This is the first post about Marty Supreme you’re seeing on io9 or Gizmodo, and for good reason. It’s because we write about technology and sci-fi movies, and Marty Supreme is a period piece about a ping pong player. There’s no technology. No science fiction. Just the portrait of a man, played by Timothée Chalamet, chasing his dreams in some of the wildest ways imaginable. It’s an awesome movie, but not something that would normally get covered on this website. But, it turns out, it almost could have been. It almost ended with Marty being bitten by a vampire.
How does that make any sense at all? Well, in the film, at one of its most crucial moments, Marty is about to break a deal he made with a businessman named Milton Rockwell (played by Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary, aka “Mr. Wonderful”). Just as Rockwell realizes Marty is about to betray him, he whispers the following: “I was born in 1601. I’m a vampire. I’ve been around forever. I’ve met many Marty Mausers over the centuries. Some of them crossed me, some of them weren’t straight. They weren’t honest. And those are the ones that are still here. You go out and win that game, you’re gonna be here forever, too. And you’ll never be happy. You will never be happy.”
In the film as it stands now, it’s just a very chilling way for this guy to try to scare Marty into thinking he’s making the wrong decision. It’s not literal. But, in an early version of the script, it was.
Speaking on the A24 Podcast (thanks to the Playlist for the heads up), the film’s co-writer and director, Josh Safdie, revealed that Marty Supreme almost ended in a very different way. After Marty returns to the U.S., the film would’ve shown us what he did for the next several decades. All the incredible success he’d have in business. Then, he and his granddaughter would go to a Tears for Fears concert in the 1980s.
“He’s thinking about ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’ and youth and what does it mean, and he has this success, but he’s not doing the thing that he believed he was born on planet to do,” Safdie said. “And you’re on his eyes—we built the prosthetics for Timmy and everything—and Mr. Wonderful shows up behind him and takes a bite out of his neck. And that was the last scene of the movie. And he hasn’t aged. I remember A24, and everyone were like, ‘This is a mistake, right?’”
It wasn’t a mistake at the time, but, of course, it’s not in the movie, so someone realized maybe it was at some point. Nevertheless, on a list of all-time insane, alternate endings to movies, this has to be right up there.
You can hear Safdie talk about the scene beginning around 45 minutes into the podcast below.
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