no better than she deserved. "I’ve led a terrible life," she says, conflating her sexual activity with her personal worth. She met Orin at a nightclub called "The Gutter," where she used to moonlight in leaner days.

Seymour and Audrey reveal their feelings for one another in the splendid ballad "Suddenly, Seymour." For the first time, Audrey feels valued as a person rather than a sexual object. "You don’t need no makeup," Seymour sings to her, "Don’t have to pretend." It is the most heart-felt and emotionally real moment in the film, which makes the lovers’ downfall all the more tragic. Ironically, in the original version, Audrey’s transition from sexualized bombshell to innocent "real" girl (she even puts on a white dress) spells her doom, a total reversal from the usual tropes of pulp fiction.

Walking on air, Seymour confronts rude reality when Mushnik reveals that he saw Seymour dismembering the dentist’s body. He threatens to turn Seymour in to the police, and gives him the alternative of skipping town, but leaving behind the lucrative secret of the plant’s growth (having been fed, it is now eight feet high). As the chorus girls seductively croon "It’s suppertime," Seymour backs Mushnik into the plant’s reach, and he gets swallowed.

The punishing father figure thus disposed of, there is no one left in Seymour’s life but Audrey and her double - and one of them has to go. Like a closet homosexual, Seymour agonizes over how to live a "normal" life free from his shameful secret. Showered by offers of TV tie-ins and lecture tours, Seymour plans to elope with Audrey and leave the plant to wither. Like a jealous mistress, however, the plant is not to be abandoned so easily, and lures trusting Audrey into its clutches with a masher phone call. Caressing her suggestively, the plant pleads for water, but once in reach, it wraps its python-like vines around her and drags her towards its gaping trap. "Aw, relax, doll, and it'll be easier," it leers, like a rapist cajoling his victim.

 
In the released version, of course, Audrey is only shaken by the plant’s attack and lives to stand by her man. In the original ending, however, the fusion of Audrey and Audrey II is made explicit by the heroine’s dying request to be given to the plant. "If I’m in the plant, then I’m part of the plant, so in a way, we’ll always be together," she reasons. "You’ll wash my tender leaves," she sings, "You’ll smell my sweet perfume / You’ll water me and care for me / You’ll see me bud and bloom…" Seymour’s frustrated desires – his dirty little secrets – have taken over. The substitute has destroyed the original, completing the Mephistophelean, black magic bargain struck when Seymour offered the plant his blood and the name of his true love. Instead of a wedding night carrying Audrey over the threshold of their little house in the suburbs, he carries her through the back doors of the shop and into the waiting jaws of the hungry plant.

But Seymour must still confront his anima in the climactic rock number, "Mean Green Mother from Outer Space." By this point the plant is unabashedly malevolent, and unmistakably a monster female. (After eating Audrey, the plant’s mouth turns from purple to livid red, the color of passion, of blood, of fire.) The epithet "motherfucker" is shortened to just "mother;" the plant humiliates the nerd by pulling down his trousers, and even tries to geld him: "I’m gonna bust your balls!" it rages. The plant gives birth to tiny clones of itself and swallows poor, redundant Seymour, playing out every man’s (supposedly) worst fear: re-absorption into the all-devouring trap.

LITTLE SHOP - Green Like Me

There have been suggestions that Little Shop of Horrors is racist, and if the film were not such a blatant satire on every aspect of American life, then the criticism might stick (the white-bread world of Audrey’s suburban fantasy is hardly treated with reverence). The criticism arises from the fact that the only African-American characters are a few bums, the three chorus girls, and the villainous plant, with its pouty lips, bad attitude and unmistakably black (not African-American, but black, with all it implies) voice. A closer reading reveals that the film’s position vis-à-vis race is actually quite sly. Read all about it after the jump!

The twin keys are the film’s time period and musical choices. Little Shop of Horrors is set in the early 1960s, when the civil rights movement was being born. In this period, African-Americans were a prominent part of everyday American life, yet they were banished to the basement of popular consciousness. The only arena in which they exerted an undeniable influence was in popular music – in jazz, the blues, and of course, rock & roll. Indeed, the only place many white kids could come in contact with blacks was on the radio: Little Richard, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins broadcast lascivious innuendo over America’s lily-white airwaves, while girl-groups such as the Supremes offered a more slick, shimmering sensuality. Though many white broadcasters refused to play "race music," many more recognized that green is a more potent color than either black or white – which brings us back to Little Shop of Horrors.

