I have lately been seized by a mania to track down interesting re-edits of films, either done by the original creators or by fans.
Ones I have seen
Steven Soderbergh — the prolific director best known for Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Ocean’s 11/12/13 — has transformed Raiders Of The Lost Ark into a seductive film school exercise. He changed the color to crisp black-and-white and stripped out all of the sound, even the dialogue, using instead a loop of Trent Reznor’s score for The Social Network.
Why?
I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are. See if you can reproduce the thought process that resulted in these choices by asking yourself: why was each shot—whether short or long—held for that exact length of time and placed in that order? Sounds like fun, right? It actually is. To me.
Fun for me too.
Soderbergh’s experiment is weird film-nerd joy but it isn’t anywhere near as fun or as gutsy as this variation on the theme.
Back when Raiders Of The Lost Ark was new, a circle of tween-aged kids had a crazy idea: how about taking a parent’s home video camera and making their own version of the movie? They resolved to reproduce every shot from the original film as well as they could, which is bonkers considering that home video releases of films were not yet a thing, giving them no way to examine every scene closely. They went to a movie theater and furiously took notes, recorded the audio on a tape recorder, pored over stills they found in places like magazines and trading cards.
They spent their whole summer vacation working on it, but they didn’t get as far as they imagined. Filmmaking is hard. So during the school year they kept at it on weekends when they could. Then they devoted the following summer to it again. Then the next summer. They were in too deep to stop. They had almost the whole movie done when high school graduation forced an end to the project.
Decades later the kids, now grown, dusted off their VHS tapes and did a few showings at theaters willing to spare a screen for a couple of hours for this oddity … despite being unable to charge money lest a plague of studio lawyers descend upon them.
I was lucky enough to go to one of those early screenings, with a raucously enthusiastic crowd. Watching the film is uncanny and delicious. Actors transform back and forth between kids and teenagers from scene to scene, or even within a scene. Because it’s a film you know, you cannot resist thinking ahead. “I know what comes next. How the heck will a bunch of kids reproduce that in a backyard?” Every time, their solution turns out to be more clever and impressive than one would dare hope.
Word eventually found its way to Steven Spielberg, who decided he had to meet these creators. He must have twisted some lawyers’ arms, because now you can just buy a home video copy.
Akira Kurosawa’s lost original cut of his story of Annakin Skywalker’s fall from grace played out against the backdrop of the rise of the Galactic Empire.
Well, obviously not. But that is what it is meant to feel like.
Star Wars has enough enthusiastic fans that there are countless fan-made re-shufflings of the films. They follow in the footsteps of The Phantom Edit, a pioneering fan effort from before just anyone with a laptop and a lot of patience could re-cut a film; it re-arranged scenes from the first prequel The Phantom Menace and cleverly transformed Jar-Jar Binks into a wise sage by snipping out his slapstick moments and replacing his dialogue with an invented alien language and wholly new lines delivered in subtitles.
Mantle takes that trick much further.
Star Wars is a pastiche informed by a host of sources. George Lucas had originally wanted do a Flash Gordon film but could not get the rights, so Star Wars stirred that together with Westerns, Edgar Rice Burrough’s Mars stories, flying ace movies about both World Wars, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and … the films of Akira Kurosawa set in Japan’s feudal era, most directly The Hidden Fortress.
So informed by Kurosawa’s influence, The Blackened Mantle refines Revenge Of The Sith by presenting it in the style of Kurosawa’s works. It’s in black-and-white, with bits of the other prequels woven in as sepia-toned flashbacks. All of the actors’ performances have been dubbed in Japanese so that subtitles can tweak the dialogue to reshape the storytelling. It preserves most of the story elements and action sequences, but trims out elements which weaken the plausibility of Annakin’s turn.
A friend recommending this got me going down this whole alternate-edit rabbithole in the first place, and the creator has an index of numerous edits under the witty title Bad Movies Made Less Bad.
So. What if it’s not a gang of kids attempting a zero-budget shot-for-shot remake of a Hollywood film? What if, instead, a talented real-deal director had the resources to do it right?
Would it produce the same movie? Would it turn out as a different movie? This should just be a film school hypothetical, impossible to test, but Gus Van Sant cashed in on the moment of his greatest industry pull to actually do it.
What did the experiement reveal?
