So it turns out that Danny Rubin, the writer of one of my all-time favorite movies, Groundhog Day, has a blog. Perhaps he’s a little obsessed with the ‘hog, but all is forgiven, because in this post he answers the question that has plagued me for fifteen years:
How freakin’ long was Phil Connors stuck in Feb. 2, anyway?!!
The answer is quite satisfying. I won’t give it totally away, but I will tell you the backstory. There were rumors (which Rubin chose not to stop because they were so cool) that it was 10,000 years, but his original conception was merely “more than one lifetime.” The studio folks, predictably, thought audiences couldn’t grip that conception, so they wanted to make it no more than two weeks (!?wft?). In the end, the time frame Rubin settled on makes a comforting amount of sense.
An unexpectedly nifty thing in the blog post is a description of the device Rubin originally wrote to demonstrate the passage of time. I think it was quite clever. He couldn’t have the classic hash-marks-on-the-prison-wall thing, so he had a bookshelf in the b&b, filled with books. Every day, Phil Connors gets up and reads a single page of one book. The next day, he reads the next page, etc. This way, you get to see him moving through the entire bookcase. Kewl, no? And in the middle of the movie, you see his utter dejection as he reads the last page of the last book and starts over again.
Of course the studio axed that, too. &@$!@ #*$.
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