WHICH VERSION?(editing motion pictures)

SCENES ON THE CUTTING ROOM FLOOR

THERE IS a famous story about the old Lindfield Kings projectionist in the 1950s and 1960s. Whatever the movie, he would be at Lindfield station by 11 p.m., ready to catch his train home. "How do you do it?" a colleague once asked. "Oh, I just drop out a couple of reels towards the end and no one notices," the projectionist from hell replied. But a lot of people did notice and Lindfield Kings found itself on an unofficial blacklist for serious moviegoers.

Nothing could be done then here or elsewhere about the vandalism of exhibitors controlling first-run movie houses. Often they would insist on cuts so that an "unwieldy" film could be made to fit their session times. Their justification usually was that the audiences were finding the film "too long", but the only evidence we have of the public's response to the now lost full-length Star is Born (1954) are angry letters denouncing the cuts. Distributors chopped away at the enormously popular Lawrence of Arabia, nearly destroying it for all time. Even after all the pieces were put back for the restoration, a section of soundtrack could not be found, so Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif were brought back to revoice the missing dialogue.

Nowadays pressures are more subtle. Throughout the making of a film writers, directors and editors are urged to keep it to a "manageable" length. The industry is now actually taking advantage of this, releasing on video and now DVD "director's cuts" including "scenes never shown before". It is all very enjoyable and provides an invaluable insight into film-makers' thinking. The danger is that mainstream film-makers are being conditioned to believe that the only form of expression that audiences will accept, at least for theatrical release, is a work where issues are explored in tightly structured, concise scenes and narratives.

"Screenwriting is like composing a sonnet," as one distinguished writer and producer told me. And indeed sometimes it is. Anyone who has sat through the entire ten-hour Russian War and Peace emerges from the experience with new respect for King Vidor's three-and-a-half-hour version. (The only problem was with the nitwits who for whatever reason wanted to make further cuts.) The problem at present is that directors and screenwriters faced with a complex subject that requires further development do indeed write and direct the story as imagined, but are later persuaded to remove much of the complexity before releasing the picture. "After all, it can go on the DVD." This may be great for DVD and video sales but film-makers are sometimes selling themselves and their audiences short.

This is best illustrated by the events surrounding the restoration of Sam Wood's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), an older film certainly, but the issues remain the same. When the full-length version was first released the exhibitors complained that the film was too long to show as part of a double bill. So Wood and his editor came to New York and recut the picture. It was this version I saw in 1954 at the Gothic Theatre, Willoughby. From memory they did a reasonably good job; even in a battered nitrate print the film had tremendous power. I recall being so moved by this story of guerillas operating behind rebel lines during the Spanish Civil War that I was in the library the next day reading the Hemingway novel.

For a reissue in 1957 a new version was prepared at Paramount. An opening sequence was restored but further cuts were made to make the film not only fit the exhibitors' time slots but those of the television networks. This was the version most of us saw on television and until recently on video. However, this time the studio cut the negative. (The late 1950s and early 1960s were a bad time at Paramount. Shortly after this, corporate vandals destroyed all the studio's records together with their magnificent research library.) In 1943 and 1957 the virtual destruction of For Whom the Bell Tolls never became a public issue.