CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND: THE SPECIAL EDITION
Directed and Written by Steven Spielberg
Hot young Director Ace Tyro has toiled for three years to complete his widescreen, R-rated indictment of major league baseball, All That Yaz. Its original running time: 135 minutes. But Tyro decides to cut five minutes for the premiere, and another five minutes after the first week of its release. He adds 20 minutes for the European version. For airplane showings the movie is softened to get a PG rating and cut to two hours flat; the airline projectors can hold only that much film.
Yaz is sold to a cable system, which airs the 125-minute version, and then to a commercial network, which gives the film a new title (The Umpire Strikes Out). To fit a two-hour prime-time slot, the network cuts it to 97 minutes. Later, another network restores much of the footage, including half an hour of outtakes, minus the locker-room sex scene. Finally, 16mm prints are rented to film societies and revival houses, but in a TV-shaped format and with yet another title: La Cage aux Fouls.
Look at a painting, listen to a record, read a novel or even a movie review, and you are in the presence of something immutable—a work of art or craft that has achieved its definitive form. In theory, film should be the same: an art machine as permanent as bronze replicas of a Degas dancer, as popular as the Model T Ford. In fact, film has become a most pliable plastic art. A wily producer, a finicky censor, even a TV executive can alter or destroy the film's shape, texture and meaning. Now the directors are playing at cinema surgery: Steven Spielberg has just issued a "special edition" of his 1977 hit, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. As one film critic observes: "People used to ask me if I'd seen a certain movie. Now they ask which version I've seen."
Ever since their flickering beginnings, movies have been fair game for the scissors and splicer. In 1903 the distributors of The Great Train Robbery advised nickelodeons that a startling shot of a gunman firing directly at the audience could be inserted at either the beginning or the end of the film. D.W. Griffith's epic Intolerance (1916), which blended parables from four epochs into a "film fugue," bombed at the box office; so Griffith extracted and recut two of the stories and released them as separate films. Too soon, producers were applying the cleaver of their judgment to good films and bad, all in the name of "giving the public what it wants." The public, it was implied, did not want to see the complete, two-hour version of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons—so 43 minutes were cut, never to be seen again.
In many cases, the unkindest cuts of movie moguls have been restored decades later by heroic film scholars. Together again for the first time: King Kong, in which the great ape engages in vigorous foreplay with Fay Wray; Welles' Macbeth and Touch of Evil; Max Ophuls' magnificent melodrama Lola Monies; and Sergio Leone's great homage to John Ford, Once Upon a Time in the West.