[Harris] Citizen Kane is a film
many scholars will tell you
is the greatest of all time,
and some of them have even seen it,
so they must mean business.
It was genuinely quite revolutionary,
it's credited with inventing,
or at least popularizing, many cinematic
techniques that are still used today,
including the jumpscare.

[Dick Cavett] Everybody remembers that
one scene where you suddenly cut
to a cockatoo screeching just before...
[Orson Welles] That was to wake up
the audience.

That's the entire significance
of the cockatoo.
[Harris] And a lot of it really holds up.
What's weird is you expect it
to be a stuffy old thing,
vintage and prestigious and made
for the amusement of old-timey people
who don't think like we do today.
But, it can get properly funny
and energetic at times.
Hot take, just putting this out there.
Citizen Kane?
Pretty good movie!
It was the feature film debut of writer,
director, and wine salesman Orson Welles.
Even while it was being made,
Kane was something of a rarity.
Despite being made
by a first-time director,
the production company
he was under contract with, RKO Pictures,
The studio famously behind King Kong
and...
Citizen Kane, had given Welles
final cut privilege.
This is a movie term referring to who
gets final say over the film
that actually gets sent to theaters.
This is a level of artistic control not
normally given to first-time directors.

If a director doesn't have this privilege,
the executives and producers
at the company often make their
own changes for commercial, personal,
or other reasons, and can override
the creator's wishes for their work.
Welles used final cut to make a film seen
by many nerd betas, as the greatest ever.
When Welles' next film with
the same studio,
The Magnificent Ambersons,
had mixed test screenings,
Welles made small changes,
but remained confident the work was good,
and would be received better
on a full release.
However, RKO felt otherwise,
and, due to various contract negotiations,
Welles had given up final cut privileges.
While Welles was working on another film
in Brazil,
RKO made extensive edits to the film,
including reshooting the ending
to be completely different,
and cut 40 minutes out.
In Welles' own words:
[Shannon]
"What's left is only the first six reels.
My whole third act is lost because of all
of the hysterial tinkering that went on."
[Harris] And it was genuinely lost, too.
To save space in the film archives,
the removed segments of the film
were destroyed.
The creator's ideal version of
The Magnificent Ambersons is gone forever.
The released version of Ambersions
is regarded,
by all four people who've seen it,
as one of the best films ever,
and perhaps even better then Citizen Kane,
but that only makes the whole thing
more horrible.
We can only imagine what it could've been.
This was the beginning
of Welles' long fight for creative control
over his projects, a fight
he seemed to lose most of the time.
Welles went on to make lots of other films
during his career,
and some of them are still really good.
But in many ways,
a lot of them were never truly his.
Welles was open about things he wished
he done differently,
or more ideal versions of his films.
He even considered doing a new ending
of Magnificent Ambersons
thirty years later
with the surviving actors,
but these truer versions of his films
never surfaced.
Welles, I argue,
was ahead of his time here.
What he was yearning to do
was make director's cuts.
In the modern era, the idea that a film
will get a director's cut
is almost taken for granted.
In fact, it's so widely accepted
that the director's cut
is the most authentic version of a film,
that some fans of the DC superhero movies
are asking specifically
for a 'Snyder Cut' of Justice League,
under the impression that this would
inherently be the better version
of the film then the version
that some other,
later director would have made.
Tens of thousands of dollars have been
raised for charities in the process
of fans demonstrating their desire
to Warner Bros.
Now I quite like a lot
of Zack Snyder's films myself-
The first step
is admitting you have a problem
-And I'd love to see his version
of Justice League,
and also un-see the version
that Joss Whedon 'Witty Dialogue'd'
himself all over,
but I can't help but notice that we seem
to now be living in an age
where you can't just dislike a film
and move on with your life,
it's an opportunity
to become even more engaged,
to give even more of your time
to something you didn't even like,
in the hopes of getting a newer,
better version.
So, how did we get here?
And, are director's cuts
all that different that much of the time,
or isn't it somewhat bizarre to expect a
director to relive a finished work
in order to make a slightly better
version of something that was already
 completed and released?
And is a director really
the main authority
on the most ideal version of a work?
LETS LOOK AT SO-

Let's look at some examples
of director's cuts
and how they're different
from the originals,
and if they're actually that much better,
and just generally go on an adventure
of discovery for what all this means
for how we think about art
in the modern era.
That sounds pretty good, doesn't it?
Welcome back to Scanline.


Put succinctly, a director's cut is:
[Shannon] "a version of a motion picture
that is edited according
to the director's wishes, and that usually
includes scenes cut from the version
created for general distribution."
[Harris] Wikipedia says Blade Runner was
the first film to ever use the phrasing
'Director's Cut' in marketing,
but th- 
But the page doesn't actually cite
a source to confirm this?
So, thanks Wikipedia.
Excellent...excellent work there.
As the questions of creative control
grow increasingly culturally pertinent,
and profitable, it's become more and more
common for films to have a second release
as a new, alternative version, one more in
line with the director's original wishes.
A sort of final cut privilege
in retrospect.
A shocking amount of films
have director's cuts now,
which gives the impression they serve
a creative need that goes unsatisfied
in the original process.
But creative control is more of a vague,
conceptual idea then a thing whose effects
are truly measurable.
Let's look at some tangible examples
of differences between cuts
and why they can be important.
We might as well start with Blade Runner,
since it apparently started all this.
Cite your sources,
god damn it.

Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi dystopian
speculative fiction science fiction film
Blade Ru- everyone knows what Blade Runner
is, why am I explaining-
Blade Runner's a very good movie.
