Full Metal Jacket - shooting script versus film

[Jan Klimkowski]

I've been trying to see the lost scenes.

Play them through in my mind's eye: Joker, Animal Mother, Rafter Man, the Vietnamese girl sniper.

There are three key moments whose inclusion would totally change the nature of Full Metal Jacket.

First, Joker in the helicopter, heading up country, watching aghast as the Arvin throw the POWs out of the open chopper door.

In the shooting script, Joker unloads his M-16 on full automatic into them in moral disgust.

Second, Joker shooting the wounded sniper dead. In the movie as released, Animal Mother praises him for shooting a girl: "Hardcore".

In the shooting script, there's no praise from Animal Mother. Instead Animal Mother cuts off her head, pushes it in the faces of the other Marines, and taunts them.

"We can't just leave her here," Joker says.
Animal Mother takes a giant step towards

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Joker, puts his face up close to his. "Hey,
asshole, Cowboy is wasted. You're fresh out of
friends. I say we leave the gook for the
mother-loving rats."
Rafter Man is buckling on his NVA belt. The
belt has a dull-silver buckle with a star engraved
in the center.
Joker says, "We can't leave her like this."
"I don't care," say Animal Mother. "Go on
and waste her."
Joker says, "No. Not me."
"Then we saddle up and move...now."
Joker looks at the sniper. She whimpers.

I try to decide what I would want if I were
down, half dead, hurting bad, surrounded by
my enemies. I look into her eyes, trying to
find the answer. She sees me. She
recognizes me - I am the one who will end
her life. We share a bloody intimacy.

As Joker lifts his grease gun the is praying
in French. He jerks the trigger. BANG!
The squad is silent.
Then Donlon grunts, flashes a big grin.
"Man, you are one hard dude."
Stutton and Liccardi are standing beside him.
Stutton says, "Joker, that's a well done.
You're hard."
Animal Mother spits. He takes a step,
kneels, zips out his machete. With one powerful
blow he chops off her head.
He picks the head up by its long black hair

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and holds it high. He laughs and says, "Rest in
pieces, bitch."
Animal Mother laughs again. He walks around
and sticks the bloody ball of gore into all their
faces. "Hard? Now who's hard? Now who's
hard, motherfuckers?"
Animal Mother pauses, spits, throws the head
into a ditch.
He picks up his M-60 machine gun, lays it
across his shoulders, struts over to Joker.
"Nobody shits on the Animal, motherfucker.
Nobody."
Joker stares at him.

Third, where the movie as released ends with the Manufactured Killers of the Marine Korps, MK MK, singing the Mickey Mouse Club anthem:

Who's the leader of the club that's made for you and me?
M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E.

Hey there. Hi there. Ho there. You're as welcome as can be.
M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E.

The shooting script ends with Joker the Marine / John Wayne / Joker the 8-year-old boy dying, riddled by automatic fire, forever suspended in the Capa death pose.

So, the movie as released greatly reduces Joker. There are glimpses of his moral courage, but they are diminshed.

The boy of the shooting script tries very hard, but is destined to die.

The man of the film as released is destined to join the Mickey Mouse club.

Especially for David Guyatt, here is co-script writer Michael Herr talking about working with Kubrick on Full Metal Jacket:

During the next few years, we talked on the telephone. I think of it now as one phone call lasting three years, with interruptions. The substance was single-minded: the old and always serious problem of how you put into a film or a book the living, behaving presence of what Jung called the Shadow, "the most accessible of archetypes, and the easiest to experience." It was everywhere in Conrad's work, it starred in all of Bunuel's films, and it served as my personal co-pilot in Vietnam, where I learned to know and respect it. It came up out of me a thousand times to whisper the words spoken later by D.I. Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket: "I got your name. I got your number ... Because I am hard, you will not like me ... I am hard, but I am fair." Damned if you do, warped if you don't, that's what the Shadow thinks is fair. Only the courage to look it in the face can subdue it for even a minute, according to Jung, in so many words; War is the ultimate field of Shadow-activity, where all of its other activities lead you. As they expressed it in Vietnam, "Yea, Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no Evil, for I am the Evil." And the Fear, they could have added.

This is what we talked about in the eternal, recurring telephone call. Never boring, it was sometimes difficult. Talking to someone who is so blatantly hard at work can only mean that you are working, too. Writers stare at their tables all the time, and live such wonderful inner lives that they can forget to speak for days. In other words, most writers are manic-depressives, while movie directors are like generals, outward bound, out there and putting it out there, full of pep, talking story, brainstorming, performing schedules, highly conceptual, totally practical. This is compounded with Stanley by what I would have to call his intellectual fearlessness. His elevator goes all the way up to the roof. He's a regular mental warrior, and his means are telephonic. He has tremendous information, and he loves to process it. I valued his information so much that I didn't even charge him to talk to me. Nor did it matter that, after seven years' work on a Vietnam book followed by at least a year on a Vietnam movie, I wanted to become the last person in the world anybody would think of when they needed a Vietnam screenplay. So what money couldn't make me do, I did for information.

At the very moment in 1979 that I was making my No More Vietnams oath, I was sent a novel in bound galleys called The Short-Timers, by Gustav Hasford. I meant to read only a few pages, but I could see immediately, in one paragraph, that this was impossible. When I finished the opening section, I felt as though I'd read a whole novel, and it was twenty-eight pages long. I knew I was reading an amazing writer. He was telling a truth about the war that was so secret, so hidden, that I could barely stand it. I certainly didn't want to be associated with it in my neo-postwar period. It was a masterpiece that absolutely anybody could pick up and read in a couple of hours and never forget; and it went out into the world seeking shelf life without the albatross of my blurb around its graceful neck. I didn't answer the publishers, I didn't write to the author. I folded. I felt vaguely ashamed, but I got over it. I repressed it. Later, when Stanley was looking for war books, I may have mentioned it, but I'm not certain that I did. When he came across it, he knew immediately that he wanted to film it. I'd recoiled so far from it that I couldn't remember anything about it. It came straight back when I re-read that first great page.