Meet Joe Black

Martin Brest’s 1998 picture puts Death, wearing a young man’s body, on the doorstep of media magnate Bill Parrish. The script descends from Death Takes a Holiday (1934) and behind that from Alberto Casella’s stage play. That film ran 79 minutes; Brest stretches the premise past twice the length. In 1934 it is the daughter who leaves with Death. Here the father walks away. The scene that still circulates is over inside the first ten minutes. ILM handled the collision in which a van launches Pitt’s young man into the path of a taxi. Effects supervisor Michael Owens has described a weighted dummy built to Pitt’s dimensions, its mass wrong on delivery, and the switch from actor to dummy hidden inside the motion blur. Around fifty composite passes went by before the timing worked. The commercial record is odd too: ninety million dollars spent, 44.6 million taken in North America. On 17 November 1998 the Phantom Menace teaser played in 75 cinemas in front of only three features, this among them, and some buyers left the moment it ended. A good fit if you accept that the crash is over early and the remaining hours belong to dinner tables and board meetings. Not for anyone buying a ticket on the strength of that viral collision clip.