Revealing 1987 article about the film's original cut
This is an extremely interesting article, published a few days before the film's release. There are quite a few references as to how the original cut was like, before it was cut to ribbons.
http://articles.latimes.com/1987-11-15/entertainment/ca-20643_1_meat-cleaver
No Rose Garden
November 15, 1987 | Sheldon Teitelbaum
Teen-age girls can handle the graphic depiction of incest in a book--but not in color on the big screen. That's what producer Chuck Fries and distributor New World found out in tests for their gothic thriller, "Flowers in the Attic," due out Friday with critical re-cutting.
The movie's based on the 1979 best-seller by the late V. C. Andrews that involves the erotic awakening of a brother and sister locked away in an attic by their insane mother. But its path to film has been rocky. Consider:
An early cut of the film was screened last December for Valley fans of the book--primarily adolescent females--and test cards indicated they were revolted. "I don't know whether this was conscious teen-age hypocrisy or what," writer-director Jeffrey Bloom told us. "Maybe young girls just don't want explicit sexual titillation. If a boy takes his shirt off, that's cool. But if it goes any further, they get uneasy."
An executive source at Fries added that the book presented the sex as a natural outgrowth of a relationship developed under duress over several years. The movie condensed that into a period of months. "And what may have seemed reasonable over the course of four years seemed dirty over the course of a summer."
The Valley girls also gagged on a scene in which Victoria Tennant, playing the mad mother, disrobed in front of her father, to be whipped by Louise Fletcher, her fanatical mother. "We dropped the skin," said the exec.
Bloom's original ending--one not even the Valley girls got to see--showed the children discovering they could merely walk unopposed out of their attic prison, into the sunshine. To symbolize growing up, Bloom said, with "the way to freedom clear."
But Fries thought it lacked drama and tried a new finale: Fletcher attacks her grandchildren with a meat cleaver. When that proved too horrific for Valleyettes, it was toned down. But a new version screened in January--Tennant falling from a window to her death entangled in a trellis--met with hoots of derision from an older audience in West L.A., according to Bloom and others close to the picture, who said that Tennant herself refused to do the scene (a double was used). So a March release was scratched.
Bloom, unhappy with the continued editing, was allowed out of his contract with Fries, although his name remains on the credits.
More previews in San Jose and Ohio with yet another ending (we'd never tell) were more successful, said a Fries source, and "Flowers" will bloom in 1,100 theaters Friday.
All the above confirm the following:
1. The original ending (though preceded by a different ending, but it's not made clear whether it was filmed or not) went like this: "Briefly, the surviving children interrupt the wedding ceremony and dramatically confront Corrine. All in attendance are horrified by what the children say about how their mother locked them up and poisoned them. The groom is shocked speechless. The grandmother is outraged. The grandfather is there, in his wheelchair, to hear it all. Corrine denies everything, but it doesn't matter; it's too late. The children's story is bolstered by the fact that they look half dead. They leave the wedding, but before leaving the house the grandmother tries to attack them [with a big knife]. They're saved by John Hall, the butler. The grandmother is subdued by him and the children leave". (Source: http://www.completevca.com/bio_exclusive_bloom.shtml)
2. There WERE some 'sexy scenes' which were eventually trimmed/removed. In the words of Kristy Swanson (January 2014): "[...] back in 1986, because there’s a lot of incest in the book, and in the script there was. We shot it and then when they tested it in the movie theaters, it didn’t test well and it made people very uncomfortable and so they pulled it out of the movie. It wasn’t in the movie. They pulled it out". (Source: http://www.craveonline.com/culture/631039-exclusive-interview-kristy-swanson-revisits-flowers-in-the-attic).
In addition, judging from the above comment by the "executive source at Fries", it seems that there was nudity as well, at least in the scene where Corrine undresses in front of the grandfather ("We dropped the skin"). share