The Case for Restricting Artists
As everyone knows, the director’s cut of a film is never anywhere near as good as the cut released to theaters. You may think you know of an exception, but you’re in error. No shame; we all make mistakes. In some cases — Blade Runner comes to mind — the director’s cut can actually turn a great film into a crashing, solipsistic bore.
And this is not really surprising. Restrictions on art — whether it’s the rigors of the sonnet form or some idiot studio executive screaming, “Make it shorter or you’re fired!” — force artists to use all their skill to say what they can in the space and manner provided. There is a reason no one reads new poetry; a reason paintings, which once served to express the deepest levels of the human experience, can now do little more than decorate bank lobbies. No restrictions. Poems are free form; paintings are abstract. And they suck. Restrictions make artists better, more resourceful, more clever, more artistic. Without them, art becomes free — and dull and meaningless.
Which brings me to The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. When director Peter Jackson made the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I understand the studio forbid him to go over three hours on any one of the three films. The result is a nine hour masterpiece. Unfortunately the success of that film seems to have made Jackson more or less untouchable. Now every movie he makes is essentially a director’s cut. And they’ve suffered for it. Everybody hates Jackson’s King Kong, but watch it again: King Kong would be a terrific movie about manhood and femininity — if you cut twenty seconds to a minute out of every single scene… and then cut some of the scenes.
As for The Hobbit — well, the first seven hours are a little slow, but it picks up in the final third. I mean, really, it’s one book, make one film. Use some skill, make some choices. Be an artist.
That said, the picture, though endless, looks lovely. The final hour really is exciting. And Martin Freeman, who plays Bilbo, is so incredibly good he almost kept me awake through the opening hours. Or days. Or whatever.
Now what they should do is release “The Studio Cut.” Let some executives into the editing room to pare the thing down to the entertaining bits. One hour long and brilliant. Can’t wait.
****
image courtesy shutterstock / Willierossin
Cross-posted from Klavan on the Culture
The Hobbit: More Restrictions on Art!
More perspectives on The Hobbit at PJ Lifestyle:
Agreed. I enjoyed the movie, but Jackson does seem to be totally in love with every nanosecond of footage he films. He can’t seem to throw anything away. He needs an editor like George Lucas needs a screenwriter.
I think it’s a testament to artistic genius of Jackson that, like Lucas, no one says no to him anymore. And yet, though too long, The Hobbit is a good movie unlike the giant steaming pile that was Phantom Menace.
Testament to his ability to wrest a creative, mostly-faithful, adaptation of one of the most beloved books of the 20th century, and make the studio hundreds of millions in the process. I like the LotR movies and I love the books, don’t get me wrong, but even I’m willing to admit that the studio putting length requirements on them was essential to them working as films. The Hobbit needed to be one movie, and the studio should have held PJ to that.
“As everyone knows, the director’s cut of a film is never anywhere near as good as the cut released to theaters. You may think you know of an exception, but you’re in error. No shame; we all make mistakes.”
So the studio hacked 139 minute version of Once Upon A Time In America is better than Sergion Leone’s 229 minute version? (We will have to wait to see what happens for the lost 40 minutes of the original cut for Cannes to discuss those.)
Getting into preferring Blade Runner with that insipid studio ordered voiceover would be a complete waste of effort if you do not even understand which version of Once Upon A Time In America is worth watching.
I deal with this in writing forums that I participate in. There’s always that one person who refuses – even in the face of overwhelming input from everyone else – to cut a scene, reconsider a character’s actions, remove dialog, or otherwise do those little things that would take their story from good to amazing. But there seems to be an impulse to put everything out there, whether it fits with the flow of the story or not.
There may be no “rules” anymore, but that there still are frameworks that we subconsciously want our stories to conform to. Straying too far from that alienates or bores the audience. Overcoming the expected formulas takes an act of genius on part of the artist (a term which applies to neither to most of the aspiring authors I know, nor Peter Jackson) that no amount of justification can ever really overcome.
It’s funny how the same attitudes one sees in amateurs can pervade professionals as well. Maybe it’s because amateurs (the unpublished author, the unrecognized director) don’t have the pressures of the system on them yet. They can take more risks and stray further because they aren’t expected to make money (ie, appeal to a wider audience). They can get away with being quirky or odd or whatever – they can do what they want, and they are answerable to nobody. Then, when there’s pressure to perform financially, as there obviously was with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, they have to suffer the “system” editing their works in order to add to the appeal. When that pressure’s taken away, as successes become readily apparent, whoever’s backing the project is more willing to ease up on the creative control. Some artists learn that they have to include the audience and what it wants in the creative process, and some artists revert right back to what they wanted to be in the first place. Sometimes that’s good, and sometimes it’s not. Just a thought.
