American Beauty and L.A. Confidential
dir. Sam Mendes and Curtis Hansen
Dreamworks SKG/Warner Bros.

Final prints of a film are looked at backwards. Studio heads review the film, its production, its original positioning and its prospects before changing it or issuing their stamp of approval. This moment, paired with the public frenzy over media and information availability, has given birth to the sordid frenzy of director’s cuts and revised releases in the 1990s. Studio interference conquers auteurship on a regular basis, and the final products of more and more projects are the result of politicking and generalizing.

To find the standard bearer, look backwards through time. The decade of the 1940s may well have been the turn from “talkies” to a more intuitive, more Hitchcockian cinema, and Orson Welles carried such a banner. Well-noted was his studio mess with “Citizen Kane.” William Randolph Hearst, ya da ya da, Charles Foster Kane, money offered to burn all prints, and so forth. RKO stood fast, and pushed Welles’ cut through to the theaters.

Quite the opposite, though, happened for Welles and The Magnificent Ambersons. It was supposed to be his next major hit, starring Joseph Cotten in a son-ruins-all family drama. Welles wrote and directed. For some reason, though, the dark, dark drama got sent through the RKO Cuisenart. The original ending was never picked up off the cutting room floor, and what got sent to the masses carried a discontinuous ending that resolved little and reeked of studio manhandling.

There is no lack of evidence of studio interference today. With DVD sales booming, more and more releases trumpet the original ending (re: Independence Day), the alternate ending (re: Army of Darkness) or the director’s cut, featuring additional footage (re: most sci-fi or horror films). Most recently, Seven, a bombast of a film at its theatrical release, came forth with a new DVD set that pandered to the public need for the secrets and the disposed-of pieces of the puzzle. Some movies are packaged with such breadth for their initial DVD release (re: Gladiator).

The two films that play out Welles’ history lesson are, indeed, not bad films. The 1990s were spotted with these fucked-with productions that yielded four, sometimes five home releases. Fittingly, two examples came at the end of the 1990s as two blips on the studio interference radar that call for us to look backwards over the whole decade. The first, American Beauty, scored a Best Picture Oscar. Would you have granted that award to it, though, if it had the original “Major Fitts frames his son” ending? The original cut started with Fitts whistling in jail and ended with his conviction for Lester Burnham’s murder. Dreamworks unsheathed the knife, gleaned off the flotsam, and a classic was born.

The second perished at the same game. L.A. Confidential, up against Titanic for Best Picture of 1997, was ballyhooed as a victory in filmmaking, the rebirth of noir from the book that could never be made a movie. The print bore a four-minute epilogue that demolished the obvious ending (rolling credits after Ed Exley shoots Dudley Smith - director Curtis Hansen even teased America by putting the scene on theater posters everywhere). In order to make things more “Hollywood”, though, Hansen kept the fairy tale resolution, and Titanic marched on. Rather than scoring the upset of the century; L.A. Confidential, a great movie until the end, stood to show just how upsetting studio interference could be.

It’s doubtful that any other studio-raped films had as much at stake (what acclaim did Dying Young ever garner?), but these two, rushing to the surface like empty treasure chests, show that there have been piles of film on the cutting room floor for quite some time. As cinema grinds into a new decade, it is a wonder how much more will pile up, and at what costs; the voice of the director, the talent, and the writers are at stake.

— Andy Stilp (andy.stilp at gmail dot com)