I find it impossible to describe. Yeah, it’s the same film as Hitchcock’s … sort of. But also sort of not. The only way to get it is to see the film. Van Sant says:
The results were that it wasn’t as frightening as Hitchcock’s film, and I attribute it to the director, me, my DNA, and the different totally immersive style of Hitchcock. Without that, it seemed it couldn’t be reproduced.
I cannot recommend it unless you are a film nerd. But if you are, there’s nothing else like it.
I’m glad that I somehow never saw the original theatrical version of Orson Welles’ noir classic despite having meant to catch up with it. It had a reputation for being great despite confused storytelling which resulted from the studio trimming the film down from Welles’ original cut.
Almost 20 years after the film was released, a print close to Welles’ last version was found, but that had been an unfinished film, with postproduction work still to be done when the studio took it away from him. Then another 20 years later, after Welles had long since died, sound designer Walter Murch discovered an angry memo Welles wrote to the studio criticizing what they had done to his film. There were 58 single-spaced typewritten pages detailing everything he would have done differently. Murch restored the film, using the memo as the blueprint, revealing the real movie at last.
One might guess that Touch Of Evil is the only director’s cut delivered from beyond the grave, but Metropolis may be an even greater miracle.
Metropolis was made in 1927 and it still looks wildly ambitious to eyes accustomed to mega-blockbusters. The cost of the elaborate sets and effects nearly bankrupted the entire German film industry. But epic result was packed with imagery so powerful and influential that I refer to it as a film everyone has seen even if they have never seen it, because its moves (and even snippets of the film itself) show up in so many later films that when one sees it for the first time, it feels familiar.
Few people ever saw the full film. It was trimmed down from its original 2½ hour runtime for distribution in Germany, then trimmed down further for international distribution. Then decades passed, with prints circulating through film schools and rep houses, getting scratched and burned and broken and spliced back together, so each extant print was at least a little different. In the ’80s a producer struck newly restored prints … with a different (rock ’n’ roll!) soundtrack, goofy colorization, and trimmed down more than an hour shorter than its original runtime.
Then at the end of the century, a German film foundation asked to borrow every print in the world. They scanned them all and combined the data — one print could correct the loss from a scratch on another print, a lost frame on one print could be covered by it surviving on three others. They pored over archived notes from the original production. This produced the fullest version any living person had ever seen, a little over two hours long. The computer synthesis of information from multiple prints made almost all of it look as fresh as if it had been shot yesterday; the film was even more beautiful than we knew. Title cards describing what surviving records revealed about the missing scenes got them as close to rescuing the entire film as anyone believed possible.
Then one more print turned up in a museum archive, a negative struck from the original full version. It was in bad shape, but it had 25 minutes of footage which no one had seen since 1927. There were a few bits damaged beyond repair, but it meant that we got all but five minutes of the original cut back.
Have I mentioned that the film is amazing? The film is amazing.
Terry Gilliam had such a hard time getting the film released at all that The Battle Of Brazil is a book entirely about Gilliam fighting against the studio’s attempt to bury it, which then spawned a documentary film. Gilliam showed the movie at film schools and art houses on the sly in his campaign to bring attention to it.
Finally the studio relented, but in a final tragedy they held Gilliam to his contractual obligation to deliver a film within a certain runtime. To keep the studio from hacking the film entirely to bits, Gilliam cut out ten minutes of footage from the finished film he had been showing around.
That theatrical edit was still hailed as a great film and became a staple of rep houses, where I fell in love with it as a young film nerd. But a decade later Criterion, the prestiguous home video publisher of classic and arthouse films, made Gilliam’s original edit available.
Gilliam was right to be frustrated by the theatrical version. The full version includes a scene unnecessary to the plot but underlining the film’s theme, the terrifying secret police revealed as working joes griping about their day, oblivious to the horrors they commit. It’s good to have the real thing back.
Possibly the most famous director’s cut to find its way to a broad audience, and one of the few to eventually displace the original theatrical version almost entirely.
Warner Bros had wanted a sci-fi action blockbuster, but director Ridley Scott delivered a textured, alienating science fiction art film. To make the movie more accessible, the studio insisted on adding a introductory title card, a happy ending, and voiceover narration throughout. Harrison Ford recorded a deliberately stilted voiceover track in an attempt to help Scott talk the studio out of using it, but the trick didn’t work.