Every artist needs a critic, somebody to sit there and say “stop, that’s too far, what you’ve got is just right.” I’m convinced that the best storytelling leaves things to the reader/watcher’s imagination. The Lord of the Rings trilogy worked because it felt like a real world that we got a small, awesome, glimpse into. The Hobbit feels like a self-indulgent exercise in throwing as much on the screen as possible, but that leaves no room for the viewer’s imagination to engage with the story. We might want to imagine all those little asides to the main plot, rather than see PJ’s take on them. Leaves no room to explore.
I am re-watching the making of Return of the King. I think Peter Jackson felt so constrained by the storytelling limits placed on him to just tell the story of the ring in the LofR movies that he’s going to stuff the entire rest of the goodies into these three films.
You called it exactly though, the limits force the creative to cut all the fat out, making a better end product.
I like the “original director’s cut” version of the Wild Bunch better than the studio shortened version myself. Maybe that’s the exception that proves the rule?
Won’t happen. Hollywood is populated by lemmings. Somebody gets lucky and finds a fleeting pulse to American Society, makes a pot of gold and every two bit hack west of Vegas storms the bandwagon.
The creative talent is gone. Creative people went into gaming. A bad selling consul game grosses over a billion and nets most of that. The successful games NETS billions. Talent needs rewards, Genius demands it. The strap hangers and Administrative Assistants have sucked all the money out of Hollywood.
I think film editors do an excellent job, and usually improve movies by cutting away stuff that isn’t really needed. In the case of the LOTR, however, I have the extended version, and I find it much, much better than the theatrical version. It’s real long, though.
And I thought part one of “The Hobbit” was very entertaining.
I also have the extended versions of the LOTR trilogy and I also think they add a lot to the story. However, there would be no way I could sit through one of those suckers at a movie theater. We split each movie over two days at home. I think this is why the Hobbit movie needs some editing.
I think Jackson is telling future producers the remakes of these movies:
“Go ahead, just TRY to outdo what I’ve done! You can’t. Or at least you can’t for under a billion dollars!”
There are some times where the Director’s Cut is better, however. For example, The Abyss. Putting back the scenes with the aliens and the tsunami was quite useful and informative.
Sometimes a director – even a relative hack – destroys the work of a great author – and as much as the author sreams bloody murder, the director is right.
A couple of examples I know: The award-winning star-trek episode City on the Edge of Forever, in spite of Harlan Ellison’s screaming about the changed ending, and Barbara Streisand quite rightly rewriting Nobel-prize-winning-jerk Issac Bashevis Singer’s idiotic and perverted story “Yentl”.
(On the other hand, Frank Herbert liked the Dune movie, in spite of what they did to it. I guess he was interested in the moral.)
For the most part, director’s cuts are just another attempt to milk more money from a movie audience. After sales fall flat for the original release, here come the director’s cut releases. Given the lack of original ideas in movie making, we’re already seeing (or will soon see) the advertising of the director’s cuts, blue ray editions, director’s cut blue ray editions, 3D releases, director’s cuts in 3D. Soon, we’ll see musical versions of the director’s comments, both in regular and blue ray editions to be followed by the 3D release.
I haven’t seen the Hobbit, but I can’t agree with your blanket attack on the director’s cut. I think the director’s cut of Blade Runner, for example, is vastly superior to the original, and there is a general consensus among fans of the film that this is the case. In particular, the loss of the terrible narration and tacked-on happy ending of the original greatly improves the film.
Blade Runner is hardly the only case. The restored cuts of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Mr. Arkadin, Touch of Evil, Metropolis, and even the only partially restored Richard Donner version of Superman II are very welcome opportunities to see films that were badly compromised or simply butchered for various reasons – most of them bad. Anyone who has compared, for example, the censored and uncensored versions of Cronenberg’s Crash would have to agree that the availability of uncompromised versions of certain films is essential.
The problem, I think, is the emergence of the director’s cut as a form of “double dipping.” That is, they are often issued for purely mercenary rather than artistic reasons, and naturally these are generally inferior in quality.