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Indeed, at times, restorers get carried away with their noble task. Akira Kurosawa is amused by the diligence of historians who assemble the complete Japanese versions of films that the director wanted Western audiences to see in a shorter, faster-paced form. He is now at work streamlining his latest film, The Shadow Warrior, in consultation with his executive producers: Francis Coppola and George Lucas.
They are a good choice for chopping. As Young Turks rising to the status of Hollywood pashas, they upset many of the old rules—including the precept that a finished film really is finished. Coppola sutured his two Godfather films, along with an hour of outtakes, into a four-night NBC extravaganza, and last year he previewed several versions of Apocalypse Now before deciding which one he wanted—for now. Lucas rereleased American Graffiti with additional footage. Still, Coppola and Lucas are hardly the only directors to have joined the emerging slice-and-splice school: Stanley Kubrick cut 19 minutes from 2001: A Space Odyssey a week after its release in 1968, and three minutes from The Shining after its opening this May. Robert Altman planned an eight-hour Nashville saga for ABC, and Martin Scorsese hoped to restore many of the sequences cut from New York, New York for telecast on NBC; so far, neither dream has been fulfilled. Bernardo Bertolucci is a compulsive tinkerer. After the release of Last Tango in Paris, Critic Pauline Kael complained to him that one of the best paragraphs in her review described a sequence that Bertolucci had cut.
Steven Spielberg, child and master of the movie machine, is another film maker who shows an itch to play Silly Putty with finished work. His first TV feature, Duel, was released in a longer version for theaters in Europe. Last year when ABC aired Jaws, Spielberg added a few scenes cut from the original print. Now he has reworked Close Encounters, deleting 25 minutes from the original print and incorporating 20 minutes of outtakes and new footage. The result: the "new" Close Encounters is different—and the same.
The plot has remained. Repairman Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) is struck, like Saul of Tarsus, with a vision of alien benignity; together with Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon), whose small son has run away from home to hitch a ride on a starship, Roy brazens his way into the first meeting of man and extraterrestrial. Both film versions pay heartfelt homage to the spirit of early Disney—not only in their use of the song When You Wish Upon a Star (from Pinocchio) but also in their insistence on a childlike belief in the magic of movies. The actors here are the audience: they spend most of the film watching and listening to the lovely sights and sounds that Spielberg and his special-effects team have put together. Spielberg in effect is the alien who steps from the mother ship at the end of the film. He is shy and cute, smart and wise. He smiles and waves.