Drop Frame

Maelstrom: "Almost Famous" and the Trouble with Extended Editions

31 July 2005

What can you say about a five-year-old movie that was reborn?

"Almost Famous" (2000) was Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical ode to the music upon which he grew up, started a career, and made his name. Successful and Oscar-winning (best original screenplay), the film came and went and came again, within the year, as a DVD titled, oddly enough, "Untitled: The Bootleg Cut." Its reincarnation was a director’s edition featuring 35 extra minutes of footage and a slew of special features. Included in the new edition – go figure – the original theatrical release.

This is a reflection of the age in which we live: the Age of Multiple Returns. DVDs have begun to be more lucrative than their films’ release to cinemas, and the result has been faster turnarounds between the date the film appears on screen and the date it is given to the public for individual consumption. What a water-cooler moment it must have been, then, when an executive somewhere first thought to burn any given movie not once, but twice, to DVD, the same year it was released or many years later, as director’s cuts, extended editions, platinum limited trademark copies, critical recreations, silver anniversary commemorations, and so on.

This year, this momentum has come under fire somewhat. Hollywood suffered through a dismal 19-week attendance drought, and their scapegoat has been how quickly movies are now released on DVD. Perhaps scapegoat is too strong a term since a recent AP-AOL poll suggested that 70 percent of pollees would rather watch movies at home – unsurprising given the improving quality of home-movie theaters – but rising ticket prices and, let’s face it, the low quality of the movies Hollywood released in that 19-weeks have also not done much to inspire the moviegoers to dance to Tinsel Town’s tune. It’s a quality driven industry, in the end, and any way the film industry and theater owners divide it, they depend on the films themselves.

Thus, we return to "Almost Famous," or more precisely, to "Untitled." They are both quality films by most measures: incredibly strong scripts, incredibly well acted, competently put together by a director who is a star in his own right (and frankly, more impressive, I feel, for having been a staff writer for Rolling Stone at the age of sixteen). I stress the word "both" here, because as much as Cameron Crowe would like to claim that the latter makes "you feel much more like you’re on tour with the band, and you have a chance to get to know the characters in much greater depth" -- I quote the director’s cut’s back cover -- they are two different films. Eisenstein theorized that a shot cannot be placed next to any two other shots without eliciting a different response from the viewer. How can a film extended by half an hour add anything but new responses – as Crowe says, "greater depth" – that did not originally apply. The Butterfly Effect -- not chaos theory, but the stock tattoo butterfly that’s on a thousand ankles worldwide, yet seems inevitably fresh and new and quirky? How can an extended edition be at all the same thing?

This is a conversation that can be had for the "Lord of the Rings" franchise as easily as it could for Crowe’s piece. The companies surrounding "Lord of the Rings" mastered the art of DVD promotion, releasing the theatrical versions after the films’ first runs, then waiting for Christmas the following year to release monster extended recreations on four disks each.

Crowe’s piece offers us an extended edition different from Peter Jackson’s Magnum Opuses: where Jackson was extending mostly, I feel, for fans of the books, Crowe was adding... what exactly? A lot of conversations in "Untitled" have been expanded from "Almost Famous." The overriding theme in added sections seems to be awkwardness: a shower scene, a strange bedroom visit from a sister’s ex-boyfriend, a failed goodbye while Lester Bangs waits for the bus, a brilliant sequence of a radio interview referred to in the original film, now seen, and thankfully so – Quince, a stoned disk jockey played by Tenacious D veteran Kyle Gass, passes out before the members of the film’s leading band, inciting a light-hearted feud, on-air. Crowe also added a pretty significant point of view break: we suddenly are party to a nicely-crafted conversation between two reluctant lovers in a hotel ice-room, a moment the film’s very central protagonist, William Miller, was not party to, and therefore, we should not be, no matter how well-crafted the conversation be.

