Well fortunately, according to the Hollywood Reporter article, these filmmakers don’t own the rights to the movie so the resulting “film” can’t be commercialized:
The effort won’t be commercialized because Showrunner hasn’t obtained the rights to the film from Warner Bros. Discovery or Concord. If they “see a marketplace for it and a path for it outside of an academic context, then of course they have ownership of it,” Saatchi says. “The goal isn’t to commercialize the 43 minutes, but to see them exist in the world after 80 years of people asking ‘might this have been the best film ever made in its original form?’”
The version of the movie that got released by the studio actually got great reviews, despite the edits that were done by the studio against Welles’ wishes. It makes me think about how so many other great films, such as Star Wars, Jaws, etc. benefited greatly by editing and cutting out a lot of the stuff that the directors originally wanted. Maybe this was another case where the folks doing the edits actually improved the film because they weren’t as emotionally invested in unnecessary scenes as the director was?
It’s so interesting because it really can go either way. The ones that always leap to mind for me are the broadly contemporary-ish sci fi films Donnie Darko and Dark City.
Dark City (1996) was pretty visionary for its time, hitting on some of the themes that The Matrix would tackle a couple years later (not to mention hints of The Truman Show). But it was a box-office bomb, often attributed to the heavy handed studio edits, which included a bunch of VO loops that basically spoiled the whole movie – they didn’t trust the audience to follow the plot, I guess. Later, a director’s cut came out that removed the forced reshoots and VOs, and really vindicated the movie as a filmmaking exercise.
On the other hand, Donnie Darko (2001), though it had problems at the box office since it came out just after 9/11, was a bit of a cult and critical darling. Later, a director’s cut came out that restored footage cut after the movie’s film festival run… and that cut turns the film in to tedious, hit-the-audience’s-head-with-a-philosophical-anvil garbage.
Unfortunately I don’t know if one can predict (or certainly I, a casual, could not predict) whether studio edits prove to be a net positive or a net negative for a given film. Sometimes they keep an over-ambitious director in check and sometimes they squash a solid artistic vision. Auteur theory is one thing, but also not every filmmaker is an auteur. (This is complicated by the fact that the title “auteur” is only awarded retroactively…)
I saw Dark City twice- once in the theater, and once a year or two ago. It held up a LOT better than I remembered, and I suppose the Director’s Cut is to blame for that. I’ve also had a fascination with automats ever since seeing one for the first time in that movie. I got to actually use one in Amsterdam, but I wish we had them in the states.
Oh I can easily see a techbro suddenly discover unions when his bots are hired at a rate he doesn’t approve of. If it’s the right bro the SCROTUS will absolutely grant the scripts the right to unionise. Because The Founders! Original intent was just this.
I know, which is what makes it so tragic. I’m not reveling in the idea of the inevitable AI screw ups that leads to avoidable deaths. I’m thinking of my friends and their kids who will be the victims of this inevitable outcome because a bunch of so-called “leaders” lack the critical thinking skills to realize this is a very bad idea.
And the fisherman who will be tagged for murder by a subpar bot. Or the refugees heading away from the conflict. Or the farmers working their fields with materials the chat bot mistakes for weapons.
Because we all know the end user will sooner rather than later abdicate their decision making to a hallucinating AI.
I finally had to go look to find the book on my shelf, cause this whole line of thinking reminded me of that relationship between computing and the military, and that history… I think the one I’ve been thinking about is The Closed World by Paul Edwards…
There is a half chapter on computing and Vietnam… if I’m remembering correctly. But it goes from the second world war until the 70s, I think?
It’s been a while since I’ve read it, but it was certainly eye-opening, especially considering how we usually understand the development of computing via private industry and the role the DoD played is often very much downplayed or even completely ignored. it strikes me that that is how many people view history, not via the lens of institutions (whether public or private), but via heroic individuals primarily. But the Cold War was an especially fruitful era for thinking about how institutions like various governmental departments shape the landscape in favor of specific industries…