I-I think.
I've heard it's good, I've got a copy here
in my editing program and I'm skipping
through it looking for footage to use,
and wow, it seems great!
It's got flying cars and a cool gun,
explores complex questions
about personhood and what it even means
to be human,
it's got music that's good,
there's...some eyes in it.
And some eyes here, and here,
and it's got lots of talking
about seeing things with his eyes,
and then later he tells this guy about all
the stuff he's...seen.
If I didn't know any better, I'd say
there's some kind of theme going on here.
Foolish Ridley, don't you know themes
are for book reports?
Get all these images and ideas out of here
before you poke someone's eye ou-
Ahh, now I'm doing it!
The movie had mixed reception
upon it's release.
To quote Brian J Robb's guide
to Ridley Scott:
"Critical reaction was decidedly mixed.
The New York Times called it
[Shannon] muddled yet mesmerising;
[Harris] Time Magazine said the film,
[Shannon] like its
setting, is a beautiful,
deadly organism
that devours life;
[Harris]
and The Los Angeles Times complained:
Blade crawler might be more like it."

Gotem! Ahh, f*ck 'em up, Sheila-
The film, while good, had some confusing
choices and strange problems.
There's a lot of beautifully subtle
storytelling and worldbuilding
where the viewer is given the chance
to think for themselves and pick up
on what's happening by paying attention.
[Bryant] "You know the score, pal.
if you're not cop, you're little people."
[Harris]
And yet there's this terrible voiceover.
[Deckard] "And I'd rather
be a killer then a victim,
and that's exactly what Bryant's threat
about 'little people' meant."
[Harris] The voiceover explains away
everything even remotely subtle,
and it sounds like Harrison Ford is bored
out of his mind.
There's a lot of really beautiful
storytelling, like when Deckard
retires a female Replicant and,
looking at her body,
feels genuinely awful
about what he's done.
The audience can see plainly what hunting
down creatures who are effectively human,
and have done nothing wrong except
want to live longer, has done to him.
But then the voiceover comes in just
to make sure you know that's happening,
just in case you don't like
being trusted to think.
[Deckard] "The report would be routine
retirement of a Replicant,
which didn't make me feel any better
about shooting a woman in the back."
[Harris] Oh, Deckard feels sympathy?
I wouldn't have known.
It's not like there's an actor
in the frame showing me or anything-
By far the worst one is legendary.
We get this incredible moment of humanity
from Roy Batty,
theoretically the antagonist of the movie,
as his life span runs out,
and he talks about the beauty of all
the things he's seen.
It's one of the greatest moments
in film history,
but hey!
Guess what decides to ruin it?
[Deckard] "I don't know why he
saved my life, maybe in those
last moments he loved life
more then he ever had before."
[Harris]
Oh, I think that guy liked being alive.
Deckard and Rachel prepare
to escape together,
and then a very tense moment,
Deckard finds proof Gaff
has been in his apartment.
A calling card of his is left in there.
Then they leave, and it's incredibly tense
and suspenseful, as the doors close.
And then, suddenly after all this noir-ish
tension and dystopian storytelling
and eternal night and rain and neon,
bam!
Upbeat music, bright skies, clean air.
Deckard and Rachel are taking a nice drive
in the woods, and that crappy voiceover
tells us actually Rachel
was a special Replicant
who doesn't have a
built-in death date.
[Deckard] "Tyrell had told me Rachel
was special, no termination date."
[Harris] Oh sure, yeah,
this ending doesn't feel weird at all.
In the last 30 seconds of the film,
it all turned out to be ok.
Just, a complete whiplash.
And why is that unicorn there?
So it was fine, really good, even,
but clearly flawed.
Soon after it's release,
there was speculation that the studio
had meddled with production.
I mean that ending is literally just
B-roll borrowed from The Shining.
A so-called workprint of the film,
a not entirely finished version
made during the editing process,
had been shown to test audiences
and was speculated to have
been significantly different,
and then edited down.
And in the early 90s, it started being
shown in a limited theatrical run,
branded as a Director's Cut,
though Scott had no actual say
in this version's release either
and publicly disowned this version.
The Workprint wasn't a finished version
of the film.
For example,
it was missing the horrendous voiceover,
which is obviously
a positive thing to miss.
There were no closing credits
and it just ends on the words 'The End'.
But more importantly,
it doesn't 'The End' with
a horrible story-runing
tacked on happy ending.
It ends in the elevator
with Deckard and Rachel,
with all the horrible feelings
of uncertainty and doom
that come with not knowing
what happens next,
and that Rachel probably doesn't have long
to live even if Gaff spared her.
The unicorn thing is still weird, though.
I guess Gaff is just a quirky guy
who likes to spare people and, do origami.
To be fair I'm a pretty big fan
of sparing people.
I even showed Kurt mercy.
Even though he showed me
no gratitude for it!
The workprint was
surprisingly popular,
and the differences were
lauded as positive ones.
The caused Warner Bros. to begin work
on a proper Director's Cut.
Well, not actually a Director's Cut.
Someone else was put in
charge of doing it,
and Scott just got to provide
notes and consult on it.
Warner Bros. seemed to be banking
on the idea of releasing a Director's Cut,
and all the ideas of creative freedom
that imply it to fans and film buffs,
but not in actually giving
the actual director that actual freedom.
The Director's Cut is...
so much better then the original.
When trying to explain
what the differences actually are,
there aren't exactly that many
major changes if you just list them out.
Largely it's about
what's not there any more.
