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October 31, 2006
Look, up in the sky... it's Richard Donner!
I'm looking forward to this. The trend of "director's cuts" lately has been a marketing ploy. Directors shoot and edit the film, then hand it over to the studio with a running time of over 2 hours. The studio understandably cuts 30 minutes or so, then releases the film, and everyone and their mama knows that the missing 30 minutes will be thrown back in for a "director's cut" DVD, which will come out 4 to 6 months after the first DVD release. These "special edition" DVDs are nothing more than a chance to pick your pocket. Very often when you watch the missing scenes you can see why they were cut in the first place.
As a writer I can see how shooting certain scenes can be very useful, practically critical, for the creation of a film. I write lots of scenes in my fiction which end up getting cut. They don't flow, they tread water, or they don't really serve much of a purpose for the reader. But that doesn't mean that they don't serve a valuable purpose for me, the writer. They help me get the voices of my characters, they help me understand some of their motives and biases. Sometimes they give me a quiet moment for the character to reflect on themselves, and when that happens the writing in the rest of the material improves. I know my character and story better as a result. If I didn't push up against the boundaries of my story and the people within it, and if I didn't occasionally push past it, I wouldn't know where those boundaries are at all and my writing would be like a river without a bank--listless, directionless, and stagnant. So, I am all in favor of directors and actors and screenwriters shooting all sorts of scenes, figuring out what they are trying to say, and then cutting them out of the film. Share them on the DVD in the extras section. Or shoot and shoot and shoot, and sometimes you end up with an entire second film, vastly different and separate from the first one you started. While I think that many of the "Director's Cut" DVDs are just a money grab, I don't think that extensive shooting or sharing that footage with viewers is a bad thing. I also don't think that multiple versions of a film are a bad thing--some director's cuts are legitimately different from the released film due to changes made competely outside the director's interest or vision, changes which may in fact drastically change the film.
Superman II - The Richard Donner Cut is in a different class. Donner was pulled off the shoot and replaced. Entire sections of the film were scrapped and the ending altered and reshot. What is being released here is thanks to a re-edit which replaces lost footage, and the ability of modern special effects to step in and bring back a vision that was altered, not just cut. This is not George Lucas adding special effects to STAR WARS and rereleasing the film. It's as if George Lucas had been replaced halfway through "Empire Strikes Back" with another director who removed the scenes with Vader fighting Luke, and now years later Lucas has the opportunity to recreate his film.
And this release goes beyond economics for another reason: Donner had a vision of Superman which was quite strong and resounding. His vision was imitated for the recent "Superman Returns," and he's actually going to be writing one of the Superman comic books for DC. I'd say that this release of Donner's version of "Superman II" is far from a money grab, it may be a return of the real deal.
Posted by sferrell at October 31, 2006 10:15 AM
