February 04, 2006

Peckinpah's Garret & Kid restored

The Berlin International Film Festival is set to close on February the 18th with a digitally restored version of Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid.

It's not just any Special Edition or Director's Cut though, it's made a bit more special since the Director is dead. The work was carried out using his old notes and colleagues of the man himself. As close to a Director's Cut as we'll ever see then.

The story from ABC News took my attention to the official site where a short clip can be seen called "Deconstructing Pat & Billy" where you can hear some of the tales of the original cut.

This version sounds really exciting, but it brings up an interesting debate. You have a Director trying to create his vision of a movie, hopefully in sync with the Writer and Editor otherwise they are trying to make their own movie too. Then you get the Studio's interfering, who tend not to know that much about movies, just money making...and even then it more often than not they still have no idea about audiences.

That's usually where the Directors Cut wades in, after the first movie has been out for a while and the Studio reckon there's more money to be made by letting that ranting creative in the back have a go. So he does, and there you have your new cut, as was originally intended...or was it?

In this situation the Director wasn't even alive, so we're being told that it was made by people who knew what he wanted to do originally, and from his old notes...which apparently he did keep. Is that still his vision of the movie?

Regardless of all of that, I'll still want to see it...but who's cashing in?


Posted by at February 4, 2006 04:10 AM


Comments

As far as I can tell, the situation regarding this restoration is identical to that of "Touch of Evil", i.e. bastardised (repeatedly) by the studio that made it in the 50s, then posthumously restored to something like Welles' original intentions using his own notes as a guide. Interesting case of parallelism.
Who's cashing in, you ask? The studio is, as you also answer. The critical kudos they'll get for restoring the film in an attempt to look more enlightened than their predecessors are a nice bonus, but really, the studio's real interest in the film is that it represents back catalogue that can be exploited to make more money from it. Warner are not a small specialist label in it for the love of film; they wouldn't go to the effort if they didn't think there was money in it for them. (Remember, in the bad old days before TV, some studios had little compunction about destroying their own films if they thought they had no more commercial value.)

Posted by: James Russell at February 6, 2006 09:22 AM