There's no voiceovers whatsoever
and the happy ending has been removed.
It's amazing what big a difference
the lack of voiceover has though,
it lets all the actors
and performances breathe.
Instead of being told
what to think about something,
they're simply being shown it,
and expected to think for themselves.
And that's really powerful.
Hey, Shannon!
[Shannon] Yeah?
[Harris] Ok, when you're editing this bit,
I want it to slowly, digitally zoom,
on my face, while I get emotional
about how good Blade Runner is.
and, y'know, we can play, like,
some knock-off Tears in Rain music,
we can get Zoë Blade to do it,
it'll be great,
it'll be really funny reference.
[Shannon] Harris, I don-
I don't think that works in a video essay.
[Harris] Yeah, but I want it,
and I'm the director.
[Shannon] Yeah, well,
I'm doing a lot of the editing,
and I might not edit it like that.
Maybe in the final cut of this video
twenty years later,
you can finally achieve your dumb vision.
[Harris] Oh, I get it,
tha-that's very meta.
[Shannon] An-I mean, honestly,
like speaking as your co-writer,
the parts of the video that you wrote
are full of holes in your research.
Like, the cockatoo scene in Citizen Kane
isn't the first jumpscare.
It was most likely popularized
by Cat People in 1942,
with the 'Lewton Bus',
there's a scene with a bus,
it's the first ever, like,
well-known jumpscar-
[Harris]
Yeah, but it's a funny joke, innit?
And we get to explain the cockatoo and,
that's pretty good,
I uh, it's a very lighthearted opening,
doesn't have to be completely true...
Ah, you... now I'm explaining my joke.
I spent ages convincing myself
that bit was funny.
N-Now it's ruined.
By the way, what happened to the footage
of me driving to McDonald's for 15 minutes
and talking about how much I love tapes
for the last video?
Did you just take it out?
Am I gonna have to start a petition
to release the Harris Cut
of the VHS episode of Scanline?
Is that really gonna have to happen now?!
[Shannon] You know what, uh, forget it,
I'm cutting this whole part out,
it interrupts your explanation
of the Director's Cut,
and honestly it's a little bit indulgent.
[Harris] What? No!
You can't do that,
my overly indulgent director's intent
is being violated!
You can't just-
BMMMMNEHHHHH
But most importantly, and I can't stress
enough how cool a change this is,
midway through the movie,
while Deckard plays idly on his piano,
he begins to have a dream,
and he dreams...about a unicorn.
Holy sh*t!
I mean, holy sh*t!
What a small, simple change,
and yet the difference is amazing.
I mean firstly,
finally someone in the movie
based on the book
'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?',
has someone having a dream in it,
but more importantly,
now the origami unicorn Gaff leaves behind
means something,
because how could Gaff
know Deckard's dreams?
This implies that maybe Deckard is also
a Replicant who believes he's human,
with implanted dreams and memories.
It's still ambiguous, obviously.
I mean,
maybe Gaff also dreams about unicorns.
Humans do, don't they?
This ambiguity, to me at least,
is the point of the film.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter
whether Deckard is a Replicant,
because he would still be equally
a person. Human, in all but name.
And it's only in this cut
many years after it's release
that this point really gets to be made.
And all this stuff is brought up
by the simple inclusion
of a daydream about a unicorn.
It's kind of amazing how much
a simple change,
just a couple of seconds of new footage,
can impact the overall meaning
and value of an entire film.
I think this, better then anything else
in any other film,
can demonstrate the sheer power
editing can have on a movie.
Quoting here from Robb's book, again:
[Shannon] "Ten years later, in 1992,
with the release of the Director's Cut,
the film received the welcome it deserved.
According to The Washington Post: the
film is great on every level: the poignant
screenplay about a man's futile quest
for immortality; Scott's tremendous
direction; the incredible, futuristic sets
designed by Lawrence G Paull, Syd Mead
and the others; the phenomenal special
effects; and the touching performances,
especially from Hauer, a replicant
fighting against the ebbing of his life.
His swan song is one of the most touching
in modern movie history."
[Harris] Quick aside, maybe people would
have been more willing to recognize
his performance if there hadn't been
a F*CKING VOICEOVER right after it.
What's interesting
about this Director's Cut, though,
is that it wasn't actually
the Director's Cut.
It's ironic that one of the most famous
examples of a Director's Cut
is not actually a Director's Cut,
and the studios were already capitalizing
on the idea of a Director's Cut
to sell a movie,
but we'll get back to that later.
15 years later, there was a 'Final Cut'
of Blade Runner,
which it was made with Scott
finally in complete control.
It's essentially a version
of the Director's Cut
with slightly different editing,
better effects,
some changes in color grading,
Harrison Ford's son came in to reshoot
a few minor things to make mouth movements
that fit the ADR.
Oh, and most importantly,
the shot of the bird flying away
at the end finally matches the rest
of the f*cking scene.
It took 25 years,
but we did it everyone.
It's not really a necessary version
of the film, but it's nice that Scott
finally got to make a version
he properly had control over.
After the success of the Director's Cut
of Blade Runner,
Director's Cuts became
increasingly common.
The most famous other example of
this is also by Ridley Scott
Kingdom of Heaven's original release
was very divisive
 and pretty poorly received overall.
Critics and audiences generally found it
unsatisfying,
often boring and lacking in depth.
It was so bad that Roger Ebert,
a film critic from opposite land
who says the wrong thing
almost all the time because he's a hack,
gave it three and a half stars out of four
and said it was better than Gladiator.
Three and a half stars?