The resulting film was not the hit they hoped for, but despite the voiceover and other flaws, Blade Runner became a favorite of film buffs, including me. I saw it in its original release and was a little too young for it. I rediscovered it as a budding film nerd in college, re-watching it obsessively. I no longer rank it among my top-tier favorites but it remains the film I have watched more times than any other.
Because cinephile love made it a rep house perennial, prints of an early assembly cut from before the studio’s changes found its way to screens, misrepresented as a “director’s cut”. Scott felt frustrated by that version’s lack of polish, but the interest people showed in it led to the studio coöperating with Scott to create a proper Director’s Cut. The resulting film was subtly different and better. Then Ridley Scott’s ongoing success in his career made it possible for him to get one more bite at the apple, making a host of fine adjustments and even shooting a bit of new footage more than two decades after principal photography had originally wrapped.
Despite having seen the original theatrical cut dozens of times, the Final Cut is so right that it has almost completely displaced that version from my memory.
I had long thought that this edition just removed the opening narration forced into the theatrical release which undercut its surreal-mysterious tone, but seeing it recently revealed that it adds 11 minutes of footage to expand several scenes a bit, and to significantly alter the closing psychic-battle setpiece.
Fixing the opening is definitely an improvement, as I aleady knew from skipping it when watching with friends who were new to the film. I’m not so sure the other changes are worthwhile. That psychic battle landed as a little goofy even when it was new; having more of the effects which have not aged well belabors the inherent problems with the ending. Though is sure does land as anticipating The Matrix, which arrived the following year.
Maybe I need to make my own fan edit which never shows us the city from the outside?
Nerdy, obscure, and amazing.
I grew up a Star Trek kid. I was the right age to be entranced by the goofy Filmation animated series when it was originally broadcast, grew into nerdlove for the original series in syndication, and was still young enough when the first feature film was released that I was uncritically delighted to see new Trek on the big screen at all.
But by the time ST: The Motion Picture was released for home video, my tastes had matured enough that revisiting it revealed that how the film was a clumsy slog. I had heard rumours about how The Motion Picture had suffered from Studio Meddling. Since the special effects shots were expensive some suit had insisted on including every bit of them, whether they served the story or not, filling the second act with a stultifying series of shots of the crew of the Enterprise looking at clouds through the viewscreen. To spare time for that nonsense, a bunch of character stuff and ideas landed on the cutting room floor.
It did not stand up in contrast with The Wrath Of Khan and the run of pretty good original cast Trek films which were still coming out. Then there was Next Generation. Then other Treks. I thought I would never look back at Star Trek: The Motionless Picture.
This wasn’t a beloved classic the studio could cash in on investing in like Blade Runner; even the famously enthusiastic Trek fandom admitted that it was a dud. There wasn’t a better cut just sitting on the shelf like there was with Brazil.
But the studio still had the footage that didn’t make it in to the theatrical release, director Robert Wise just couldn’t let go of the thought of the better film he had wanted to make, and a lot of film professionals have a soft spot for Trek. Wise doesn’t call what he and a host of enthusiasts did a restoration of his cut, he says they got to finish an unfinished film. They didn’t just trim out the clouds and weave the story beats back in, they worked on everything. They improved the sound design. They cleaned up the effects shots they wanted to keep. They made new effects shots to replace things they originally hadn’t had time, or money, or capacity to do back in the 1970s, careful to match the distinctive look of the original effects.
The resulting labor of love is not just a marvel of craft or just a good Trek film. It’s a great Trek film. It may not have quite the appeal to non-fans of The Wrath Of Khan or The Voyage Home (the one with the whales!) but anyone who likes Trek at all will enjoy it, and for anyone who ever loved the original series it is a true gift.
The theatrical version of this film was so bad that it nearly killed the franchise. I saw it on its original release, which was an unnerving experience. The first few scenes were so gripping that I thought the universally negative reviews were lunacy. The next few scenes didn’t quite work. Then the next few scenes were weaker still, and it continued to decline through an incoherent second act, and then further still to an excruciatingly hokey ending. Strong turns by Sigorney Weaver and Charles Dance couldn’t save it. It’s a pile of crap.
It was well known to have come out of a horrendous production process. There had been a succession of scripts and directors — including a script by William Neuromancer Gibson which one can now find adapted to comics and as an audio drama — and was already wildly over-budget when young David Fincher took the reins to direct his first feature. The filmmaking and wrestling with the studio was such a mess that Fincher is said to have come close to refusing to have his name on it. He hasn’t just refused to attempt a new cut of the film, he is so bitter that he has refused to ever talk about the movie at all.
