
4 minute read
INT. VIDEO STORE -- NIGHT
A LONELY YOUNG MAN, 16, gazes at a shelf of DVDs. Whatever he picks is going to be his only company for the night. Stakes are high.
His eyes linger over a title. He reaches for it, then hesitates.
CLOSE-UP: three copies of Blade Runner: Theatrical Cut. Director’s Cut. Final Cut.
REVERSE: Lonely Teen looks at the copies. He is confused. His hand hovers over the cases, indecisive.
Title Card
COMPLETE AND UNCUT! WITH OVER AN HOUR OF NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN FOOTAGE! THE WAY THE FILMMAKER INTENDED! LIKE YOU’VE NEVER SEEN IT BEFORE!
There are lots of different decisions that go into selecting a movie to watch. Genre, length, story, and stars all play a role, as does the streaming service or the device to watch it on. Even after all of these choices have been made, and one thinks they have finally arrived at that magical moment when they can dim the lights and settle into a film, sometimes another, more nebulous choice presents itself: Which version? The theatrical cut? The director’s cut? The extended edition? The special edition? The special theatrical re-released extended director’s cut? What do these terms even mean?
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INT. STUDIO SCREENING ROOM -- 1924 – DAY
Onscreen we see a vast and blazing hot desert, barren except for TWO MEN in a struggle beside a dead horse.
A MAN, 40s, stands triumphantly over his vanquished foe. He starts to walk away, but his hand jerks back.
He looks down: he’s handcuffed to the dead man.
Title Card
The end.
The notion of the director’s cut is almost as old as cinema itself, dating back at least to 1924 when Erich von Stroheim screened his eight-hour cut of Greed. This film represented his vision of the ultimate adaptation of Frank Norris’s novel McTeague … but try telling that to a roomful of suits looking at a film that would have to screen in two parts over two consecutive nights. von Stroheim cut his version down to 4 hours and 20 minutes, but that was still not enough to appease the suits. By the time MGM was finished trimming the film, it ran 140 minutes. The excised six hours of footage was destroyed, melted down for the silver. Even at its incredibly truncated length, Greed is still regarded as not only one of the greatest films of the silent era, but of all time. However, those missing six hours constitute one of the biggest “whatifs” in film history. CUT TO:
INT. RKO EDITING ROOM -- 1942 – DAY
TWO STUDIO EXECUTIVES, 30s, humorless and dim, stand behind ROBERT WISE, 28, who sits behind a Moviola.
The executives point to the film splicer. Reluctant, despondent, Wise places a strip of film over the splicer. He takes a deep breath.
He brings the blade on the splicer down. The cut ECHOES like a guillotine.
While it’s far less than six hours of footage, the missing 40 minutes of Orson Welles’s 1942 film TheMagnificentAmbersons rivals the full cut of Greed in its mythos among cineastes. RKO took control of the editing of Welles’s follow up to Citizen Kane while he was filming a documentary in Brazil. And they didn’t stop there: they also reshot the ending to Ambersons, destroyed the excised footage, and cut off funding to the documentary, which was never completed (a reconstructed version did come out in 1993). Ambersons flopped, though some believe it to be an even greater achievement than Citizen Kane, even in its compromised form.
The story of Ambersonsbecame the story of Welles’s career as a filmmaker: nearly every film he made afterwards was either dramatically recut by the producers or never completed, making him the leading man in the saga of the Artist vs. the Suits. Welles played this part well, always presenting himself as the Misunderstood Genius too creative for an industry run by bean-counters. Like von Stroheim before him (and many filmmakers after him), he would claim that his version of Ambersons was the best film he’d ever made. And for decades, no one could dispute these directors because there was no way to see their cut.
INT. VIDEO STORE – NIGHT
The Lonely Teen is still trying to make up his mind.
This is where we came in. Home video and cable television changed everything for the director’s cut. First, the Los Angeles pay-cable network the Z Channel began broadcasting director’s cuts such as Michael Cimino’s four-hour Heaven’s Gate (cut down to 140 minutes theatrically). Then, some film vault workers discovered an alternate cut of Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner that ran a few minutes longer and—more importantly—omitted Harrison Ford’s dreadful, world-weary PI voiceover and the studio’s ridiculous happy ending. This cut, which had originally bombed with test audiences in Denver and Dallas, now screened in theaters in Los Angeles and San Francisco to big crowds and positive reviews. When he learned of the screenings, Ridley Scott asked Warner Brothers to let him back into the editing room to create a true director’s cut, which was released on home video in 1992 for the film’s tenth anniversary. It was met with universal acclaim, and since then it’s been listed in every one of SightandSound magazine’s decennial critic’s poll of the 100 greatest films ever made.
The success of Blade Runner on home video invented the notion of the director’s cut as we know it. Films such as Welles’s Touch of Evil and Mr. Arkadin, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, or the aforementioned Heaven’s Gate saw their reputations resurrected. Other cuts of Coppola’s ApocalypseNow or Peter Jackson’s LordoftheRings series gave devotees more territory to explore, while still other cuts spiced up tamer films by offering “unrated” cuts that included material deemed too graphic for an R rating, to the extent that by the mid-2000s it seemed like every movie had a director’s cut in release somewhere.
Given the fact that many of these director’s cuts did not perform well theatrically, studios were more than willing to tap into this new revenue stream by offering audiences the same film they’d seen, only now with “never-before-seen” material, whether that material needed to be seen or not. Filmmakers also welcomed it because it gave them an opportunity to present “their” version to audiences, reinforcing the image of the director as the author and primary creative force of a motion picture.
For all of the good it does, this situation presents a difficult question: with all these multiple versions of a film available to watch, which is the “real” version of the movie? Or, put a bit differently, are these different versions even the same movie? In changing the edit of a movie, is an entirely different movie being made? And if so, should they have little subtitles, parentheticals, asterisks, etc.? Or should they go by different names entirely? Should one cut be completely disregarded and cast out?
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