I'm not saying Roger Ebert's taste
is questionable,
but just putting it out there that's
the rating you gave to the Phantom Menace.
Okay, actually,
I take it back, Roger Ebert's great.
People are really uncharitable to
The Phantom Menace,
it's actually pretty go-
Kingdom of Heaven then got
a Director's Cut released on DVD
with 45 minutes of new material,
which massively expands the story,
alters the roles of the main characters,
and turns the film
 into a genuine masterpiece
of historical epicness,
and fleshes out Orlando Bloom's role
so much that it transforms
into his best ever performance,
and also frankly his only performance.
There are hundreds of Director's Cuts now,
many of which arguably improve the movie.
Most of them have much less
drastic changes than these,
but it's clear that even small changes can
make a big difference,
and, as with The Final Cut,
even if there's next to no difference,
the point is the creator getting
to achieve their vision,
unsullied by previous meddling.
That is the point right? Isn't it?
Well, not all alternative cuts
of films exist for this reason.
Artistic intent and creative ambition
aren't set in stone.
Okay, time to get personal, as a creator
who's got a lot of stuff
out there that he can't meaningfully
go back and change without
releasing it as a whole new thing,
there are tons of things that I would
do differently now in retrospect,
or mistakes that I genuinely
would love to go back and fix.
When I make youtube videos
from my own personal channel,
I inherently have final cut privilege.
No one can tell me what to do,
there is no executive producer
with any oversight or control,
and when I work with a sponsor,
I tell them I'm not gonna
make any changes even if they ask,
and they just are gonna
have to live with what I make.
So...
Basically,
I am at all times
free to unleash my unmitigated
creative vision upon the world.
But what if my unmitigated creative vision
isn't perfect the first time around?
what if I make genuine
mistakes or change my mind
or...couldn't afford to do something
or just didn't have the talent
to creative the things I visioned
That's got to be pretty mitigating
right there.
Most of the time, Director's Cuts
for me would be things like
rerecording voiceover
to sound a bit less echoey
or a bit less mouth clicky.
That sound,
I hate when I hear myself
making that sound, it's awful.
Or remove jokes that I realized weren't
actually very funny in retrospect,
or, worse, are actually casually ablest
and I just hadn't noticed.
Or fix that time I accidentally left
an arrow at 2% opacity
at the top of the screen by accident
instead of fully fading it out
and it's there for
half the f*cking video-
So, getting another run at a project isn't
always fully about control.
It's about making improvements
that you feel you could do now,
and a lot of Director's Cuts are more in
line with this way of thinking.
One director is famous for changing his
mind about something after releasing
a film that he thought
was fine at the time,
and that director's name
is Paul Thomas Anderson.
When Magnolia came out,
It was well-received but considered
by some to be a little on the long side.
Anderson defended the decisions
he made for his film
and seemed pretty happy with it.
[PTA] And I was really upfront, you know,
saying it's gonna be three hours and,
you know, they were wonderful in saying:
'Ok, we're not gonna tell you what to do.
We'd love it if this was shorter,
you know,
but, but, so just make
it as short as you can.'
[Harris] but the interesting
thing about time is,
It makes you rethink your work
a little sometimes.
[Charlie Rose] This movie, at this moment,
the one that is in the theaters today,
it's the movie you
wanted to make.
[PTA] Yeah. Exactly.
[Charlie Rose] Is it the movie you
set out to make?
[PTA] Exactly.
[Marc Maron] But if you were given
the opportunity to do another cut of it...
[PTA] Oh, I'd slice that thing down,
it's way too f*cking long.
Oh, no, it's, it's, it's
unmerciful how long it is.
[Harris] No Director's Cut of
Magnolia has been released,
but it's useful knowing
directors might have made their own films
differently with
the benefit of hindsight,
even when they defended them at the time.
Sam Raimi had complete control
over Evil Dead, his first film,
to the point he places the failure
of his next film, Crimewave,
on there being too much oversight
compared to Evil Dead.
[Raimi] They replaced my actors,
they threw Bruce Campbell out of the lead,
They threw out my musician Joe LoDuca,
they recut the picture,
they had their own say with
the sound effects and mix,
they...did everything they could
to make it what it is today.
[Willem Dafoe]
Did you see Crimewave?
[James Franco]
Yeah?
[Willem Dafoe] I saw that movie on an
airplane and people still walked out.
[Harris] ED was independently financed,
largely by whoever Raimi and his friends
could get to give them money,
so they could do whatever they wanted.
[Bruce Campbell] We didn't have nearly the
freedom as our first film,
because investors
aren't gonna come on the set,
a dentist isn't gonna say 'are you
sure that camera angle's right?'
But this freedom doesn't
mean Raimi was necessarily
going to be happy forever
with all aspects of the film he made.
There's a controversial
segment in the film
where a woman is sexually
assaulted by demonic trees.
The scene is far more
gruesome than anything else in the film,
and it's definitely a contributing factor
to it being regarded
as one of the video nasties in the UK
and getting an NC-17 in the US.
Plus it was banned in
other countries with different releases
subject to various different cuts
over the years.
In retrospect, Raimi isn't happy with
that scene and talks about this openly.
[Sam Raimi] Well, I think it was
unnecessarily gratuitous
and a little too brutal,
and I...finally because
people were offended
in a way that...I did...
my goal is not to offend people.
It is to entertain, thrill, scare,
make them laugh, but not to offend them.
[Interviewer] Do you regret putting it in?
[Raimi] I do, I do.
Piers Haggard felt precisely the same way
about his folk horror film
'The Blood on Satan's Claw'.