The question is, who cares? There is no Middle Earth here, there are no fans ready to chant like orcs and demand Crowe’s head on a Scots sword (imagine what they would have done to Jackson had he made "Rings" into only one film like the Weinsteins suggested). In "Almost Famous," we have only Crowe, his story, his life, and how he intended to put it on screen. Why bother with two editions? "Because the director’s cut is the pure vision of the script," you say, "cutting for time, for substance, to put it on screen in theater – i.e. the cutting done by executives – is a corruption of the film art." And to you insufferable lot, I say, "tough."

The "cutting done by executives" is the film process. Why? They have the money, and without the money the movies do not get made. The same is true of theatre, of music, of fine arts. So be it for film.

The editing that gets done after the director is part of the process, after all, like the second editor to journalists, the second draft of the published text. True, some executives would seek -- or have sought -- to cut out all but the most cliche in films, to remove the very thing that gives a film the identity to be worth seeing. In those cases, let filmmakers strive to have their own voice. Let filmmakers fight. But when the cutting is done for less obscene reasons, why argue?

"Almost Famous" is a good example. Academy Award winning in its original contexts, the extended verison is long and less focused; I remind you of the point of view break. Its "greater depth" is also uninteresting character development – certainly nothing that did not exist in first movie. The same $3.5 million soundtrack (a tremendous soundtrack) is there without alteration, the same acting. So, apart from the radio interview and the timing of the line "You’re still young enough to be honest," said to Miller after he lies about his age, little makes the new version worthwhile. Little, except the temptation to buy it because its extended, which is, after all, the point.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must break with my critical facade for a moment to add that I am a big fan of the original film. I might not immediately agree with Joel Siegel that "Almost Famous" is "the best rock and roll movie ever" – I would turn Mr. Siegel’s attention to "Don’t Look Back," "This is Spinal Tap," "Stop Making Sense," and "Tommy," just for starters – but I do reserve a certain central place for it in my filmic mind. I think, because it’s a road movie, as much as it is a rock movie. An "Easy Rider" with a kid, whom I identified with when I first saw it (whom I identify with now, since I’m struggling for interviews just as he is).

That perspective notwithstanding, a greater issue is at work. That of sales. What is the permanence of film, anymore, if DVDs are being released with extended versions, fuller versions, deleted scenes, scenes just recently unearthed in a vault somewhere? Aren’t deleted scenes just an indication that the filmmaker didn’t do his job to begin, making sure that what he shot would fit into story and time frames? Weren’t Lucas’ new editions of "Star Wars" worse than the originals because they were technically updated?

No, give me the genuine article. The original cut. The studio version. I want the film that has all the sweat and tears and fights behind it. Give me the studio recreations for good and bad, because, where there is bad, we can learn, and where there is good, there is bound to be a good filmmaker who refused to let his voice be overthrown.

If the filmgoing audience lets itself get sucked into this frenzy of director’s special versions – an easy thing to do since it seems so much more the right thing to do – than what’s to stop a film from having seven or eight or eighteen DVD versions? What’s to keep studios from making money off test edits and pre-prints, packaging them as rough drafts, two for $20, if they were so generous as to set the price so low? Where would the rebirths end?

The "Untitled" package offers an intesesting concession: both the director’s cut and the original theatrical release, together between two disks. An interesting concept, though I wonder if it could be done in one blow, an option to watch the film with or without deleted scenes. A thought for the rushing tide of DVD salesmanship that may not have the gravity to be reversed.

It’s a question of integrity, in the final analysis. Film as permanent article. Film cannot be an accountable or documentable form if it can be re-released over and over again. Film would have no real texts, no substance: the directors would know they could always go back and try again. There would be only additions.

Can’t the silence be at times more compelling than the sound?

In the days before video brought movies into the home, the audience had no way to know what was or was not the original film. It had no options: there was only the movie as it played when it played. Perhaps we should go back to that. It would solve the theater owners’ problems. They, I am sure, would have little to say.

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