Dude!! Whatever happened to ONE version of a movie?

Cafe Society
1

I’m not sure if this belongs in the Pit or not but here’s my movie related beef.

Remember the good ole’ days when someone asked “hey! did you see [insert movie title]?” and the answer was “yes” or “no”.

Now its:

"Do you mean the ‘theatrical release’, the ‘directors cut’, the extended directors cut’, the extended unrated directors cut in letterbox’ or the ‘Junior Vasquez extended remix cut’?

Blade Runner Director’s Cut - ok fine, you removed the ‘happy’ ending. No problem

Aliens Director’s Cut - Yeah, those auto-guns were pretty cool

These are fine but some directors are determined to ruin their classics:

Appocalypse Now Redux - WTF? Did you really need to add another 45 minutes of pointless sceans of gabbing with some French jerks or stealing Col Kilgores surfboard? The movie was already almost 3 hours to being with!

and of course:

Star Wars Special Edition - Yeah…I can’t tell that those new ships are CGI. And thanks for turning Han into a PC pussy. Good call. Turn all your classics into ‘Jedi’.
and then of course there are versions I can’t even figure out. Starz has been running special edition versions of

Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

and

Pearl Harbor

Best I can figure, LOTR added a lot of little scenes that added little overall substance to the movie and Pearl Harbor basically made everything much gorier so that all the men who fell asleep during the first half will be awakened by their SO screaming at the Saving Private Ryan style carnage that has been added.
So join me in saying ENOUGH ALREADY! MAKE THE DAMN MOVIE RIGHT THE FIRST TIME!

2

How about 28 Days Later, where they’ve started tacking on alternate endings while it’s still in the theaters?

3

I don’t mind those too much, but sometimes I get a director’s cut and can’t for the life of me figure out why a separate DVD had to be made to show one 2 minute scene which usually has nothing to do with the story. On many movies, I don’t even notice what was different.

But what I really hate is when people try and remake an old classic movie but can’t stay reasonably true to it. I enjoyed Ocean’s 11 a lot, but that is about the only one. I won’t even get started on what that idiot Tim Burton did with Planet of the Apes. I live in fear that someone is going to try and remake Key Largo or the African Queen with Ashton Kutcher and some ditzy bimbo.

4

Look, the quickest way to put an end to this nonsense is not to buy the special editions. Get the movie when it comes out and stick with that.

If people stopped buying these, they’d fade away. Sadly, too many people think that getting the extras somehow improves the movie. While an occasional deleted scene is worth having (I can think of two so far), most deleted scenes were deleted for a very good reason.

As far as director’s cut – if the director didn’t like the first version, why didn’t he do it right in the first place? Especially when it’s not an issue of studio interference.

5

Nothing pisses me off more than the “Terminator 2: Extreme Edition”. Come on, I already bought the “Ultimate Edition”! Doesn’t “ultimate” mean “final”? As in, “not gonna release it again, we’re through here”?

I posted a long rant about altering existing films in this thread back in 2000, when The Exorcist was rereleased in digitally-altered form. I feel the same way today. You shouldn’t digitally screw with films from other eras, I don’t care if your name is Lucas or Spielberg or Friedkin. It’s just plain wrong, and I won’t support it.

Don’t get me started on E.T.…

6

Max: I seem to recall some massive monkeying with E.T, but I can’t recall just what was done. Can anyone enlighten me?

As for Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut is not only a much better version because of the change in ending, it also answers an important question with a sequence that was removed from the original version at Harrison Ford’s insistence. And, on a purely stylistic note, the out-of-place narration is gone. The Director’s Cut is so much better I wouldn’t even consider buying the original release for my DVD collection.

7

There’s one that sticks out in my mind, the scene where the police have blocked the road and the bikes take to the air - in the new version they removed the guns from the police officers’ hands and replaced them with radios.