[Piers] The r**e scene now, um,
I think it's probably too strong,
and it's interesting that
I wasn't bothered at the time.
I think you, um, will find most directors,
if they get their teeth into a sequence,
which is gonna be really powerful,
they become completely seduced, and I was
seduced by the sheer dramatic power.
[Harris]
Directors have these kinds of regrets
or change their minds about stuff
all the time.
Although, of course,
no studio has helped them
rerelease these films with
the sexual assaults cut.
I guess adding in more unicorns
is more important than
ameliorating excessive sexual violence
on film.
Some directors actually do get to make
their ideal changes though.
The Coen brothers, who did some work
on the editing of Evil Dead
and later worked closely with Raimi
on other projects,
got to do a Director's Cut
of Blood Simple,
despite also being in charge
of the original cut.
Blood Simple is awesome.
It's very different from the rest
of their films but not tangibly worse,
just different,
it's a very stripped down thriller.
The Director's Cut
is even more streamlined,
it's about three minutes shorter.
No scenes have been outright cut,
but a lot of shots have been trimmed down
in length so the feel is much tighter.
These changes it very small.
The director's cut is arguably tighter
and better edited,
but also not different enough
that I don't think anyone
who didn't like it would like it that much
more, and I don't think anyone who really
likes the movie thinks that much better
of it because of this version either.
I'm reminded here of Orson Welles
complaining about hysterical tinkering.
What exactly was the purpose of all this?
The film is theoretically better,
but...
but I find it strange that people would go
back to create a slightly better version
of something that already existed
and was fine.
Now, I love the Coen brothers as much as
the next pretentious white nerd boy,
but frankly if there's any evidence that
Director's Cuts are actually a bad idea,
this is Exhibit A.
Aren't mistakes something we ought to
accept, rather than hope to eventually see
slightly touched up later?
In one of the many documentaries 
about Blade Runner,
one called 'All Our Variant Futures',
a lot of attention is paid to all
the mistakes being fixed in the Final Cut,
but a lot is also made of the charm of
some of the mistakes.
Gaff's eye color changing,
things like that,
and it's clear a lot of thought
went into when one mistake is something
to be corrected to improve the quality
of the work,
and when other mistakes bring their
own character to the film
and ought to be left alone.
Aren't all these mistakes
part of the film, though?
Should an artist be allowed
to prepertually alter their work
once it's been handed over to the public?
In a 1993 article,
in the journal 'Film Comment',
film scholar and critic Gregg Salman
wrote 'Uncertain Glory - Director's Cut
editions: the redemption of an art
or the first step on a slippery slope?'
He said:
[Shannon] "Viewing film art as perpetually
subject to update and correction,
political or other, says something about
the director's relationship to their work.
In a way, they redress artistic grievances
by treating movies as mere product.
In this country, an inalienable
right to change as an artist
doesn't extend to changing art and,
therefore, art history.
Rather then artistic deliverance, the DC
trend represents a significant disturbance
of film history and -equally important-
the popular cultural memory
of the original audiences.
(Even kitsch merits protection.)
The director's cut means the practical
elimination of a film record, and that
the market valorizes the new to the point
that it supplants the old version.
And despite what the misnomer
"Director's Cut" implies,
this movement augurs poorly for
the rise of the Hollywood auteur.
There's certainly no amelioration
of the compromise between strict studio
and enterprising director, essential
to evaluating their personal commitment
to circumvention of studio philistines.
In the end, the same old commerce
here masquerades
as the aesthetics
of creative freedom."
[Harris] The ending to his piece
is appropriately dramatic:
[Shannon] "Our film culture faces a future
in which old movies will not just seem
different from how we remembered them,
they will be.
The theatrical release
is fast becoming a work-in-progress.
Original versions soon will exist only in
the fragments of our collective memory.
Then, to quote the authority,
"all those moments will be lost in time
like tears in rain.""
[Harris] In a much more recent piece,
Alex Rosa's 'Auteurs Gone Wild:
Why the Director's Cut often turns
into an ax murder',
in the American scholar from 2010,
Rose says:
[Shannon] "Directors couldn't leave
well enough alone; they redressed
their early classics in ever gaudier
clothing in attempts to reclaim
their youthful eminence,
since corrupted by years of compromise.
[Harris] Rose calls Director's Cuts
an indulgence, saying:
[Shannon] "Even the subtleties, 
while peripheral and seemingly innocuous,
have their effects.
An extra cutaway here,
a quick reaction shot there,
and suddenly the
gags aren't quite as funny,
the sex scenes aren't as breathless,
the fights lose their drive,
the dialogue drags.
Just a little more padding and primping
and the intangible gestalt
of the original is lost.
Indulgence is a death sentence.
A reliable antidote, however,
is the adoption of constraints.
In what other medium would colossal vanity
be permitted, much less encouraged?"
[Harris] Solman says:
[Shannon] "Typically, the commercially
successful, rather than the artistically
worthy, enjoy studio benevolence,
same as it ever was."
[Harris] In a reader's response section
in a Film Comment from later in the year,
Gordon Hale from Philadelphia has a
prescient comment on Solman's piece.
He describes Tom Richardson
re-editing Tom Jones, then says:
[Shannnon] "As films grow older
and their copyrights expire,
both the artists and the moneymen
will have the same incentive
to prepare "new additions"
qualifying for new copyrights.
Original versions will then
be withdrawn completely,
"new, improved" editions will abound
(just like toothpaste and detergent),
and the examples Solman cites
will seem like a drop in the bucket."
