Monday, July 24, 2006
DVD Special Editions Out Of Control
Sony announced today that "Bugsy: Extended Cut" will come out on October 3rd. Wonderful, but for one thing: whose extended cut? They don't mention Warren Beatty or director Barry Levinson or even screenwriter James Toback. Surely with Beatty backing him, Levinson had control over the final cut for this Oscar-winning film. Studios are churning out 'special edition" cuts of movies left and right, assuming people will just buy anything. The great thing about DVD is they don't HAVE to make us choose. It's very easy to include a theatrical release AND a director's cut (if there is such a thing) on one DVD or in a set. Odds and ends -- deleted scenes that the director didn't use and never intended to use -- shouldn't be slapped into the movie wily-nily. Include them in the extras as deleted scenes, for heaven's sake. I'll bet when they release this, the original theatrical version goes out of print and that's a travesty. The theatrical versions should ALWAYS be the primary version available on DVD except in a very few rare instances any film buff can name. (And the original version should still be available anyway.) Nowadays, finding the theatrical version is becoming harder and harder.
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2 comments:
And yet I wait Shekhar Kapur's original 3 hour version of Four Feathers...
I'm starting to think that winter's evening in 2001 was just a fantastical dream.
Priv8pete is referring to a screening of a three hour rough cut of "The Four Feathers" that he attended. The final theatrical version he found far less satisfying. I have no objection to a "director's cut" of The Four Feathers -- assuming Kapur WANTS a director's cut out there and oversees it and the DVD doesn't supplant the theatrical version that was released. Ideally, BOTH of them should be available in one, low-priced set (say $30 for a two disc set). But if the studio just sat some intern at an editing machine and had them slap in every piece of film they could find to create an "extended cut" of Four Feathers that no one involved creatively in the film had anything to do with, then I would object. That movie was of course a critical and commercial flop. The debate gets really silly when we're talking about Academy Award-winning landmarks like Apocalypse Now, The Last Emperor and the iconic blockbuster Star Wars. The fact that those directors want to ELIMINATE forever the theatrical versions that achieved so much acclaim and supplant them with newly edited versions is a travesty. Lucas can release a 10 hour version of Star Wars for all I care -- heck, I'll even sit in a theater and watch it. But don't try to rewrite history and dump the version that was originally released.
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