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\n This article is about the 1990 film. For its title character, see Edward.\n\t\n\n\n
\nEdward Scissorhands is a 1990 American fantasy romance film directed by Tim Burton. It was produced by Burton and Denise Di Novi, and written by Caroline Thompson from a story by her and Burton. Johnny Depp plays an artificial humanoid named Edward, an unfinished creation who has scissor blades instead of hands. The young man is taken in by a suburban family and falls in love with their teenage daughter Kim (Winona Ryder). Additional roles were played by Dianne Wiest, Anthony Michael Hall, Kathy Baker, Alan Arkin and Vincent Price.\n
Plot[]
\nAn elderly woman tells her granddaughter the story of a young man named Edward who has scissor blades for hands. As the creation of an old inventor, Edward is a humanoid who is almost completed. The Inventor homeschools Edward, but suffers a heart attack and dies before giving real hands to Edward, leaving him permanently \"unfinished\".\n
Many years later, Peg Boggs, a local door-to-door Avon saleswoman, tries to sell at the decrepit Gothic mansion where Edward lives. She finds Edward alone and offers to take him to her home after discovering he is virtually harmless. Peg introduces Edward to her family: her husband Bill, their young son Kevin and their teenage daughter Kim. Edward falls in love with Kim, despite her initial fear of him.\n
As their neighbors are curious about their new houseguest, the Boggs throw a neighborhood barbecue welcoming Edward. Most of the neighbours are fascinated by Edward and befriend him, except for the eccentric religious fanatic Esmeralda, and Kim's boyfriend Jim. Edward repays the neighborhood for their kindness by trimming their hedges into topiaries. This leads him to discover he can groom dogs' hair and later he styles the hair of the neighborhood women. One of the neighbors, Joyce, offers to help Edward open a hair salon. While scouting a location, Joyce attempts to seduce him, but scares him away. Joyce lies to the women that he attempted to seduce her, reducing their trust in him. The bank denies Edward a loan as he does not have a background or financial history.\n
Jealous of Kim's attraction to Edward, Jim suggests Edward pick the lock on his parents' home to obtain a van for Jim and Kim. Edward agrees, but when he picks the lock, a burglar alarm is triggered. Jim flees and Edward is arrested. The police determine that his period of isolation has left Edward without any sense of reality or common sense. Edward takes responsibility for the robbery, telling Kim he did it because she asked him to. Consequently, Edward is alienated by those in the neighbourhood except for the Boggs family.\n
During Christmas, Edward carves an angelic ice sculpture modeled after Kim; the ice shavings are thrown into the air and fall like snow, a rarity for the neighbourhood. Kim dances in the snowfall. Jim arrives and calls out to Edward, surprising him and causing him to accidentally cut Kim's hand. Jim accuses Edward of intentionally harming Kim, but Kim, annoyed by Jim's jealousy of Edward, breaks up with him. Edward flees in a rage, destroying his works and scaring Esmeralda until he is calmed by a stray dog. Kim's parents set out to find Edward while Kim stays behind in case he returns. Edward returns to the Boggs home to find Kim there, who asks him to hold her, but Edward fears he will hurt her. Jim drives around in a drunken rage and nearly runs over Kevin, but Edward pushes Kevin to safety, inadvertently cutting him. Those witnessing the event think that Edward is attacking Kevin and Jim assaults Edward. Edward defends himself, cutting Jim's arm before he flees to the mansion.\n
Kim races after Edward, while Jim obtains a handgun and follows Kim. In the mansion, Jim ambushes Edward and fights with him; Edward refuses to fight back until he sees Jim slap Kim as she attempts to intervene. Enraged, Edward stabs Jim in the stomach and pushes him from a window of the mansion, falling to his death. Kim confesses her love to Edward and kisses him before departing. As the neighbors gather, Kim convinces them that Jim and Edward killed each other.\n
The elderly woman finishes telling her granddaughter the story, revealing she is Kim herself and saying that she never saw Edward again. She prefers not to visit him because decades have passed and she wants him to remember her as she was in her youth. She believes Edward is still alive, immortal because he is artificial, and because of the \"snow\", which Edward creates when carving ice sculptures.\n
\nCast[]
\n- Johnny Depp as Edward Scissorhands \n
- Winona Ryder as Kim \n
- Dianne Wiest as Peg \n
