8
votes
Beyond the Snyder cut: From an R-rated Mrs Doubtfire to an ultra-violent Event Horizon, film history is littered with rumours of cuts that may or may not exist
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- Title
- Beyond the Snyder cut: the other mythical films we're curious to see
- Authors
- Charles Bramesco
- Published
- Mar 23 2021
- Word count
- 1376 words
Director's cuts can be great, but our culture's obsession with auters greatly ignores the creative aspects of the work of producers. I have quite a few unpopular opinions because I do not believe directors are necessarily better than producers. I actually like the theatrical version of Blade Runner (which I cannot find anymore, it was basically erased from history and from the internet) and the director cut of Apocalypse Now has 30 minutes of useless scenes.
People rarely talk about cinematographers either. Going back to Dune, I'm excited that Villeneuve is directing the new one but I'm gutted that Deakins isn't on cinematography. Roger Deakins is why Blade Runner 2049 is so good, much more so (imo) than Villeneuve.
The other greatly unmentioned person in the trilogy of creative leads on a movie (director and cinematographer are the other two) is the editor. A good editor can make or break a film. But they live in a darkened room, often late at night, hunched over an Avid deck and don't do anything glamorous like shouting 'action' or riding a camera boom.
Don't get me started on sound designers. Nobody notices sound design but it's so, so important. And I don't just mean Han Zimmer putting that stupid honking noise everywhere (it's a shame he's known for that because Zimmer is actually very good at his job), the diagetic ("in universe" sound, not soundtrack) sound really matters as well, but when it's right you barely notice, it's only when it's really wrong that it stands out. But that still means it has to be got right.
Film is a hugely collaborative artform and I agree we shouldn't just focus on directors.
Generally I don't like director's cuts, they tend to put too much in and end up with far too much runtime. The art is usually in taking stuff out. I did like the final version of Apocalypse Now though. I did watch it first while under the influence of lsd so that might have been a factor (btw, if you get the chance do that because it was incredible)
Film is Not Really My Thing™, so I don't have strong feelings on the director/producer relation; but there's a tension I think is similar in literature between authors and editors. To wit: when authors become famous enough to ignore (or just awe into mute acceptance) their editors, the quality of their work nearly always plummets. (One clear example of this is George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, where books four and five drag terribly and books six plus are widely assumed never to be forthcoming.) Turns out having an outside observer with the authority to say "this is bad, fix it or get rid of it" is important! People, no matter how smart or well-regarded, are bad at evaluating their own work, and so having someone to tell you you've gone too far up your own butt (figuratively speaking, usually) helps mitigate that.
Absolutely. As a writer I would love to have an editor. I used to have a producer that was very much involved in the creative process when I worked in film projects more often, and it was awesome.
I think there are just as many "director's cuts" that are worse as there are ones that are better.
I believe the negative perception of producers comes from stories like that of Little Shop of Horrors. Studio meddling and focus testing damaged the original version of the film. While it was still good, they threw out the original ending where Seymour and Audrey are eaten, and the plant goes on to wreak havoc throughout the city. This finale cost $5m to film, and lined up with the original ending of the source material. The producers did some audience testing and decided the ending was too weird and grim..for a movie about a man who feeds people to his giant carnivorous plant. So a new "happy" ending was shot where the main characters lives and Audrey II is defeated.
Also whenever a trailer or poster says "From the producers of {{Really Good Movie}}", it's usually a bad sign.
I mention this a lot but there's always potentially someone who hasn't heard about it - there's a fanedit of Dune which is supposedly very close to Lynch's original shooting script. We'll never know if it was the film Lynch wanted to make, but it's an amazing piece of work in terms of piecing something together from the available bits and pieces. It's three hours long and well worth a watch even if you didn't like the original cut of the movie.
It's been confirmed dozens of times over that there is no original version of Event Horizon to be released. They destroyed the unused footage.