Magnolia - Was the ending inspired by...

I was listening to one of my favorite bands: the flaming lips, and they have a song called "frogs". In that song they talk about it raining frogs. Right away I thought of the end of magnolia and wondered if perhaps mr. paul thomas anderson borrowed the idea. Does anybody know? Does anybody care?
 
It was actually taken from Charles Fort book "Book of the Damned".
This section,

"who was a turn of the century writer who wrote mainly about odd phenomena. So I just started writing it in to the script. It wasn't until after I got through with the writing that I began to discover what it might mean, which is this: you get to a point in your life, and shit is happening, and everything's out of your control, and suddenly, a rain of frogs just makes sense. You're staring at a doctor who is telling you something is wrong, and while we know what it is, we have no way of fixing it. And you just go: "So what you're telling me, basically, is that it's raining frogs from the sky." I'm not someone who's ever had a special fascination with UFO's or supernatural phenomena or anything but I guess I just found myself at a point in my life where I was going through some shitty stuff, and I was ready for some sort of weird religious experience, or as close as I could get to one. So then I began to decipher things about frogs and history things like this notion that as far back as the Romans, people have been able to judge the health of a society by the health of its frogs: the health of a frog, the vibe of a frog, the texture of the frog, its looks, how much wetness is on it, everything. The frogs are a barometer for who we are as a people. We're polluting ourselves, we're killing ourselves, and the frogs are telling us so, because they're all getting sick and deformed. And I didn't even know it was in the bible until Henry Gibson gave me a copy of it, bookmarked to the appropriate frog passage. "

Courtesy of the Magnolia Shooting Script/Companion Book
 
I think the idea came about because he didn't know how to end the movie. So, he just had frogs fall out of the sky, so people could call it "arty." :D

- Mike.
 
Back
Top