[Harris] So even though I like Blood
Simple, I really quite like that there
is a Director's Cut of Blood Simple,
I love the Coen brothers,
and I'm glad that they
have the power to go back
and do that if they want,
it still manages to pose a lot
of difficult questions
about how much power a director
should have over their art
and whether or not Director's Cuts
are actually as anti-commerical
as they seem to be.
Maybe there's a certain confidence or
honesty in not going back
and making changes.
Anderson and Raimi
have criticisms of their old films
as anyone who gets years to look back
on their work ought to do,
but they aren't going back and
making changes to things that are
already a part of history in
order to satisfy those criticisms.
It's ok to learn and move on,
for things to not be perfect.
It may well be that the ability to go
back and change something if you want to
poses just as much of a threat to the
integrity of art as any meddling studio.
Sometimes the director's changes
don't just not make the film any better,
but they actively make it worse,
and what director's name
springs to mind better than
Francis Ford Coppola
Apocalypse Now is a really good film,
and it better be because it took forever
to make and would have destroyed
Coppola's...Coppola's...
Coppola's career if it hadn't,
but it was good.
So it meant Coppola kept his career
and was free to go on to make
Um...uh...
Apocalypse Now is a really
good film, but in a very interesting way.
At nearly two-and-a-half hours,
it's pretty long,
but the pacing of the movie is so good.
All the scenes flow so perfectly,
and the dreamlike descent into madness
is so well-defined that it's pleasant
to sit through, you kind of slip into it,
it doesn't feel it's length at all.
If you showed me the movie
and told me it was 90 minutes,
I would probably believe you.
In 2001, Coppola released
Apocalypse Now Redux.
Re-dux? Reddicks?
Redux, an extended cut with
reworked editing and more scenes added in.
This new version
is three hours and 22 minutes.
More content squeezed
out of the content tube
onto to the conveyor belt of cinema?
Yes, please!
Apocalypse Now?
Good film. Great film!
Arguably a masterpiece.
Apocalypse Now Redux?
GARBAGE!
THE WHOLE THING IS FUCKING
TERRIBLE, HE RUINED IT!
I HATE YOU SO MUCH FRANCIS!
When you shoot over a million feet
of footage to make your masterpiece,
which yeah I guess is an achievement,
it turns out that most of that
footage is piss and you probably
shouldn't put all of it in the film.
The additional scenes utterly destroy
the pacing of the original,
so while it's technically only almost an
hour longer, it feels five hours longer.
I've seen the Redux version
twice and both times
I had to pause and do
something else for a while,
like take a nap or watch
a different better film.
The long-ass plantation scene adds
so little to the film,
it effectively takes away from it
by distracting
from what the film had successfully
focused on more by being shorter.
Just because some of the stuff in the film
is good doesn't mean you can
put an entire Kitchen si-oh fu-

All the tiny scenes of humor
or light-hearted escapes from
the darkness are washed away
by the sheer scope of the thing.
It just keeps on going
and it's boring and drags
to the point of being actively painful.
Ahh- I slapped my meat too
hard against the walls of my set.
They're all-they're all hurty now.
Luckily, since it turns out that director's
intent is a super malleable concept,
it appears that Coppola has changed
his mind yet again about what his film
is supposed to be.
This year for the 40th anniversary,
he's releasing the
Apocalypse Now Final Cut,
Director's Cut number three
at this point,
which is actually 20 minutes
shorter than the Redux version.
I'm curious if this version
of the film manages to maintain
the amazing feel of the
original, but honestly I doubt it.
Coppola already made a really
good version of his film 40 years ago.
He had his final cut, take it away
from him now. He's done. It was fine.
I haven't seen this version
of the film because I don't...care,
but it is coming to a theater
right next to me in September,
so I basically have no
choice to eventually see it,
and in the director's cut of this video,
I will...put my impressions
of the film here and let you know
what I thought of it.
And that video will come out in 20 years.
Or, when I hit a million subscribers.
Whichever comes first.
Incidentally, years ago when I
was talking to one of my many
pretentious film friends
who I secretly hate-
I studied documentary production at uni,
you run into these people,
it's an occupational hazard-
and I was explaining to her how much I
hated Apocalypse Now Redux,
but then she asked me:
"have you heard about the workprint?"
She then went on to explain that there
is a leaked workprint of the movie,
which is 5 hours long, the 10 minute long
song 'The End' by The Doors
plays in its entirety in the opening
in this version of the film.
What were they thinking, was the intent
to make a film that long at some point?
Do they think people would watch it?
Were they developing an experimental
new torture device?
Don't watch it. Even if you can
find it leaked online somewhere,
just don't watch it,
it's not worth stealing.
This draft of Apocalypse Now,
much like the actual draft,
is something that
you're morally obliged to dodge.
So here's an even more evolved
version of the Blood Simple problem,
directors are going back and re-re-editing
their films to try to undo
some of the damage they
did in the first re-edit.
The slippery slope was real and one
of the best directors ever
is actively tumbling down it right now,
hysterically tinkering with his film again.
But there's actually an even more
egregious example of a director making
a silly edit to their film and
everyone wanting the original back.
That's right, you all knew it was coming.
I'm talking about Steven Spielberg.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
is a pretty good movie,
but 20 years later Spielberg
decided some changes were necessary.
The kids in this scene
are in way too much danger.
Look, some of those cops have guns.
Well, now in this version
they have walkie-talkies.
Phew, now the kids are never in any danger
as they fly hundreds of feet in the air
on f---ing bicycles-
It appears that even Steven has
gone on to regret this decision,
or at the very least makes sure
the original is still available.