The studio tried to lure fans into paying for a home video release of this unloved mess by creating a box set of Alien films with a bunch of special features, including what they called the Alien³ Assembly Cut, a Frankenstein’s Monster made without Fincher’s involvement incorporating a bunch of unused footage and reference images for special effects that were never made. I gather that the result is a hash that makes one wonder what might have been. That non-film inspired a crew of nerds to create this fan edit, tinkering with the arrangement of scenes and fleshing out missing effects.
The result is better than anyone who has seen the theatrical version would believe possible. It’s not as good as the original Alien or James Cameron’s Aliens sequel, but that is praising it with faint damnation; I think it’s better than the sequels Ridley Scott has given us. If you have a taste for the series it’s worth a couple of hours.
The Abyss — Extended Edition
Aliens — Special Edition
While I’m nerding out, I have to point to these James Cameron re-edits of two of his films.
The theatrical release of The Abyss was good but sloppy, and the ending was completely broken. We are lucky to have the Extended Edition even though it remains more than a little shaggy.
I understand why some people prefer the theatrical version of Aliens — it’s so tight that you could bounce a quarter off of it — but I concur with Cameron’s judgement in creating the Special Edition, if only to have the sentry guns pile on even more suspense.
Ones I want to see
Probably the most-seen fan edit ever made, in part because anyone can re-make it DIY: it’s just The Wizard Of Oz with the sound off, playing Pink Floyd’s album The Dark Side Of The Moon as a soundtrack. There was a craze for it back in the 1990s, when video rental through Blockbuster was at its peak; reputedly there’s a lucky alchemy in the way the tracks of the album align with events in the film.
Despite listening to the album a billion times when I was young somehow I never got around to trying this. One of these days.
I have not played the vidya game, but an enthusiast for it introduced me to the film adaptation. It doesn’t quite work, but it is so atmospheric that I found it seductive anyway.
Fan edit enthusiasts rank this one of the best examples of the form; rumor has it that even the movie’s director likes it.
There are a lot of director’s cuts broadly recognized as better than the original theatrical version. There are a lot of fan edits which many fans call better than the original theatrical version. There are even a few fan edits which directors have praised. But I think this film is unique in being such a good a fan edit the original film’s director annointed it “The Director’s Cut”.
Admirable humility by Brian De Palma.
This is a weird one. Christian Bale played both Patrick Bateman, the titular main character in American Psycho, and also Batman in the three Christopher Nolan films, so an enterprising fan has stitched the two films together to suggest that they are the same guy.
It’s so crazy, it just might work. I have to find out.
An oddity both in that it tightens the the movie to be a few minutes shorter and that many fans fault it as inferior to the theatrical version.
Nosing around the internet, I find a lot of people calling this the best of the sequel trilogy re-edits, mining footage from all three films and using the subtitles trick to assemble a single feature telling a significantly different story. That’s not as seductive as the Kurosawa conceit, but I’m curious.
As with the Star Wars prequel trilogy, the sequel trilogy is frustrating. The Force Awakens demonstrates impressive craft but not quite the resonance someone who grew up with Star Wars hopes for, The Last Jedi is divisive (I adore the way it brings Luke Skywalker full circle), and The Rise Of Skywalker wraps it up with … a total trainwreck. That last is particularly bitter given the gorgeous production design, actors’ strong performances, and nifty action setpieces it wasted. Good ingredients for stone soup.
It’s easy to pitch me on the fan edits above attempting to improve on Star Wars at its worst, but why mess with The Empire Strikes Back, generally recognized as the best Star Wars feature film?
Well, I found fans insisting that this edit is actually better than the original film. I didn’t think I needed to see Empire again at all, but my curiousity is piqued.
Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut
The Superman II we got was a remake of an unfinished film the world never saw. The original plan for the 1970s Superman movie was to leverage the cost of the ambitious production by doing two films worth of principal photography, in the hope that profits from the first film could fund post-production on the second film. It almost worked. After a long, difficult production, director Richard Donner delivered Superman: The Movie and it was a hit. But budget and production challenges meant that the shooting Donner had done for the sequel was not quite enough to bring the sequel home, and in a complicated behind-the-scenes soap opera, Donner was replaced by Richard Lester.
