How Beetlejuice Beetlejuice made 'MacArthur Park' scene a sequel to 'Day-O' (exclusive)

Warning: This article contains spoilers from Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

When you think of Beetlejuice, you think of "Banana Boat (Day-O)," the Harry Belafonte calypso music number that played during a ghost possession-induced "lip sync for your life" in the 1988 cult classic. Willem Dafoe, a star from the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice sequel, maintains a special connection to it. "That was close to my heart because...I had a theater company and we used those two songs" — "Day-O" and Belafonte's "Jump in the Line" — "in one of our theater pieces, so I already felt very close to Tim's aesthetic," Dafoe, who plays Afterlife beat cop Wolf Jackson, tells Entertainment Weekly.

Dafoe's isn't the only one to have a strong connection to that music. "Day-O," especially, became almost like the unofficial theme song for Beetlejuice as the film gained more and more notoriety over the years, even featuring prominently in the Broadway musical adaptation. Heading into the new movie sequel, which is playing now in theaters, choreographer Corey Baker was not concerned about recreating that same magic for a different musical moment in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

"Knowing that 'Day-O' in the first film is so iconic, we were all really clear on Day 1 that we were not trying to replicate that," Baker says. "We're going to have the device of Beetlejuice makes people perform and do crazy things, for sure. That's in his universe, but of course it'll be different because we're in a different time of his journey and a different story."

The result was a lip synced, choreographed dance number to "MacArthur Park," the Jimmy Webb-written, Richard Harris-performed song from 1968. Speaking with EW over Zoom from London, Baker turns to his phone which contains a bounty of videos recorded during prep. "There's about 680 different versions we created that could have been in this movie that went on quite a process," he remarks.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice culminates in this moment, which Baker says "was the longest scene we had to shoot because so much takes place in it." Michael Keaton's demon bio-exorcist hijacks the Halloween-timed wedding ceremony of Winona Ryder's Lydia Deetz and her TV producer fiancé Justin Theroux. He first traps all the social media influencer guests inside their own smartphones, before using his ghostly powers to force the remaining attendees into song and dance, including Jenna Ortega's Astrid (Lydia's daughter) and Catherine O'Hara's Delia Deetz. It's during this lip sync and interpretive dance that Monica Bellucci's Delores storms in, having hunted her demon ex the entire film.

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"We all wanted a musical number," screenwriter Alfred Gough, who wrote the screenplay with his fellow Wednesday collaborator Miles Millar, recalls. "We just didn't know what it was. It all felt like the movie was wrapping up too neatly. And then Tim called us." Burton suggested "MacArthur Park," which is one of the tracks on the director's personal jukebox located in his home. "We went and listened to it, and then we just wrote out a musical number based on that," Gough says. "And then we kept evolving it. We were like, 'Yes! That's the crazy, weird, insane thing you need at the end of this movie.'"

According to Baker, the "MacArthur Park" number went through multiple iterations in the script across the rehearsal and shooting phases, saying, "We were constantly developing and changing." At one point early on, Baker got the idea of creating a dance that felt "disgusting" and "really grotesque." However, "As soon as we went down there," he says, "I was like, no, that's not right." At another point, his team experimented with the characters pretending to be animals. "I really don't know why we did that, but there was a whole moment when we tried that out," Baker recalls. "That was probably the most left of field idea."

Baker and associate choreographer Chris George Scott would make a video of a routine, share that with Burton for notes, and then bring in actors either one or two at a time to try out variations at the studio. Ortega and O'Hara, who have multiple synchronized movements in the sequence, were the first to try it out. He praises Ortega's collaboration and remembers speaking with her about her now-famous dance from Wednesday, the actress' first gig with Burton, saying, "It was probably one of the first things we ever talked about. I congratulated her on it, because it's not an easy feat."

Baker explains how it was important for the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice choreography to not feel choreographed, but more like improvised movements. "They shouldn't break out into a fully fleshed chorus line number," he quips. "As much as I'd love to see that, that's not right for this story."

A perfect example came during his first conversations with O'Hara. "She had this amazing idea that Delia was an artist, so she would actually be really into the type of dance if Beetlejuice possessed her," Baker remembers. "And it would probably be like contemporary dance. So [O'Hara] breaks out into contemporary dance moves that she's seen on the internet and we have an improvisation dance moment together. That's where it formed and that's how we started to build what would be in the wedding scene."

As for the couple's dance with Keaton's Beetlejuice and Ryder's Lydia, twirling in harnesses above the ground, the team delved into research about Baroque-style celebratory dances. Baker notes how this movie unpacks how old Beetlejuice actually is compared to Lydia, who cracks a joke about how "the 600-year age gap" was a real issue for her, while a flashback scene shows Beetlejuice meeting Delores for the first time during Europe's Black Plague. "We came up with this weird wedding waltz that eventually developed into what's in the movie," Baker says.

The other big touchstone was the original "Day-O" number itself. "It always felt right to go back to the roots of the table in 'Day-O' in the original movie and be like, 'How would these people move as their characters, as humans in this space if it just happened?'" Baker posits. "The improvisation and constant change really helped in the end because it feels, in a weird way, not put together, which is what it should be."