Little Shop plays off this cultural trend by creating the three chorus girls, Crystal, Ronette and Chiffon. Just as their namesake girl-groups were plucked from poverty and groomed for success by labels such as Motown, the Little Shop girls magically change from ragamuffin street clothes to glittering gowns whenever a song begins. Once, they even perform this feat without the benefit of a camera edit! Though the girls have no participation in the actual narrative – only twice do they even speak to the other characters - barely a scene goes where they are not present, either vocally or visually. Always, they watch the action from the background, commenting directly to the audience with meaningful looks and pointed lyrics. Like a tune you keep hearing on the radio, the girls are ubiquitous: they appear on fire escapes, on rooftops, outside windows; they seem to move through walls and are often invisible to the main characters. Moreover, the cultural cliché of black "authenticity" is invoked by the fact that the girls are the only ones who truly know what is going on. Like the Greek Chorus on which they are modeled, Ronette, Crystal and Chiffon are allied with implacable Fate. As the proceedings grow more sinister, they transmute into sleek sirens singing of impending doom – but the hapless white characters are heedless of their warnings.

It is the jive-talking, blues-singing, honky-eating plant which inspires the most racial discomfort for some spectators, and indeed, the plant’s perceived "blackness" becomes problematic with the changed ending. Again, the parallel with the music business is apt. Like a record executive exploiting his discovery's "talents," Seymour sees Audrey II only as a vehicle to material success, never recognizing the plant’s own will until it is far too late. Levi Stubbs, in a 1987 People interview, offers this insight to his portrayal of the plant: "He [Oz] said the plant starts out sorta sweet and kind, then gets sly and devious and mean....In the music business you have quite a few people like that, so I put those people in my mind." He also puts any hints of racism to bed, saying, "If I thought the part was derogatory to anyone, they couldn't have paid me enough to take it. Sure, a lot of black people have big lips, but this is a plant, for crying out loud! That attitude is stupid."

Little Shop turns on its head the familiar trope of the "magical Negro" (see The Legend of Bagger Vance, The Family Man, Hitch, Reign Over Me, The Green Mile and others - wherein a wise, even mystical black man is the catalyst for a white man's return to a more authentic, centered and soulful mode of existence. The cultural roots of this backhanded compliment of a plot device are outside the scope of this essay, but suffice it to say that Audrey II performs exactly the opposite function for Seymour, under guise of "liberating" him. By encouraging Seymour's aggression, avarice and self-serving moral relativism, the plant traps him in a web of money, fame and self-deceit. "I’m yo' willin' slave," the plant wheedles. Seymour, of course, takes the vegetable’s servility for granted – only later does he realize that it is he who is the servant.

I prefer to read Little Shop of Horrors as a tale of the servants turning on the masters - not too far from what certain segments of the white population of the era might have perceived happening in real life. I don’t propose that the play or the film was intended as a racial parable, but the implications are there nonetheless. The anarchic finale could be seen as mirroring the Watts riots, a Freudian "return of the repressed" in its most literal and explosive terms. Of course, in the revisionist version of Little Shop of Horrors, that explosion never comes, blackness is repressed, and the lovers escape to the safety of a white suburb. But what’s that there in the shrubbery? You can’t keep a good monster down. Look out, white parents – here comes hip-hop!

LITTLE SHOP - The Root of All Evil

Money and possessions - or the lack thereof - play a crucial role in Little Shop of Horrors, and forms the basis of its central metaphor. Most of the characters are poor, downtrodden souls dreaming of a better life – one dangled in front of their faces by the movies and TV, but always tantalizingly out of reach. Though the film never kids itself - after all, who doesn't want money and a safe, secure life? - this desperation for "the good life" drives Seymour and Audrey to sacrifice their principles and self-respect, leaving them open to exploitation by the evil alien plant. After the jump, more about the cash-poor tragedy of life down on skid row and how changing the ending undercut this tale of upward mobility gone bad.

Like Romeo and Juliet, Seymour and Audrey are soulmates kept apart by circumstance. The aching divide between them is beautifully pictured at the start of the film. At the end of the "Downtown (Skid Row)" number, the pair sing the same lines, though separated in space. They both stop on a street corner, but on different sides of the same building - the corner of which neatly cuts the frame in two. Thus joined in song and spirit but divided by their material situation, they look to the sky and plead for a change in their dead-end lives. Wrapped up in their own miseries, they never even notice (too busy singing?) that the objects of their affections are, literally, right around the corner.



Drab reality keeps Audrey and Seymour from realizing that they are meant for one another. Seymour pines away for Audrey, and watches with jealous resentment as she leaves work early ("I got a date," she winces) and comes in late ("Not that we’ve had a customer," Mushnik sighs) to date the despicable dentist. When Mushnik criticizes her romantic choices, she replies, "He’s a rebel, Mr. Mushnik, but he makes good money. Besides, he’s the only fella I got." Seymour’s heart visibly breaks - we can see he’s just longing to shout out that no, she has him – but how can he compete with the flashy dentist, with his leather jacket and motorbike? Churchmouse-poor, what does he have to offer, other than his love? Little does he know that all he has to do is declare himself and Audrey would gladly ditch the greaser.