In order to resolve the legal ambiguity that created in assigning a director’s credit, Lester wound up re-shooting a lot of what Donner had already done. While Lester deserves credit for how rightly beloved Superman II was and remains — “kneel before Zod”! — some of its odder elements are Lester’s additions.
As with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a sentimental director and enthusiastic nerds decided to finish the film that might have been. I gather that the result doesn’t have anything like the astonishing polish that the Trek team got to deliver, but I also hear that it qualifies as an interesting real movie.
Once Upon A Time In America — Extended Director’s Cut
The title is a misnomer. Director Sergio Leone’s true original cut was about 700 minutes long (almost six hours!). This recently released edit was created without him, since he has been dead for 25 years, and it runs “just” just 250 minutes.
The cut Leone preferred is lost to time. There are no records of what it contained, precious few people ever saw it, and he is not alive to tell anyone about it. Legend describes it as a glorious, fascinating misfire. Since the elaborate production had Leone starting from a ten-hour rough cut, there is no figuring out what Leone wanted to do from first principles.
It was cut down for a showing at Cannes, then cut again for limited release, then at the point when it finally got a full a full US theatrical release it had been whittled down to a broken 139 minutes. But then in the years since Leone’s death there has been a trickle of different releases adding more and more things back in. It seems that the latest edit is the most complete version we will ever get.
I have not seen any version. Someday I want to tackle it, and binging the longest available version seems like the way to go.
Dark was filmed in 2013 and released in 2014 under the title Dying of the Light. The film was taken from me after the first director’s cut, re-edited, scored and mixed without my input.
I offered to revisit the film, cut and mix a new version at my own expense but was denied permission by the producers.
This cut was created using work print DVDs. I had no access to the original hi-res footage and unmixed sound. I used those limitations to my advantage when creating this new film.
I was working toward a more aggressive editing style when Dying of the Light was taken away from me. Dark represents the direction I was hoping to go.
Dark was not created for exhibition or personal gain.
It is for historical record.
— Paul Schrader
Found by a friend who says it “largely takes place within Nicolas Cage’s CIA agent’s brain as it is being eaten by a tumor, as he pursues vengeance against a terrorist. I haven’t yet seen the official release, but the re-cut is just wild.
More fan edits
I want to come back to write these up in greater detail, ideally after seeing them.
Reputedly a weird, inventive mashup of several films, starting from John Carpenter’s The Thing.
A weird mashup of several films, said to be more “contemplative” than a narrative.
A fan attempt to recover the novel’s spirit and Lynch’s intent. I have soft spot for some of the weird stuff in the very long “Alan Smithee” cut, so I can imagine how that might be possible. And it gets surprisingly positive commentary.
A fan edit of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare which reputedly makes it more psychological than fantastical to good effect. I revisited New Nightmare recently and I found it short of the fresh surprise which impressed me when it was new, so I imagine that there is room to improve the film by re-framing it.
An elaborate fan project to rescue the lost version of a cult classic.
A fan edit weaving together the Ridley Scott Alien sequels into a single film, in an attempt to produce something that makes sense. an attempt to make them make sense.
A fan edit of Constantine drawing on deleted scenes. It seems there is a lot of opportunity there, given what a mixed bag the theatrical cut was, and the choice of title suggests that the creator shares my love for the ’90s comics. But hard to get.
All the sequels woven into a single feature, much
loved for clarifying the source’s themes. One can get a little taste.
More official releases
I want to come back to write these up in greater detail, ideally after seeing them.
The theatrical release does amazingly well at sweating down the doorstop of a novel and reconciling King’s novel The Shining with Kubrick’s film The Shining along the way. But there is a lot more to say, so I wonder how it does that.
Lots of little changes, plus a big change to the ending, reputedly making it even more Faustian.
The theatrical release was already a great film … and it turns out there is a much longer version available.
The director’s attempt to recover as much of the movie they had actually wanted to make as he could. Sort of. But do I care?
Reputedly better all-around, including that it corrects queer erasure in the theatrical release.
I Am Legend — Alternate Version
The only major change is in the last few minutes … but that is reputedly a profound change.
Kingdom of Heaven — Director’s Cut
A fair bit longer than the original theatrical version, which evidently makes it land as completely different on a thematic level. During the Iraq war era I had no appetite for a film about the Crusades, but I’m curious.
A weak film that came out of a very
messy production, and this cut is supposedly very different. But in this case is different actually better?
