My Life as a Former Test Screening Regular

From being kicked out of a Jim Carrey movie to having a Marvel movie theatrical experience few others share, I look back on my days seeing unfinished movies.

In my recent interview with Bill & Ted co-creator Ed Solomon, I mentioned how the first time I saw Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure was not when it opened in February of 1989 but actually many months earlier, during the summer of 1988. This was because Bill & Ted was the first time I ever attended a test screening, although it would be far from the last. 

While studios also sometimes conduct tests outside of Los Angeles, growing up in LA, they were a constant presence. And as a movie-obsessed kid, once I found out about them, I was determined to go to as many as possible, ultimately doing pretty well in that regard for the next 15 years or so. From Shocker to Gremlins 2: The New Batch to Wayne’s World to American Pie to Old School, there are a ton of movies I saw months before they opened in an early, incomplete form. And I was hardly alone in this, as not only did I have friends who similarly went to many test screenings — as did many other big movie fans — but it became a somewhat well known habit in the late 90s, as Ain’t it Cool News began running “spy” reviews from tests, much to the studios’ understandable chagrin. 

Read on for some of the stories that stand out from my time as a test screening regular, from seeing rather different versions of a movie than what eventually opened to being kicked out of a Jim Carrey test audience to seeing a Marvel movie in the theater that few others can claim to have done the same with. 

CH-CH-CH-CHANGES

The purpose of a test screening is generally to determine how well your film is working as you edit it into its final form. Are there moments that drag? Is there confusion about a plot point? Does the ending feel satisfying? By and large, when I think back on my time going to test screenings, most of the movies I saw felt basically the same when they eventually opened, even though there were relatively small yet crucial tweaks made in the editing to tighten up the pacing or improve clarity.  

Sometimes though, much more dramatic changes occur. When I saw Boogie Nights at a test screening, it was a notably longer version than what eventually opened - and yes, Boogie Nights is a fairly long movie in its final (and terrific) form. The excised scenes were later included as separate bonus features on the film’s DVD and Blu-ray, and include a dark reveal for what happened to Becky (Nicole Ari Parker) after she got married and left the porn industry and the very ill-fated attempt by Dirk (Mark Wahlberg) to go help her in the midst of his drug addiction, all set to Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk.”

Boogie Nights and Corvette Days

For Becky, removing this sequence means her time in the film simply ends with her going off to a happy ending rather than seeing her husband get abusive towards her. For Dirk, it removes the specific explanation for how he trashes his car, which is somewhat notable since Dirk needing money to fix the car does still remain in the movie. However, the film truly didn’t need these sequences to work. Becky’s husband turning out to be physically abusive isn’t something established earlier, while we still see so many examples of how much Dirk’s life is falling apart that him wrecking his car makes total sense even without actually having it occur on screen.

There are some rather famous stories of endings of movies that changed thanks to test screenings, such as Fatal Attraction or Pretty in Pink, as the audiences rejected the original finale and a very different one was filmed to replace it. Though I can’t say I saw a different ending to a movie nearly as iconic as those, I did see the original ending to the somewhat forgotten Hard Rain, then still known as The Flood when I saw it. 

In Hard Rain, Christian Slater plays an armored truck driver who runs afoul of a group of thieves, led by Morgan Freeman, attempting a heist in the midst of a huge flood. The plot always involved Freeman not ending up as the actual final villain of the film, as Randy Quaid’s corrupt sheriff attempts to take the loot for himself. However, in the version I first saw, Freeman’s character is shot and killed by Quaid. I remember thinking this worked well, but apparently I was in the minority, as the ending was reshot and Freeman survived his injuries and made off with some of the loot.

“Sorry, kid, only one of us making it out of here alive! Oh, wait… Turns out the test cards have made it so we’re both gonna make it out of here alive!”

As Freeman put it, speaking about this change to the Guardian a few years ago, “I played a bad guy in a movie and they showed it to an audience - and we're letting an audience tell us what to do now - y'know, and the audience said, 'Well, I don't want him - Morgan can't die!' And I was a thief. 'He should get some money.’”

One notable test screening I attended was for a movie that had already gone through extensive changes. After its first round of test screenings, the underrated The Exorcist III was incredibly overhauled on its way to theaters, adding the original film’s Jason Miller to the cast and reshooting all of Brad Dourif’s material to now be integrated with Miller’s performance (if you’ve seen the film, you know how this specifically works), among other changes. However, I saw the film at a test screening that was pretty much the final version of the film, with Miller now in it, as the studio attempted to see if all the changes they’d made now helped the film play better than it had the first time around. 

I should also note that one key difference at test screenings is that little of the music is final. The score is almost always temp track pulled from other film’s scores, which is usually odd yet fun to spot - “Hey, they’re using Edward Scissorhands’ score in this scene!” Also, many of the songs playing are likely not going to be the final ones either. It was sometimes funny to hear some of these temp choices and pretty much know they wouldn’t make it into the final film. When I saw a test screening of Encino Man, Paulie Shore and Sean Astin showed up to school as “Smells Like Teen Spirit” played and I correctly deduced that whether it be because of the cost involved or Nirvana simply not agreeing to it, that song would not be heard in the final version. 

“You know what’ll make this movie even better? Adding a “New” No Doubt song to it. Get it? Because the song will be called “New…”

On the flip side, I attended a test screening for Doug Liman’s Go in 1998 and instantly thought the movie was great, only to then be even happier when it opened in April 1999 and there was now a song from a band I loved, “New” by No Doubt, playing over closing credits that didn’t exist when I first saw the film.