Seymour feels so inadequate that even when his plant brings success to the shop, he can’t conceive that a girl like Audrey could want him. Even though he sees the sweet girl beneath, he is so dazzled by her superficial glamour, he can't imagine she'd want a schlub like him. When she offers to help him pick out some new clothes, he gapes, "You’d be seen with me in a public place like a department store?" Bashfully, she agrees – but not tonight. She’s got a date.

In her heart Audrey knows that Seymour is the kind of guy she wants and needs, but her fear of the dentist and her innate insecurities stop her. "I don’t even deserve a sweet, considerate, suddenly successful guy like Seymour," she tells Ronette, Crystal and Chiffon. Then, in the privacy of her tiny flat, she opens up a Better Homes and Gardens magazine and imagines herself and Seymour living in suburban bliss between its pages. Sighing over the gleaming appliances and well-manicured lawns, she wistfully sings of life "Somewhere That’s Green." The song, and charming cartoon-like fantasy sequence that goes with it, is hilarious, skewering every dreadful cliché of tract-house living – Tupperware parties, TV dinners, and "plastic on the furniture to keep it neat and clean / In the Pine-Sol scented air somewhere that’s green."

The talent and wit of Ashman and Menken, Frank Oz, and especially Ellen Greene prevent this sequence from becoming a snide put-down of Audrey’s dreams. Though we chuckle at her fantasy home’s tacky décor we never feel superior to Audrey as a person. Despite her peroxide exterior, Ellen Greene's Audrey is a sweet, simple, fragile soul, and the performance is touchingly sincere for what could be a totally clichéd character. Faced with a grim life of cold-water flats, bums on the sidewalk, and a flashy, rich, but abusive boyfriend, who wouldn’t want to flee to the suburbs? In her fantasy, Seymour even sports an un-glamorous but reassuringly normal pot-belly.

The tragedy is that, like Seymour, Audrey defines happiness by what she’s seen on TV and read in magazines, and feels that someone from her poor circumstance and less than Ivory-pure background could never have something as simple as love. The fantasy is so much better than her reality, it drives her to date the awful dentist, who at least "makes good money" and practices in a gleaming deco office on 5th Avenue. A poor girl from the slums, Audrey feels lucky to have even this tenuous security, and takes the beatings as the trade-off. In "Suddenly Seymour" she hints at a life of desperation: "Nobody ever treated me kindly / Daddy left early, Mamma was poor / I’d meet a man and I’d follow him blindly / He’d snap his fingers, and me, I’d say ‘sure.’"

Into this void appears the Audrey II, with a slick line of patter and a talent for attracting a different kind of "green." Audrey II embodies the ever-hungry maw of capitalism, spreading its tendrils far and wide, and luring the unwary to their doom by appealing to every base instinct. Like a TV pitch man, it makes even the most repellent prospects seem attractive, and like a credit card company, it offers the world on a platter - but with interest paid in blood. Once Seymour realizes how much debt he's in, the very thing he worked so hard for - Audrey - is rudely repossessed.


Audrey II turns on the charm.

Audrey II's pernicious aura of greed and gluttony engulfs even those who know nothing of its true nature. Orin accidentally kills himself by overdosing on the laughing gas he sniffed for kicks. Mushnik meets his demise because he lets his mercantile instincts over-ride his moral sense: he saw Seymour chopping up the dentist’s body, and reasonably assumed that Seymour murdered him. Threatening to turn him in, he blackmails Seymour to learn the secret of the plant’s growth and hence, the fortune in publicity that comes with it. Too late, Mushnik learns Seymour's true secret and is swallowed whole.

With the situation rapidly spinning out of control, Seymour decides to elope with Audrey after one last TV appearance, after which they can take the money and run. The need to appease Audrey II for one more payday, rather than immediate flight, dooms the couple in the original version, but only provides a dramatic climax in the release prints. As seem by the American public in 1986, Audrey and Seymour escape skid row with Seymour's newly-inflated bank account, and never again troubled by the bloody sacrifices Seymour has made. Certainly a more palatable conclusion in the midst of the go-go 80's, but one seriously lacking in moral weight or dramatic unity.


Seymour contemplates signing his soul away for fame, fortune and love.

Instead, we are left to contemplate what might have been - how a man from "International Licensing and Marketing" sets the stage for the end of the world. The Audrey II is a potent symbol of greed, of hunger for anything and everything except true spiritual happiness. Like Romero's ravenous zombies, Audrey II is the ultimate "consumer," and inspires a compulsive avarice. In the deleted ending, thousands flock to buy their very own Audrey II, in a frenzied fad like hula-hoops or pet rocks. Mindless commercialism and corporate amorality (one can imagine the indigent population near Audrey II factories mysteriously dwindling) bring about the downfall of America – visualized by the climactic shot of a cackling plant smothering the Statue of Liberty in its vines. Innocent commodities have turned deadly; consumers have become the consumed, and America is engulfed in an apocalyptic bonfire of the vanities.