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Hollywood Cut-Ups:
If you were an aficionado of nineteenth century Romantic
history painting, you’d likely oppose the curator of the Musee du Louvre in
Paris if he decided to placate the politically correct mores of his museum
clientele by painting a brassiere over the exposed bosom of Lady Liberty in
Eugene Delacroix’s The Twenty-Eighth of July: Liberty Leading the People.
Or if you had a penchant for contemporary literature, you’d most certainly
find it unpardonable if a committee of bow-tied bureaucrats elected to strike
the racial epithets from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird just to
keep a few minority high school students from being rubbed the wrong way. And I
daresay that if you grooved to the music of the Rolling Stones, you’d have a
major bone to pick with their label if it tried to attract younger listeners by
re-releasing Exile on Main Street with a newly recorded mix that
lightened the original album’s purposefully muddled, fagged-out sound. Of
course, you’d be right to contest any one of these decidedly abhorrent
scenarios because altering a work of art in any way—whether it’s to
accommodate present-day morality or to mend its waning popularity in the name of
profit—is a criminally thoughtless bastardization of the original material. So
why isn’t cinema, a medium just as artistically precious as literature or
painting, afforded the same degree of respect and protection? Granted, the
mounting trend of studios re-releasing classic movies with new material has
proven an ingenious tool to help generate additional revenue for aging titles,
but the modern technological refinements imposed upon such classic pictures as E.T.
or the Star Wars trilogy is an artistically fraudulent procedure, and
displaces such movies from their rightful place in the annals of film history.
Whether it’s grafting new-fangled computer-generated trickery over a sci-fi
picture’s original special effects, or shoehorning previously struck footage
into the body of an established masterwork, the business of revising older
motion pictures to suit contemporary tastes is a cinematic sacrilege, and robs
future moviegoers of experiencing films the way past audiences did. You’d expect the avaricious studio chiefs in Hollywood to
be indifferent to the historical value of preserving films in their initial
form, but the filmmakers themselves have become co-conspirators in this crime
against cinema. In fact, the studio-director relationship has become so
incestuous that the misleading moniker of “special edition” has lost any
real meaning and has become synonymous with “director’s cut,” a term
less likely to kindle distress from the film purists. With financial backing
from 20th Century Fox, director George Lucas re-released Star Wars upon
its twentieth anniversary in 1997 with enhanced digital effects, newly lensed
footage, and audio tracks boosted to the latest Dolby specifications. In
interviews, Lucas mumbled some sort of twaddle about how “movies are never
really finished, just abandoned,” and how a lack of monetary resources
prohibited him from executing his true epic vision of Luke Skywalker and
company’s star-trekking adventures. But even a child could spy that these were
the desperate rationalizations of an aging auteur second-guessing his cinematic
legacy, and that Lucas’s decision to technically revamp his renowned space
opera was a crass marketing ploy to spark interest in the forthcoming trilogy of
Star Wars prequels. Indeed, special effects had evolved considerably
since 1977, but it was Lucas and his contemporaries that were instrumental in
educating the movie going public about the importance of film preservation.
Lucas’s drastic about-face on the issue in regard to his own pictures was
duplicitous at best, and his feeble justification for partaking in the very deed
he once sermonized against calls into question his integrity as an artist. Lucas
is far from being just another grasping Tinsel Town whore, but you have to
wonder if financial attainment has become more important to him than artistic
achievement. The modifications Lucas imposed upon the Star Wars
trilogy for its heavily promoted re-release were anything but subtle, and
routinely squandered the movies’ aesthetic flow for the new effects were
irritatingly conspicuous when juxtaposed against the old. In the original Return
of the Jedi, puppeteer Phil Tippet achieved some funny effects with Sy
Snootles and the Max Rebo Band, an alien ensemble that headlined at the palace
of the gangster ogre Jabba the Hut. Their peculiar musical stylings were
realized by composer John Williams, and their signature ditty, “Lapti Nek,”
perfectly underscored the filth and debauchery that pervaded Jabba’s lair. But
in the revised edition of Jedi, the marionette of Sy has been eighty-sixed
and replaced by a digitally realized version, relegating Tippet’s innovations
in the craft of puppetry to the celluloid scrap heap. Williams’ “Lapti Nek”
has been unceremoniously cut from the proceedings, too, and some characterless
piece of pop left in its stead. I suspect the thinking behind these changes was
that they’d carry more appeal for today’s younger audiences, but surely
nobody in their right mind would defend MGM if they decided to amend The
Wizard of Oz by digitizing the Cowardly Lion and dubbing over his signature
song with some expletive-riddled, Ice Cube-style rap. So why isn’t poor Miss
Snootles granted the same respect? Many argue that since George Lucas is the chief architect of the Star Wars universe, the movies are fundamentally his to do with whatever he likes. But this is a perilously dim slant on the matter because it disregards the fact that the original movies (despite their painfully obtuse dialogue, slapdash editing and embarrassing roster of limp thespians) have ingratiated themselves into our imaginations and have become a vital component of our popular culture. Lucas may lawfully manage the intellectual properties of Luke Skywalker and Sy Snootles, but these characters and the extraordinary worlds they inhabit essentially belong to all of us now. Lucas’s decision to overhaul the Star Wars trilogy
has since set an unfortunate precedent. Because of the films’ enormous
popularity, the cigar-chomping moguls in Hollywood won’t entertain the notion
any longer of re-releasing a classic sci-fi flick without first bringing its
effects up to date. (This smacks of Ted Turner’s bone-headed contention that
nobody would sit through a black and white picture anymore unless it was
colorized.) The figure that today’s kiddy set, raised on elaborate video
games, is too plugged into the refinements of digital technology to settle for
the quaint, in-camera effects of the original Star Wars trilogy—nor
