Eyes of Laura Mars

EYES OF LAURA MARS

I’d been curious about this film for years due to John Carpenter’s involvement as the original writer of the screenplay, but I was uncertain how much of the final film reflected Carpenter’s original intent.  The official credits go to Carpenter for story & Carpenter and David Zelag Goodman for writing the screenplay, but other cooks were in the kitchen: interviewer Gilles Boulenger (in his book “John Carpenter The Prince of Darkness”) quotes Carpenter thusly: “[Columbia executives] brought eight other writers to rewrite my screenplay.  Then they handed it over to David Zelag Goodman, and I think he gave them what they wanted.  As for me, I couldn’t deliver it, I couldn’t change my style suddenly…”

The story in the final film (which was directed by Irvin Kershner of Empire Strikes Back fame) follows a controversial but successful female photographer (the titular Laura Mars) who abruptly begins to have brief spells during which she sees through the eyes of a killer who murders her associates one by one.  The first vision comes to Laura as a nightmare, but the next occurs while she’s fully awake.  She goes to the scene of the second murder and tells a cop that she saw the crime.  She later gives a full statement to the police about her seemingly psychic experience.  One cop named Neville takes a particular interest in Laura’s case.  Despite the piling up of dead bodies, Laura continues with her photo shoots, which involve having scantily-clad models doing violent things in unusual settings.  Laura’s ex-husband shows up (perhaps to have another suspect in the mix) with a connection to one of the victims.  Laura’s agent (Donald) has a birthday party, and Laura’s driver (another suspect, Tommy) drops her off for the celebration.  Laura receives a phone call from her ex-husband (Michael) saying he needs her help.  Laura opts to go to him, but to do so she must ditch her police protection lest she lead the fuzz straight to Michael, who is a person of interest in at least one of the murders.  Donald distracts Johnny Law long enough for Laura to get to her car, but while she’s driving, Laura has a vision of the killer’s point-of-view as he kills Donald in an elevator.  Laura (blinded by her vision) crashes the car but is uninjured.  Neville learns of fresh evidence in the case and confronts Tommy with it: a playing card from the deck Tommy is known to carry around and fidget with was found in the elevator under Donald’s corpse.  Tommy flees from the police, and one cop shoots him dead.  Neville (who has begun an out-of-the-blue romance with Laura) phones Laura to tell her that the killer is dead, and she should pack her bags so he can take her away on a vacation.  When he arrives at Laura’s pad, he reveals that in fact he is the killer.  Apparently he has a split personality, and one of his personas believes that Laura’s photographs immorally commercialize death.  Laura shoots Neville. 

The romance between Laura & Neville was written into the screenplay post-Carpenter, and the killer was originally a stranger.  This information comes from the Boulenger book in which Carpenter states: “I was trying to make a thriller, and I certainly didn’t want to tread into the kind of melodramatic body-stripping romantic stuff they were looking for.   It was a story problem.”  Boulenger then points out that “in Eyes’ original screenplay the Skid Row Slasher was not the heroine’s lover.”

The final film is a mixed bag that doesn’t work on all levels.  Laura Mars is a unique and memorable protagonist, but too often in the narrative she vanishes while the audience follows Neville.  The love story comes completely out of nowhere: Laura and Neville fall in love after barely knowing each other.  Also, I expected the people close to Laura to grow increasingly paranoid about their personal safety as the bodies of her associates pile up, but nobody seems too freaked out.  I’ve searched high and low for a copy of Carpenter’s original screenplay (titled simply Eyes) and would love to see what his original story involved.  I recommend the film with reservations.