The authors of “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” present an epic 7-minute musical number

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, now in theaters.

When Tim Burton asked to speak to “Wednesday” writers Al Gough and Miles Millar after a long day of filming the series in Romania, the duo thought they were in big trouble.

“After filming finished, he was usually in his car and gone,” Gough recalls. “So at first we thought something was wrong: ‘Oh shit, what happened?'”

It turned out that Burton was about to pitch them a pretty big project: the sequel to his popular 1988 supernatural fantasy film Beetlejuice. Gough and Millar immediately agreed and went to work with Burton to develop the story.

“We’ve done a lot of sequels, and it’s always about finding out why the sequel should happen,” says Millar. “Why is this a film and not just a commercial piece because we as a studio can make a lot of money? You have to feel integrity and say something.”

He and Gough had already cracked the code for a totally convincing second film when they wrote the critically acclaimed “Spider-Man 2” in 2004. The key to “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” according to Millar, was finding the right balance between social satire and the seriousness of the original.

The new film instead focuses on three generations of Deetz women: Delia (Catherine O’Hara), Lydia (Winona Ryder) and Astrid (Jenna Ortega). “I was just thinking, it’s really about these women and the horrible men in their lives, right? Beetlejuice with Lydia, Jeremy (Arthur Conti) with Astrid and Rory (Justin Theroux) also with Lydia,” says Gough.

“The first film said something about the culture of the time: yuppies moving to the country! In many ways it’s like a gentrification film,” Millar adds. In the 2024 reboot, Theroux brings some modern sycophancy, with his character Rory cleverly using therapy slang as a weapon to exploit those around him.

As for the film’s most crucial element, Gough and Millar didn’t want to simply rehash the original. That’s partly why ghost couple Adam and Barbara Maitland (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) aren’t in the sequel. “Tim had said from the start that he didn’t want the Maitlands in it. I think that’s partly because they’re ghosts and so they don’t age,” says Gough. “We had a moment where we tried it, but it honestly just felt like fan service. That story had already been told.”

Although Gough, Millar and Burton had just worked with Ortega on “Wednesday,” her character in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” couldn’t be more different from the macabre “Addams Family” icon. “We didn’t want to make her Wednesday and we didn’t want her to feel like a clone of Winona,” says Gough. “Winona’s character as a teenager… was open to oddities and weird things. Astrid says, ‘I believe in what I can see: facts and science. She has a pretty soft heart for her causes, but one of those causes is not her mother.'”

At the end of the film, Astrid does She meets her mother – and what better way to show off her new-found bond than with a crazy dance performance?

Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O” appears early in the film (sung by a choir at Charles’ funeral) and recalls the memorable dinner party scene from the original film. Millar and Gough knew they wanted to create a similar musical scene in the sequel, but felt a lot of pressure to live up to its predecessor. “For us as writers, the ‘Day-O’ sequence in the first film was so iconic,” says Millar. “It was always like we had this fear in the back of our minds: How can we top that?”

They found their answer during the film’s climax, when Beetlejuice crashes Lydia’s wedding to Rory and demands that she fulfill her part of the prenuptial agreement she signed earlier in the film. The first film’s wedding scene, while fondly remembered by fans, is actually a moment that can be missed if you blink.

“It takes about five seconds and then Geena Davis comes riding on the sandworm and he’s finished,” says Gough. “What will he do when he gets a second chance at marriage?”

Add music. “We got to the end of the film and we all wanted a musical number in it, but we couldn’t agree on anything,” Gough recalls. “Tim called us and said he had a jukebox in his kitchen. ‘I heard the song ‘MacArthur Park.’ What if we use that as the main song in the wedding scene?'”

And off they went: They used the original version of the song by Richard Harris from 1968 (Donna Summer made the song a disco hit in 1978), while Lydia, Beetlejuice, Astrid, Rory and even the priest sang along and showed off their best moves.

“It’s a seven-and-a-half minute song. So at first we thought, maybe we don’t need those sections? And Tim was like, ‘Nah, we’ll use everything,'” says Gough. “It’s the kind of crazy thing that the movie needed. Once we got the story and the structures down, we could do these big twists and turns, and they felt like they fit into the movie. It was so ‘Beetlejuice.’ When you look at the movie and think of a million ways it’s going to end, I don’t think ‘MacArthur Park’ would ever be on the bingo card.”

The length of the sequence also gave the creative team the opportunity to incorporate even more characters into the song. “I especially love the moment when the song completely changes gears and (Willem) Dafoe comes out of the crypt in the middle of the song in the crazy ’70s orchestral rip,” says Millar. “As a song, it’s really incredibly theatrical.”

This wedding is certainly one of the most exciting moments in the film, but it’s not the only time we see Beetlejuice at a wedding ceremony. Early in the film, his backstory is revealed as the audience watches him marry the terrifying Delores (Monica Bellucci).

It is the first time audiences see young Beetlejuice robbing graves hundreds of years ago, in a black-and-white sequence narrated entirely in Italian.

“We knew he was old, so we thought, ‘Oh, that’s the era he would be living in,'” says Gough. “Actually, it was Tim’s idea to say, ‘Let’s do everything in Italian!'”

“I think he said it was like the prologue to a Fellini film,” Millar adds with a laugh.

Although the creative team fleshed out their “agent of chaos,” they insisted on maintaining Beetlejuice’s limited screen time. Keaton only appears for 17 minutes in the 1988 film, and the sequel isn’t much different in that regard.

“He’s so much fun to write as a character, but… he’s not the protagonist of the film,” says Millar. “It was difficult to find the right balance. People love him so much. The film is called ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ for a reason, so he has to be essential to the film.”

Gough and Millar say this challenge helped them improve their writing and that the result is a script they are proud of (with Only enough Beetlejuice). “You think harder about what those scenes are going to look like and what your contribution to the film is,” says Millar. “It feels incredibly satisfying, like you’ve spent a lot more time with him than you realize. That’s the magic of this character.”