So this is an example of a director
deciding they want something changed,
going to great technological lengths
to get it changed,
and then having second thoughts.
This whole
'directorial freedom to go back
and change your films is important' thing
is starting to look a little bit flimsy
in the face of directors making changes
that they then decide were bad.
There's probably an example of a
director being even worse than this,
but, well whoops, oh, we're out of time
for this episode of Scan...

Fine.
We all want to talk about him.
It's time to talk about
Federico Felli-fine,
George Lucas.
George Lucas's amazing and revolutionary
science fiction film
Thx 1138
is an ass-kickingly depressing
and bizarre prediction of the future
that makes some really incisive
comments about modern consumerism.
Characters literally buy weird
plastic shapes just for the joy
of having purchased something,
then throw them in the trash.
In 1977 George Lucas
predicted Funko Pop-
The original theatrical version had five
minutes taken out against Lucas's wishes.
After the success of a couple
of above-average fantasy films
he made a bit later, Lucas
got to release a restored version
 with that footage added back in,
which is nice.
He got his movie back
in line with his vision.
But then George started
deciding that his films couldn't
just be brought into accordance
with his original vision.
No, they could be retrospectively...
improved.
I'm sure you all know
about this already,
but in 2004, George Lucas released
the Director's Cut of
Thx 1138, I'm doing another fake-out.
This Director's Cut adds a bunch of CGI
and some new shots and effects,
it's two minutes longer
and it's just kind of needless.
It's nice that his film got to be
properly mastered and restored, I guess,
but the level of meddling with the thing
that was really finished
decades prior is unnecessary.
The film doesn't need some more
CGI scenes added in years later,
it was already great.
If an old thing has flaws or isn't perfect
or you change your mind about it,
sometimes it's okay to let it go.
Well, that about wraps it
up for this episode of Sc-
GEEEEOOOOOOOORRRRRRGGGGGGGGGEEEEEEE
George. Mr. Lucas.
I love your films.
I love you as a person.
I love you as a thinker.
I think you're an amazing man.
And Star Wars is an absolute blessing.
I love all of them.
Even the prequels have some
great stuff in there.
My contract with Shannon obliges me
not to defend the prequels
too hard in a video attached to her name,
but you know how I feel.
You've read my emails.
But, come on.
What were you doing?
Did we really need Han
to be marginally less
of a scoundrel by
making him shoot second?
And, then did we really need
him to shoot second while
also awkwardly CGI dodging
a close-range laser blast?
Did we really need R2 to be hidden
slightly more behind the rocks?
Making it a little more
believable that he couldn't be seen?
But making us wonder
how he even got in there?
Did we really need to remove a
cool scene from Return of the Jedi,
just to show off the amazing
new CGI you could do now?
Did we need this?
This part looks better on VHS, by the way,
I wonder if someone has done a video
about why that would be. But come on, bro!
Even you think the Han stuff is silly now.
George, I loved your work.
Genuinely and completely.
But it's on you that it's such a hassle
to see the original unedited versions
people saw and loved in the theater,
and that's just not fair,
even if those versions
don't line up with your vision.
Spielberg did the right thing
making sure the versions
people loved are still available,
because movies don't just
belong to directors,
to their supposed auteurs,
they also belong to culture.
You can have your version of the movie,
but the people ought to have theirs.
I genuinely find you and your work
hugely inspirational,
but the way access to the originals
was deliberately obscured,
by you, was really disappointing.
All these different kinds of Director's Cut
with differing resulting effects.
Well, they really complicate
all this, don't they?
So, yeah, studios mess with films,
often irrevocably.
It's nice that sometimes
an unmessed version can manifest.
But the problem is,
artists and audiences have been enamored
with the concept of this.
Directors run the risk of falling down
a rabbit hole, continuously re-editing
their work once it's already out,
like it's in early access or something,
changing their minds
about what their own visions even were,
and sometimes even helping to obscure the
versions people know and love from history.
Worse than this, what makes a director
an authority on what the film should be?
Directors are a small part of a project.
The producers, writers, editors, actors,
artists, set designers, all these people
are so important and valuable
on any project,
that it seems almost rude to pretend
the director is the one who should
decide what the film they all made is.
It takes a village to raise a child,
and the mayor of the village
shouldn't get to say that child
belongs to them.
This problem hits me on a personal level,
in fact.
The last Scanline video
did surprisingly well
and made it into some
lists of best video essays,
but often it was credited directly to me,
when scanline is a collaborative
show between me and Shannon Strucci,
whose name was above mine
in the credits.
We share writing, editing,
and other creative duties.
She's editing this part right now,
I'm just doing the voice-over.
It's really nice that we got recognized
for our work, but it's OUR work, not mine.
I'm not trying to call anyone out here,
but being credited for work
that wasn't simply mine
makes me a little uncomfortable.
It's an easy mistake to make,
the video is posted on my channel
where most of the videos
are purely my work,
but I think this misunderstanding is
also an extension of how we relate to art
right now,
as products of central individuals
and not the many other people
who work on something
or the surrounding situation
that led to it.
On that note, I think what people like
is the idea constructed by the concept
of Director's Cuts.
We like to imagine films
as a struggle between true creators
and the false moneymen,
as a battle to realize someone's vision.
It's a compelling narrative,
and maybe it's a little true.
The idea that there's an authentic version
of a film is kind of beautiful,
and that makes the struggle to try
and get that version seem almost romantic.
