How the Visual Effects of ‘Death Becomes Her’ Changed Movies

A tagline for the 1992 release of “Death Becomes Her” billed the film as “Your basic black comedy.” In truth, it was anything but: A screwball mélange of satire, slapstick and gonzo body horror, the movie would have been notable enough for starring two Oscar-winning actresses, Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn, as lifelong frenemies who find immortality — and all the curses that come with it — via a magic elixir. (And for the fact that Bruce Willis, a die-hard paragon of broody masculinity, played the hapless, bumbling cuckold caught between them.)

Reviews were mixed; The New York Times called it “wildly uneven.” But a series of groundbreaking visual effects — particularly unexpected in a mid-budget comedy — both shocked and awed audiences, and earned the film its sole Academy Award, along with an enduring cult following and now, a Broadway musical adaptation.

“We actually didn’t think we had a chance,” Doug Chiang, the film’s visual effects art director, said on a video call, of the Oscar win he shared with three collaborators. “Because we were going up against two stellar projects, ‘Batman Returns’ and ‘Alien 3,’ and ours by comparison was rather small in scale.”

“Small-scale” was hardly a byword for the director Robert Zemeckis, who at the time was fresh off a blockbuster run of three “Back to the Future” films and the pioneering live action-animation hybrid “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” So David Koepp, then a little-known 28-year-old screenwriter, didn’t expect the spec script that he and his fellow writer, Martin Donovan, had submitted under contract at Universal Pictures to land in Zemeckis’s hands.

“We envisioned it as, if we were lucky, a $5 million independent movie, so we wanted some grotesquerie,” Koepp said by phone. “But our inspirations were like, ‘The Evil Dead’ and ‘The Vikings.’” “The Vikings,” a gleefully hammy 1958 swashbuckler starring Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas, featured a fight sequence between its two leads that Koepp said inspired one of the most indelible setups in “Death Becomes Her.” In it, Streep’s character, a fading but indomitable Hollywood actress named Madeline Ashton, is reunited with her old friend, Hawn’s wallflower novelist Helen Sharp.