- Anthony Michael Hall as Jim \n
- Kathy Baker as Joyce \n
- Robert Oliveri as Kevin \n
- Conchata Ferrell as Helen \n
- Caroline Aaron as Marge \n
- Dick Anthony Williams as Officer Allen \n
- O-Lan Jones as Esmeralda \n
- Vincent Price as The Inventor \n
- Alan Arkin as Bill \n
- Susan Blommaert as Tinka \n
- Linda Perri as Cissy \n
- John Davidson as TV Host \n
- Biff Yeager as George \n
- Marti Greenberg as Suzanne \n
- Bryan Larkin as Max \n
- John McMahon as Denny \n
- Victoria Price as TV Newswoman \n
- Stuart Lancaster as Retired Man \n
- Gina Gallagher as Granddaughter \n
- Aaron Lustig as Psychologist \n
- Alan Fudge as Loan Officer \n
- Steven Brill as Dishwasher Man \n
- Peter Palmer as Editor \n
- Marc Macaulay as Reporter \n
- Carmen J. Alexander as Reporter \n
- Brett Rice as Reporter \n
- Andrew B. Clark as Beefy Man \n
- Kelli Crofton as Pink Girl \n
- Linda Jean Hess as Older Woman/TV \n
- Rosalyn Thomson as Young Woman/TV \n
- Lee Ralls as Red-Haired Woman/TV \n
- Eileen Meurer as Teenage Girl/TV \n
- Bea Albano as Rich Widow/TV \n
- Donna Pieroni as Blonde/TV \n
- Ken DeVaul as Policeman \n
- Michael Gaughan as Policeman \n
- Tricia Lloyd as Teenage Girl \n
- Kathy Dombo as Other Teen \n
- Rex Fox as Police Sergeant \n
- Sherry Ferguson as Max's Mother \n
- Tabetha Thomas as Little Girl on Bike \n
- Tammy Boalo as Neighborhood Extra \n
- Jackie Carson as Neighborhood Extra \n
- Carol Crumrine as Neighborhood Extra \n
- Suzanne Chrosniak as Neighborhood Extra \n
- Ellin Dennis as Neighborhood Extra \n
- Kathy Lockwood as Neighborhood Extra \n
- Jalaine Gallion as Neighborhood Extra \n
- Miriam Goodspeed as Neighborhood Extra \n
- Dianne L. Green as Neighborhood Extra \n
- Mary Jane Heath as Neighborhood Extra \n
- Carol D. Klasek as Neighborhood Extra \n
- Laura Nader as Neighborhood Extra \n
- Doyle Anderson as Neighborhood Extra \n
- Harvey Bellman as Neighborhood Extra \n
- Michael Brown as Neighborhood Extra \n
- Gary Clark as Neighborhood Extra \n
- Roland Douville as Neighborhood Extra \n
- Russell E. Green as Neighborhood Extra \n
- Cecil Hawkins as Neighborhood Extra \n
- Jack W. Kapfhamer as Neighborhood Extra \n
- Bill Klein as Neighborhood Extra \n
- Phil Olson as Neighborhood Extra \n
- Joe Sheldon as Neighborhood Extra \n
- James Spicer as Neighborhood Extra
Uncredited[]
\n- Nick Carter as Neighborhood Extra \n
- Tim Rerucha as Van Friend \n
- L.A. Rothman as Girl in Diner
Production[]
\nDevelopment[]
\nThe genesis of Edward Scissorhands came from a drawing by then-teenaged director Tim Burton, which reflected his feelings of isolation and being unable to communicate to people around him in suburban Burbank. The drawing depicted a thin, solemn man with long, sharp blades for fingers. Burton stated that he was often alone and had trouble retaining friendships. \"I get the feeling people just got this urge to want to leave me alone for some reason, I don't know exactly why.\" During the pre-production of Beetlejuice, Burton hired Caroline Thompson, then a young novelist, to write the Edward Scissorhands screenplay as a spec script. Burton was impressed with her short novel, First Born, which was \"about an abortion that came back to life\". Burton felt First Born had the same psychological elements he wanted to showcase in Edward Scissorhands. \"Every detail was so important to Tim because it was so personal\", Thompson remarked. She wrote Scissorhands as a \"love poem\" to Burton, calling him \"the most articulate person I know, but couldn't put a single sentence together\".\n
Shortly after Thompson's hiring, Burton began to develop Edward Scissorhands at Warner Bros., with whom he worked on Pee-wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice. However, within a couple of months, Warner sold the film rights to 20th Century Fox. Fox agreed to finance Thompson's screenplay while giving Burton complete creative control. At the time, the budget was projected to be around $8\u20139 million. When writing the storyline, Burton and Thompson were influenced by Universal Horror films, such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Frankenstein (1931), and Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), as well as King Kong (1933) and various fairy tales. Burton originally wanted to make Scissorhands as a musical, feeling \"it seemed big and operatic to me\", but later dropped the idea. Following the enormous success of Batman, Burton arrived at the status of being an A-list director. He had the opportunity to do any film he wanted, but rather than fast track Warner Bros.' choices for Batman Returns or Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian, Burton opted to make Edward Scissorhands for Fox.\n