But this narrative has been repackaged
and sold back to us in the form
of Special Editions of Terminator 2
with a couple more scenes, and
box sets of every version of Blade Runner
for us to compare and contrast.
Think about that.
Warner Bros. are responsible
for the Theatrical Cut, and here they are
selling us the fixed version
of a film that was broken by them.
We like to think of works as made by
one person, products of their own vision,
when nothing is that simple.
The Tears in Rain monologue,
the best part of Blade Runner by far,
wasn't made by Ridley Scott.
It wasn't even written by the writer,
not completely.
Rutger Hauer modified the monologue
the night before, making it shorter
and feel more human,
and added the most famous line:
[Rutger Hauer] And then, you know,
I came up with the line
"All those moments will be lost
in time like tears in rain."
[Harris] Knowing this, the idea
that it's all up to some sole creator
and their mystical intent only obscures
the reality of filmmaking,
and trains us to desire a purity of vision
that's completely unattainable.
Makes us go out and buy more
products for the joy of obtaining
an even more perfected
version of one person's idea,
even if that idea was bad,
and keeps changing even,
necessitating more versions,
and then unbroken versions
so that you still have original, 
and it just goes on and on forever.
When does the consumption
end and the art begin?
There are no easy answers
to questions about art.
The best I can muster right now is,
Director's Cuts are certainly a valid idea
and they can arguably
improve the quality of a film,
but, this idea is also easily co-opted
into the exact same commercialism
that necessitated them in the first place.
The idea that the
director is the one person
who should have final say
on the most ideal version of a work
is a highly ideological assumption
which says more about how we think
about film then it actually says
about the medium itself.
But that's a whole can of worms that
we'll have to get into at a later date.
I guess at some point,
we should maybe explore what authorship
actually is,
and whether the author is alive or not,
and what the hell 'auteur' means.
Join us on the next Scanline when we
discuss how meaning is constructed.
Ah, great, I'm gonna have to read books.
But if anything, what all this examination
of cuts seems to relate
is the power of editing. We've seen just
how much very small changes can affect
the feel of a whole sequence
or the meaning of a story.
An editor can make a bad film great and
a really good film terrible and boring.
Editing is such an important part
of the process that some people
spend years of their lives,
or an awful lot of money,
learning how to do it.
Too much money, frankly.
Luckily, we here at Scanline
have put together
a functioning simulation
of a film school.
[Shannon] Hi, Shannon here.
This cut here,
where the sound starts first,
is a great technique for drawing
people into your film.
To do it, you, uh, just you-you, um...
You just have the audio start first,
see, it's under the video on the timeline,
so it looks like a J, it's called a J cut.
So J, that's how you do a J cut.
Ok. Thank you. That's film school.
That'll be $15,000 please.
[Harris] If only there was a cheaper way
to get someone to...share the...skills
required to learn editing.
Ah, oh wel-wait hang on!
Skillshare is an online learning platform
for creators.
If you want to learn how to be an editor,
don't do what I did
and try to teach yourself for 10 years.
Fellow youtuber Jordy Vandeput has a class
on editing in Adobe Premiere
that takes three hours and 22 minutes,
the exact length of Apocalypse Now Redux,
and a much better use of your time.
Jordy's cutting, animating,
and color correcting tips are like
the decade I spent teaching it to myself,
only in fast-forward,
and actually taught me a couple new things
I hadn't realized you could do so easily.
I'm a little embarrassed about that,
and better yet, it didn't cost
an entire college tuition.
An annual subscription to the entire
platform is less than $10 a month,
but if you click on the link in the
description or go to skl.sh/hbomberguy,
you can get two months of free access
to these classes and over 25,000 more.
I talked about time management skills
in a video a couple months ago,
and on that note, Thomas Frank's
productivity master class
genuinely improved my life
in measurable ways.
Hold on, do you hear this?

That's my filing cabinet,
which I have now.
I used to keep all the invoices
for music and art and stuff in a big pile
in the corner, and leave
to-do lists everywhere,
and now I have a system
that actually works,
and getting things done
is much less daunting.
If stuff like that that might be
of interest to you,
once again, that link is
skl.sh/hbomberguy.
So yeah, Director's Cuts can be good,
often they aren't, Francis,
but, on the whole it's clear
why this is an aspect
of film worth focusing on.
Because as we've seen,
films really can be greatly altered
by even tiny removals or additions.
Cinema is often as much
in here as it is on the screen,
but what we see on the screen,
with our...eyes, facilitates our emotions
and beliefs and imaginations.
Our collective reverence for
alternative cuts reveals our understanding
of the power films hold over us.
By learning just how differently
the same idea can be expressed,
we're learning more about how
to express ourselves.
Cinema is a powerful thing
because it is an extension
of the human soul.
I've seen things that you people would
believe because you've seen them, too.
I've seen the addition of a daydream
change how I feel about personhood
and my entire understanding of a story.
I've seen the addition of more things
to something I like
transform it into something I hate,
and I've seen thousands of people
criticize a few scant frames
of digital puppeteering
because the original
meant so much to them.
And I'm glad that none of these
moments will ever truly be lost,
because we have the power to
share them with each other.
Thank you for watching.
[Shannon] And that's when I realize that
this guy might like movies.
[Harris]
ehhneaHHHHHHH




[Harris]
Hi there.
This video is dedicated to the memory
of Rutger Hauer,
who passed away this year.
Incidentally, 2019 is also the year
in which Blade Runner was set.
I found myself wondering which 2019
I'd rather live in,
but, frankly in both there are plenty
of people who aren't being treated
with the personhood they deserve.
Go do something nice for someone today.
