The Scream Trilogy

Now for something completely different...talking about the Scream trilogy (all directed by Wes Craven).

Why, you ask, would I be talking about the Scream trilogy? I don't know. Scream came on one of the movie channels the other day and I had to go rent the other two just to get closure, and several things started swirling around in my head. My head works in a very six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon sort of way when it deals with films--I like finding connections and ironies and the like. Which is funny, because someone refers to the six-degrees thing in Scream 2 (which has the ultimate irony in which Neve Campbell later starred in 1998's Wild Things, starring Bacon, giving her the vaunted "Bacon number" of "1.").

The first Scream was a very good film, and my enjoyment was all the more by witnessing the film start humbly at the box office (and my theatre, the good ol' Williamson Square 8 in Franklin) way back in December of 1996, and then blossoming to a surefire hit, packing the house every weekend and especially the "late" 9:45 show. It was one of those movies I had great delight in walking into the packed auditorium and seeing people's reactions--this was actually quite groundbreaking at the time. In 1996, opening one week earlier, was Jerry Maguire, a fantastic film starring, besides the obvious, Jerry O'Connell as Frank Cushman, the big-fish quarterback Jerry (Tom Cruise) tries to land as a client. So, Maguire and Scream were competing films in 1996, and O'Connell was in a film competing against a franchise in which he would later be a part (in Scream 2).

The following year, in Scream 2 (not that good a film), without any knowledge that they would be competing against the largest box-office draw of all time, Titanic, directed by James Cameron, several film students get in a spirited banter about sequels. Some say there are indeed better sequels than originals. Timothy Olyphant, playing Mickey, says Aliens (also directed by Cameron) is better than Alien (directed by Ridley Scott), then later says Terminator 2 is better than Terminator (both directed by Cameron), to which Sarah Michelle Gellar's Casey Cooper says, "You've always had a hard-on for Cameron." Of course, there was no way to know that Scream 2, slated for December 12, would be competing the next week with Titanic, because that was originally supposed to be a July release before Cameron started doing more to "perfect" the film. We must also not forget that David Warner stars in both films, in Scream 2 as drama teacher Gus Gold and in Titanic as stuffy assistant-to-Billy-Zane, Spicer Lovejoy.

Also, you may never see so many TV stars from hit shows in one movie at once: Neve Campbell ("Party of Five"), Sarah Michelle Gellar ("Buffy"), Joshua Jackson (Scream scribe Kevin Williamson's "Dawson's Creek"), Courteney Cox ("Friends"), and Laurie Metcalf ("Roseanne").

So, here's another fun thing to think about, at least for me, and hopefully I haven't bored anyone to tears with this whole thing, is that Timothy Olyphant's December appearance in Scream 2 will not be the last time you hear the word "Olyphant" in a December movie, as The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers comes out on December 18, 2002 brandishing the fantasy creatures called "olyphants," who also play a part in the final chapter, The Return of the King, released December 17 of the following year. The fact that the word olyphant appears in two vastly different trilogies should be of some note, however trivial.

Scream 3 (also not that good a film) was released February 4, 2000, breaking the tradition of its December slot. This movie has Lance Henriksen in it, who was in the aforementioned Aliens and The Terminator (and also Cameron's Piranha 2: The Spawning), which isn't that much of an irony, but it should be noted. Because she was obviously cast since she was in a famous trilogy, Carrie Fisher's appearance in Scream 3 does not deserve much mention--I am looking for things that were probably not on purpose. In fact, there are millions of references that were on purpose--like Courteney Cox mentioning that her nude photos were her face but Jennifer Aniston's body in Scream 2, that I have purposely neglected here. In fact, Scream 3 doesn't have many things that are off-the-wall trivial--but it does have one (or a few, depending on your point-of-view).

In Scream 2, Randy (Jamie Kennedy) gets asked, as in every Scream movie, "What's your favorite scary movie?" and he says, "Showgirls...absolutely frightening." This is a nice joke perpetrated by the filmmakers to add humor to an otherwise tense scene. But without any irony whatsoever the same question is asked by Sidney (Neve Campbell) to Detective Mark Kincaid (Patrick Dempsey) in Scream 3, and his response is, "my life," which is an extremely dimwitted answer. I can't believe he says this with a straight face, and Sidney says to herself, after he leaves, "Mine too." The point of all this is there is a movie called My Life starring Michael Keaton and Nicole Kidman that came out in 1993. It's not a scary movie by any means, but it does have Keaton suffer a disease that's supposed to kill him, thus is the crux of the movie. So, I got sort of a chuckle imagining that's what movie they meant, although if he had said it as a joke reference to that obscure film it wouldn't have been funny.

I can also gather a very reaching, but fun (maybe, I really don't know), connection with this in that Queen Latifah was in My Life and was also in Scary Movie 3, the third spoof of the Scream trilogy, which was also spoofing The Matrix trilogy in the scene in which she appeared. Honorable mention goes to the possibly-on-purpose casting of Jenny McCarthy in Scary Movie 3 (directed by David Zucker, who also cast her in BASEketball), when she in fact appeared in Scream 3.

So, how in the world, do you ask yourself right now, do I connect Scott Foley, who was in Scream 3, to Michael Vartan, the loveable Michael Vaughn from J.J. Abrams' "Alias," aside from the fact that Foley starred in J.J. Abrams' "Felicity," and that both met Jennifer Garner on the sets of those respective shows, and that Foley was married to Garner at the time Vartan stole her from him? Well, you gotta' go back to April 1999, ten months before Scream 3 hit theatres. Vartan played love interest Sam Coulson in Never Been Kissed, a film starring Drew Barrymore (Scream) and David Arquette (the entire Scream trilogy), in which Barrymore and Arquette play brother and sister.

Oppositely, Rose McGowan played Arquette's sister in Scream but played his love interest in 2000's woeful Ready to Rumble, which was an eerie pairing after seeing them play siblings.

Anyway, there's the fun I had with The Scream Trilogy, which is just a small example of the worthless stuff that I think about during movies at times. Hope you enjoyed it.