8

I agree that we could do without some of the Special Editions (The Star Wars Special editions seemed [retty pointless to me – a lot of nifty visuals added that didn’t affect the story. Although, I admit, I paid to see them inj the theaters). On the other hand, when the Special Edition is a Director’s Cut as he really wanted it, not as he was forced to compromise to get the damned thing in the theaters, it can be great.
Aliens has a lot more than just the auto-guns sequence added. Cameron had scenes showing the life of the “shake and Bake” settlement and of "Newt"s life before the Alien invasion ripped it apart. Good stuff. I also really refer his original cut of Terminator 2. They vut out some excellent material, not padding, before its initial release. Ditto for Cameron’s Abyss, which seems like almost a different movie.

Bladerunnerp has already been mentioned. The difference is so profound that Pepper Mill, who hated the initial release, loves the Director’s Cut.

I also like the restored versions of older classics. Spartacus is much more complete now since its restoration about 15 years ago. Again, it ain’t padding, but scenes that were thought too risque/risky at the time. The version of 1776 on DVD has two scenes cut from the original release because they annoyed Richard Nixon(!)

9

I don’t mind some of the special editions. The extra scenes in LOTR added detail to some of the characters, especially the dwarf. You’re right though about E.T., Star Wars, and the T2 proliferation. I think the special editions are only bad if:

a)they extra scenes or whatnot don’t add anything to the movie. Every stupid teen comedy has an extended release that has more dick and fart jokes.

b)it changes the tone of the movie. Guns to radios and Greedo firing first are two of the biggest movie rapes in history. Han stepping of Jabbas tail is somewhere in the top ten.

c)it is just a desperate grab for money. I can’t believe that in the last couple of years somebody found something so cool that had to be added to T2 to justify another $40 dvd boxed set.

10

The allure of the “alternate ending” escapes me. If you’re the director or producer and you have an alternate ending, why wouldn’t you just save it for a sequel?

11

ooo…I forgot about The Abyss with that stupid 5000 ft tsunami wave at the end.

I bought Old School Unrated Version on DVD. I can’t figure out what’s so unrated other than the brief jello wrestling scene with the tities. It’s not like there are new scenes of Eliza Cuthbert going down on Luke Wilson or anything.

There is nothing worse than movies being edited from their original version to make them more PC.
It still leaves me with the problem of not knowing which version is “the” version I should add to my DVD collection.

12

The editing of E.T. is just plain idiotic. As noted above, scenes with the FBI agents brandishing guns were altered so that the agents were holding walkie-talkies. Why was this change made? I mean, you can be anti-gun all you want, but who seriously wants to argue that federal law enforcement officers shouldn’t carry guns?

About the Star Wars special editions: Lucas’s justification for the SEs is that he always wanted the movie to look like this, but he didn’t have the budget. Okay, fine, whatever. But does he expect us to believe that he didn’t have the money back in 1977 to finish the “Greedo shoots first” scene, when he already had the film for it? Clearly, it’s just a latter-day addition he made because, in his old age, he’s decided that Han needed a more solid justification for shooting Greedo (even though, most would agree, he had one already). Since Greedo’s wild miss is probably the most-hated scene in any altered film, if Lucas has any brains, he should remove the scene before the movie hits DVD.

Oh, another thing about Star Wars: more stuff was changed than just the added scenes and the background CGI. Look at this side-by-side comparison of the editing in the “prison shootout” scene between the original and special edition movies: Star Wars Censored. Pause the movie and advance one frame at a time, or you might miss the difference.

I hear now that yet another version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail is being released on DVD. sigh. I already have two!

13

Heh - I bought a region-free DVD player just so I could see the director’s cut of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. That’s an example of a movie that could have greatly benefitted from the deleted scenes:

Ever wonder why Sting had such a care-free atitude about Hachet Harry and why Harry had such a hard-on to get the bar? It’s 'cos Sting won it from him in a poker game years ago.

But yes, the ETs and Star Warses of the world really cheese me off.

