Larry Wilson might not have graduated from the Harvard Business School or lived through the Black Plague, but he’s still certainly qualified to talk about Beetlejuice. While most people rightly think of director Tim Burton and star Michael Keaton when they look back at the dark comedy, the story was the brainchild of Wilson, his producing partner, Michael Bender, and fellow co-writer, the late Michael McDowell. In celebration of the 30th anniversary of the hit film (which opened on March 30, 1988), Yahoo chatted with Wilson about a movie that might have been very different. (Watch the highlights above.)

1. Beetlejuice originally had a far darker ending

Among Beetlejuice unexpected turns is its ending. Dour daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder) comes back home from school with mostly good grades and is rewarded with a ghostly dance number by her home’s resident ghosts Adam and Barbara Maitland (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis). It’s a surprisingly cheerful way to leave the characters. But Wilson and McDowell initially wrote up something much more morbid.

“Our first ending was Lydia — she died in a fire and was able to join Barbara and Adam in the afterlife,” Wilson said with a sheepish grin. “A couple of people said to us, ‘Do you really think that’s a good idea? Is that really the message you want to be sending to the teenagers of the world? Die in a fire?’ So, yeah, it probably was darker.”

2. Beetlejuice almost wound up with a dreadfully different title

Working as an instructor for UCLA’s Extension program in the ’80s, Wilson befriended a student named Marjorie Lewis and gave her a copy of his Beetlejuice script. Lewis, who was working in development for the Geffen Film Company, championed the script enough that it wound up being bought and made. Wilson thinks it fortuitous that heavyweight producer David Geffen came on board.

Warner Bros. might love Beetlejuice now, but there was great resistance to the movie from the studio’s marketing department at the time. Among the concerns the suits had was the title. They recommended a truly terrible alternate title.

“The title that I remember being suggested, pretty much before the release, was House Ghost,” Wilson recalled. “I bet it was David Geffen who said no to that, and a big firm no. There were marketing people within Warner Bros. who thought no one would know what ‘Beetlejuice’ was, but they’d know what a house ghost was. Thank God [they went with Beetlejuice]. I would not like to be here talking about House Ghost the movie.”

Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice. Screenwriter Larry Wilson said that while Keaton defined the character as we know him today, the original inspiration for the beloved character was a comedic icon — Groucho Marx. (Photo: Warner Bros.) More

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