\nFilming[]
\nBurbank, California was considered as a possible location for the suburban neighborhoods, but Burton believed the city had become too altered since his childhood so the Tampa Bay Area of Florida, including the town of Lutz, inside of the subdivision named Carpenter's Run, and the Southgate Shopping Center of Lakeland was chosen for a three-month shooting schedule. The production crew found, in the words of the production designer Bo Welch, \"a kind of generic, plain-wrap suburb, which we made even more characterless by painting all the houses in faded pastels, and reducing the window sizes to make it look a little more paranoid.\" The key element to unify the look of the neighborhood was Welch's decision to repaint each of the houses in one of four colors, which he described as \"sea-foam green, dirty flesh, butter, and dirty blue\". The facade of the Gothic mansion was built just outside Dade City. Filming Edward Scissorhands created hundreds of (temporary) jobs and injected over $4 million into the Tampa Bay economy. Production then moved to a Fox Studios sound stage in Century City, California, where interiors of the mansion were filmed.\n
To create Edward's scissor hands, Burton employed Stan Winston, who would later design the Penguin's prosthetic makeup in Batman Returns. Depp's wardrobe and prosthetic makeup took one hour and 45 minutes to apply. The giant topiaries that Edward creates in the film were made by wrapping metal skeletons in chicken wire, then weaving in thousands of small plastic plant sprigs. Rick Heinrichs worked as one of the art directors.\n
\nMusic[]
\n- Main article: Edward Scissorhands (soundtrack)
Edward Scissorhands is the fourth feature film collaboration between director Tim Burton and composer Danny Elfman. The orchestra consisted of 79 musicians.[1] Elfman cites Scissorhands as epitomizing his most personal and favorite work.\n
\nReception[]
\nEdward Scissorhands was released to positive reception from critics and was a financial success, grossing over four times its $20 million budget.\n
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Videos[]
\n![\"Edward](\"https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/timburton/images/3/33/Edward_Scissorhands_%281990%29_Trailer_-1_-_Movieclips_Classic_Trailers/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/185?cb=20230608005751\" "\\"Edward")
![\"From](\"https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/timburton/images/e/eb/From_1990_Building_the_%22Edward_Scissorhands%22_castle/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/185?cb=20190521003856\" "\\"From")
Trivia[]
\n- Of all the films Tim Burton made, this one is by far his favorite. \n
- This movie was flimed from 26th March to 19th July 1990 \n
- After the Disney/Fox merger, this, along with other Tim Burton films distributed by 20th Century Fox, is now owned by The Walt Disney Company, the studio that made The Nightmare Before Christmas. Ironically Johnny Depp plays Captain Jack Sparrow in Disney's franchise Pirates of the Caribbean (2003-today) and worked with them in several films, including Burton's Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass. \n
- This was Vincent Price\u2019s last film before he died three years later from Parkinson\u2019s disease. \n
- The Super bowl aired commercial parody of the film which brought back Winona Rider as Kim and she is the mother of Edward's son, Edgar
External links[]
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| Features | \n\n Pee-wee's Big Adventure ·' Beetlejuice · Batman · Edward Scissorhands · Batman Returns · The Nightmare Before Christmas (film) · Ed Wood · Mars Attacks! · Sleepy Hollow · Planet of the Apes · Big Fish · Charlie and the Chocolate Factory · Corpse Bride · Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street · Alice in Wonderland · Dark Shadows · · Frankenweenie · Big Eyes · Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children · Dumbo · \n \n | ||
| Other | \n\n The Island of Doctor Agor · Doctor of Doom · Stalk of the Celery Monster · Luau · Vincent · Hansel and Gretel · Frankenweenie · Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp · James and the Giant Peach ·Batman Forever · Batman & Robin · The Jar · Conversations with Vincent · The World of Stainboy · Kung Fu · Mannequin · Bones · Here With Me · 9 · Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter · Alice Through the Looking Glass\n \n |
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References[]
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- \u2191 Rohter, Larry. \"Batman? Bartman? Darkman? Elfman\", The New York Times, 1990-12-09. \n \n
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