Joseph Farrell:IN THE 1987 film Fatal Attraction, a psychopathic woman terrorises a married man with whom she has had a one-night stand, making more and more threatening gestures toward him and his family until her violent demise becomes inevitable.
The film originally had a rather arty conclusion, in which the woman, played by Glenn Close, commits ritual suicide as she listens to a recording of Madame Butterfly. Preview audiences rejected the ending as unsatisfying, however, and at the insistence of a marketing executive, Joseph Farrell, Paramount Pictures had the director, Adrian Lyne, reshoot it.
In the revision, Close's character and her paramour, played by Michael Douglas, have a violent struggle in which she is nearly drowned in a bath and is finally dispatched by a gunshot fired by his wife (Anne Archer). With the new ending, Fatal Attractionwas nominated for six Oscars and earned more than $300 million in box-office receipts worldwide.
"Joe is the one most responsible for Fatal Attractionbecoming the gigantic hit it became," Sidney M Ganis, who was Paramount's president for worldwide marketing at the time, said in an interview.
It was a prime example of the influence of Farrell, who was widely credited with expanding the use of opinion-tracking strategies for all the major studios in Hollywood.
Farrell (76), who has died in Los Angeles, had been an executive at the Louis Harris polling firm before he founded a company to do market research on Hollywood films in 1978. The National Research Group refined the process of pre-release film-testing.
Farrell was not initially welcomed by Hollywood’s old-boy network. “He was different; he was intellectual,” said Ganis, a recent president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
“He was a suit to the nth degree, highly educated, highly verbal and with this questionable programme that none of us at the beginning understood very well.”
Farrell was not flawless in his prognostication of success, but he said he was "accurate enough". He "was very rarely dead wrong," Ganis said, although he recalled the time the two of them stood in the back during a screening of Ghost, the 1990 romantic fantasy that became a huge hit. "Joe looked at me and shook his head."
Joseph Nicholas Farrell was born in New York. He graduated from St John’s University, the University of Notre Dame and earned a law degree from Harvard. He was an executive for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund before going to Louis Harris.
Farrell practised what he preached. An accomplished painter and sculptor, he was also a furniture designer who sold his original pieces under the name Giuseppe Farbino. “Who wants to buy furniture from an Irishman?” he said.
Joseph Farrell, born September 11th, 1935; died December 7th, 2011.