Bathsheba doesn't live here anymore: 3 new endings to the script

Door #1: Jill Clayburgh: me!

Spending the weekend revising the ending of  Madding Crowd for Helen, my producer. That would be the recently unaffianced Helen who urges [read: demands] I change entirely my script's [and the novel's] end by ditching the marriage [see http://tinyurl.com/4qy368w]. Helen's vision: the film closes with our youthfully-widowed heroine Bathsheba as an independent, successful, content, and happily unmarried woman. Helen thinks this version will have much greater appeal to the targeted female demographic for this costume-drama chickflick. It's counter-intuitive to me but all I'm trying to do is sell this script, buy my way out of a life-sentence of university teaching, and fulfill my dream of living and writing in Manhattan. Once this was not a "dream" but an achievable plan until Jamie's biological dad had his stroke--the bastard, sorry I know, stroke is bad but I swear the bastard planned it-- and no tuition money nor Rossetti sketch came my way [see: http://tinyurl.com/6596vjk].

So here's what I've got going in the rewrite dept. Please, please, dear readers, weigh in. Vote now. comment.

Note: I won't insert  plot summary of FFMC, the novel but you may find one at my page, on right hand side: or simply go to: http://tinyurl.com/45aklaa. I believe it's worth the detour of 300 words, but it's your choice.

Door #1  Troy the presumed-dead husband secretly returns to Bathsheba [BE], who in a moment of weakness, has sex with him. When Boldwood sees Troy the next day strutting around BE’s farm, he shoots him, goes to jail. Shock: a few moths later, BE discovers she is pregnant. Oak the shepherd proposes; she declines but agrees that they will continue to enjoy a warm and often romantic relationship. BE raises a daughter with  strong, [pre]feminist values. Sometimes she and her daughter play duets on the piano. When last we see Bathsheba, Oak is working about her farm, her daughter is learning French from her governess, and Bathsheba mounts her horse and gallops out into the rolling Dorset countryside of her farm as the sun sets gently on the verdant landscape and the vibrant, matured but yet beautiful Bathsheba Everdene.

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Door #2. Diane Lane:
Like, I wish!

Door #2. With Troy dead and Boldwood in jail, BE has had it. Oak's a pal but you know, not finally the guy you want at the end of the day. Day after day. And frankly, Oak still and will always think BE is the most marvelous and lively Victorian woman he'll ever meet, but as wife-material....well, he's thinking the prospect will be better in Canada. Sick of all the bad memories, BE sells the farm for a tidy profit. She travels to Italy, buys a fixer upper. This will be fairly compressed because it's going to be the end, not the premise, of the script. Thus we last see BE with a somewhat dilapidated structure, but an entire village of swarthy Italian men. In the final shot, a ripped Italian laborer introduces himself and the Tuscan sun sets over the verdant landscape and the vibrant, matured yet beautiful Bathsheba Everdene.

Door #3. Thelma and Louise

Door #3.  Frankly, Bathsehba's done up by all the unwarrantedly awful things that have happened to her. so when Troy shows up at the Xmas party and tries to spousal-rape her out by the stables, she pulls an exceptionally sharp letter-opener from her bag and hits his jugular. He dies. This may seem unlikely but if you think it's high on the unlikely scale, let me refer you again to the plot summary of the actual novel, on my Pages. The adrenaline of hate can turn a letter opener into a lethal weapon. Believing she has nowhere to turn, Bathsheba runs into the night, and, coming full circle to the film's start, arrives in the vicinity of her old aunty's, near the cliffs on the southern coast. It's late. She steals into her aunty's barn for rope. She leashes two sheep--ones who seems jejune and trusting, like Bathsheba was once, herself--and jogs with them to cliff's edge. Our final shot is BE, a sheep on either side of her, launching herself toward the glittering waters of the English coast. Her suicidal leap is presented--via rising strings and stunning cinematography--as a triumph.