Yahoo Movies Beetlejuice Beetlejuice writers on the sequel's big musical number
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice writers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar have explained how the Tim Burton sequel's big musical sequence came about.
After the 'Day-O' sequence became the first film's breakout moment. it was a given that the second one would have a big song-and-dance number, too.
And the filmmakers went big, with all seven minutes and 20 seconds of Richard Harris' 'MacArthur Park', a song that includes the legendary lyric: "Someone left the cake out in the rain, I don't think that I can take it, 'Cause it took so long to bake it, And I'll never have that recipe again".
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Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, the writing duo walked through the journey of bringing the song into the film.
"How do you top 'Day-O'? We'd gotten to the end of the movie, and we had the wedding and all these things happening, but we wanted something more," Gough said.
"And Tim had been searching as well. He's got a jukebox in his kitchen, and he called and says: 'I've been listening to 'MacArthur Park', and it's stuck in my head. I think it's the song we should use.'
"The Richard Harris version is seven-and-a-half minutes, and he wanted to use all of it. So, then we kind of built out that third act using that song and the weird moves inside that song to build the structure of that sequence."
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Millar added that the song is "nuts" and that was "exactly why it's perfect".
"We listened to it again, and it's just so out there and bizarre that it's the perfect song for a Beetlejuice movie," Millar said. "There are all these turns to it. There's this weird bridge, with an orchestral number, that works great when Willem Dafoe comes out of the crypt with the Ghoul squad.
"The song has all these different elements Tim could use, but it was long. We attempted to cut it back, and Tim was like, 'No, I want all of it.' And he was right."
The film has done well critically, with a decent Rotten Tomatoes score, but commercially, it has exceeded expectations, far surpassing the original's box-office takings in days.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is out in cinemas now.
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