would Hollywood’s makers and shakers buy the idea that any modern moviegoer
could still get all crinkly-eyed over a rubber-skinned animatronic like E.T.’s
title character. So, in order to placate the evolving tastes of contemporary
audiences, these once cherished pictures have been devalued to the level of
cut-rate merchandise, subject to revision and repackaging upon the whim of the
copyright holders. But this gross procedure throws into question whether the
updated reissue will inevitably supplant the original, making it the definitive
version and perhaps the only one accessible to future audiences. And if studios
(and filmmakers) keep adjusting the content to satisfy the new crowds, then we
have to assume that inevitably the “special edition” itself will we updated
down the road after technology makes another grand leap. (This has already come
to pass: special editions of the Star Wars special editions were released
on DVD earlier this year.) The world’s more astute filmmakers have yet to
address these questions, but once vocal critics justified in their contempt of
colorization or panning-and-scanning have remained curiously silent on the
subject, too. Just as disconcerting a practice of updating the technical
aspects of a motion picture is inserting formerly junked scenes into the body of
a recognized classic. A reissue, it is reasoned, can only be justified if it
touts some new, never-before-seen material—regardless if it disrupts the
thematic elements or narrative flow. In 2001, Francis Ford Coppola attempted to
rekindle interest in his sagging career by reissuing a 49-minute longer cut of
his hallucinatory masterpiece Apocalypse Now. The revamped edit (entitled
Apocalypse Now Redux) featured a host of lackluster sequences that the
director himself originally disavowed, dismissing them as irrelevant and
diversionary. Coppola should’ve banked on his original instincts because the
embarrassment of cutting-room trimmings that he inserted into his magnum opus
sadly annihilated the film’s once fluid tempo. Worse, the added footage
created myriad character incongruities that only served to explain their
amputation in the first place. In the original cut of Apocalypse Now,
Captain Willard was abnormally single-minded of purpose; his devotion to
locating and assassinating Colonel Kurtz helped to keep the rest of the
movie’s action building to its surreal climax. But the revised cut featured
such ludicrous passages as Willard sacrificing precious fuel so he could buy the
soldiers on his patrol boat a few hours of R&R with a chopper full of
brain-dead Playboy Bunnies. Coppola must’ve been brain-dead as well if he
forgot that Willard needed every ounce of that fuel to make it up the river so
he could comply with his mission to terminate the Colonel’s command. Even more
distressing, though, is that the new edit of Apocalypse Now has become
the definitive version because the previously removed scenes have been spliced
into the movie’s original negative, forever altering subsequent prints.
Coppola’s “special edition” or “director’s cut” of Apocalypse Now
may continue to garner interest from a new generation of moviegoers that might
have otherwise overlooked the film, but it should’ve been trumpeted for its
original merits, and re-released in its original form to celebrate the
astonishing achievement that it originally was. Since movies are often a reflection of the time in which
they were made, the up-to-the-minute modifications imposed upon them by the
dreaded “special edition” often disturbs their historical value. For
example, the 2001 re-release of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. made several
concessions to the new climate of political correctness. In the scene where Mary
chastises her son for dressing up as a terrorist for Halloween, the word
“terrorist” had been replaced with “hippie,” lest the sensibilities of
post-9-11 audiences be upset. Even more ridiculous was the decision to digitally
remove the holstered guns from the soldiers in charge of quarantining the dying
E.T. Though the minor changes in E.T. didn’t really upset the film’s
theme, other films have seen their entire meaning changed upon revision. By
making a few subtle edits in Blade Runner (as well as striking every
syllable of its admittedly atrocious narration), Ridley Scott transformed
replicant-hunter Deckard into the very specimen he was hired to track down,
completely standing the picture’s thesis on its head. Mind, when a studio rips a project from the hands of a director who isn’t contractually permitted “final cut,” a refurbished version may be in order down the road if that studio elects to disembowel the work to either placate contemporary mores or maximize screening potential. (The restored editions of Abel Gance’s Napoleon or Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America are good examples.) But too often the trend signifies a vulgar, shamelessly avaricious attempt to exploit art in the name of profit, or worse, pacifying the cinematic illiterate. When a classic motion picture is subjected to revisions to accommodate modern-day preferences, it trivializes the art form and squanders its historical significance. If directors such as Lucas are dissatisfied with their previous work, they should pour their energy into fabricating new pictures that more closely approximate their ambitions, and not muck around with their past efforts. Or if hindsight convinces them that cutting a particular scene from a picture’s original edit was a mistake, nobody will balk if they elect to include the deleted passages on the supplementary disc of a later DVD package. But if the almighty buck serves as the chief motivating force for reconstructing classic pictures, then only the ticket-buyers can dictate if Hollywood’s principal players will stay in the business of rewriting film history. December 15, 2005 NOTE: When Star Wars Episodes IV-VI were released on DVD earlier this year, yet another batch of “modifications” to the saga were revealed: a slightly less cartoonish Jabba the Hut putting the squeeze on Han Solo in A New Hope; Ian McDiarmid assuming his rightful place as ruler of the galaxy in The Empire Strikes Back; and Hayden Christensen replacing the late Sebastian Shaw as the shimmering specter of Anakin Skywalker in one of the closing shots of Return of the Jedi. The latter was the most offensive change Lucas had imposed upon the Star Wars pictures yet. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a gazillion times: Anakin may have gone over to the Dark Side when he was a young lad, but, goddammit, he returned to the side of the angels when he was an old fart. So, ejecting Shaw not only makes little sense, it’s an insult to his memory! © Copyright 2008 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.
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