14

For LOTR, the extended edition, scenes were put back in that were nice but not vital (in the opinion of the director et al).
Some of the stuff was just an extra line or 2. Other scenes were cool moments in the book (gift giving in Lorien, Frodo & Sam seeing Elves leaving). Most fans appreciated these scenes. They were not in the theatrical version because it would have made the movie too long. Also, the exteneded edition had 4 commentary tracks (the director/writer track explains many of the added scenes and why they were cut)

So I think there is a reason why there are two versions–theatrical for casual fans (in a palatable length) and extended for hardcore fans. Some of whom would be excited by a 4+ hour version.

Brian

15

This is not a new thing at all. There’s never been “one version” of a movie.

Since the dawn of the movies, films have been recut and reedited for a variety of reasons.

Sometimes the movies were cut down after previews, or on re-release, or when they needed to hit a certain time, or when they were distributed to TV.

Sometimes the movies were expanded when they are re-released, or when they needed to hit a certain time (Laurel and Hardy two-reelers were sometimes padded with non-L&H musical numbers to bring them up to feature length, for example.)

Sometimes slightly different versions are released in different parts of the world (e.g. it turns out that the British versions of some Marx Brothers movies are slightly different than the American releases.)

But in the deep dark distant past, when people could only see movies in theatres or on broadcast TV, these changes usually went undetected by everyone except for the most hard-core movie geeks and film scholars.

Then along comes video. Now the average viewer can own a copy of his favorite movie. Now he suddenly notices that the version on the video isn’t quite the same version he saw on TV as a kid. Now the guys who make the video/DVD can add on the deleted scenes and an explanation of why there are different versions. All of a sudden the endless tinkering with movies, which has always gone on, becomes clear.

There are two ways to react to this. One is to complain about the silly, pointless versions, like Apocalypse Now Redux, the Star Wars special editions or – going a bit further back – Chaplain’s narrated re-release of The Gold Rush.

The other is to be happy that you, the consumer, often now have access to the better versions – the restored 217 minute Lawrence of Arabia (as opposed to the butchered 187 minute version), the director’s cut of Blade Runner, or (coming this fall) restored versions of the classic Loony Tunes cartoons.

You take the bad with the good. But take it from someone who grew up watching heavily edited, badly scratched movies on commercial TV interspersed with constant commercials for used cars: the good in the DVD age far outweighs the bad.

16

Wumpus is right; different versions have been floating around since way before video, but without one version being engraved indelibly in your mind, it went pretty much undetected.

Case in point, Lost Horizon. There are so many versions of that over the years, both theatrical and for television broadcast, it’s hard to keep track – they even changed the name a bit for Pete’s sake. The restored version released a short time ago on DVD uses the original, full length (138 minutes I think) soundtrack that was discovered in the UK with images from here, there, and everywhere (Including a couple 16mm television prints from Canada) and there were still a couple minutes that were missing. The restorers bridged them with stills from similar scenes in the movie.

Speaking of Lord of the Rings, could it be that there are two versions of The Two Towers floating around? As the link states, there are reports of P.J.'s cameo having him hurl either a spear or a rock. I swear I’ve seen both in the couple times I saw it in the theater. Guess we’ll find out when the DVD is released.

DD

17

Well yes. I have to admit I like the full length version of Dune more than the chopped up theater-friendly version.
Fuckin’ Lucas. He is determined to make sure all the Star Wars movies suck.

18

I know. This sh*t can be such a pain in the ass. I miss older movies where the movie was just gritty and unapologetic and well done.

I’m going to watch A Decade Under the Influence tonight. Its a documentary on 70s movies and the filmmaking from that era. IFC is airing it in 3 parts this week and then as a whole on Friday.

19

I, too was kind of upset when I first heard about the changes to E.T., my favorite movie from childhood. They just seemed unnecessary.

But at least Spielberg and co. did us right by including BOTH the original theatrical version and the new digitally “enhanced” version in the same package. So you have a choice. (You hear that, George Lucas?)

And for the record, I’ve watched both versions and the changes are actually pretty subtle and don’t detract from the movie. If you hadn’t seen the original recently, you’d probably never notice the difference. But some of us just like the original better for nostalgia’s sake.