There's a neverending battle, it seems, between great directors making films -- some successful to the point of greatness, some not, but all the visions of unique artists -- only to have them be cut by the releasing studios interested in catering to audiences and their wallets. If you know me at all, you know what I think of this, but I'm not so much interested in just griping about this in the general case. My question is, rather, why do these pointy-haired studio bosses make these kinds of cuts when there's no REASON to?

These thoughts were pretty much lifted from David Poland's The Hot Button column, both his article about it and the followups from readers in the columns for the couple days after. Read those, linked below, if you're interested in them.

At any rate, the point: Gangs of New York, to be released very soon, is the latest film from director Martin Scorsese. I'm not a Scorsese fan, but I respect him as an artist and a filmmaker. Many consider him to be the greatest film director alive today, bar none.

The film is being financed by Miramax, a studio that changed much in the movie world by picking up promising films by promising but unknown directors, pouring money into financing and marketing them, and come up with big successes, commercially and/or critically. Pulp Fiction. The English Patient. Shakespeare In Love. Clerks. The Talented Mr. Ripley. Good Will Hunting. Emma. Muriel's Wedding. Jackie Brown. Brassed Off. Heavenly Creatures (which proved to the world that Peter Jackson could direct more than movies about Muppet pimp junkies; without it, would we have the current LotR films?).

Love or hate these titles, it's hard to argue that these films are, at the very least, the product of artists permitted to bring their personal visions to the screen -- even though Miramax dude Harvey Weinstein is hardly a hands-off sort of studio executive -- rather than being instruments in a big Movie Factory that cranks out one soulless formula flick after another.

I don't know what happened to Miramax's vision, or that of Harvey Weinstein himself. The version of Gangs of New York that will be released to theaters is not Scorsese's three-hour cut. The studio is forcing the removal of 20 minutes, including some of the more violent images. David Poland's questions are mine: Why do you purposely hire one of the greatest directors there is only to cut him? And, in any case, will a dark, 2 hour, 40 minute Scorsese picture be any more marketable than a dark 3 hour Scorsese picture? It's understandable, even if it's still not justifiable, if a studio takes something that's relatively unmarketable and forces changes that will sell it better. But Miramax won't see an extra dollar from Gangs of New York because it's 20 minutes shorter. So why -- WHY force those cuts?

Does history not teach us anything?

Blade Runner. Studio requires the addition of a crappy voice-over and cuts the movie down. Director's cut on video makes it a skillion times better to anybody who actually cares about the movie in the first place.

The Abyss. Studio cuts make the ending unintelligible.

Almost Famous. Nearly a half hour cut from the film, but its box office was still soft. It's well received critically, but the director's cut on video is admired much more. Does anybody prefer the shorter version?

This kind of stuff has been happening as long as movies themselves have been happening. Buster Keaton, now often considered the greatest silent comedian ever (above even Chaplin) and even more universally considered the greatest actor-writer-director of all time, had his talent and career utterly suppressed when he signed a contract with MGM and wasn't permitted the freedom to work.

Orson Welles, actor-writer-director of what is most often considered the greatest film of all time, Citizen Kane, fought with studios on practically every film he ever made, most notoriously The Magnificent Ambersons, a brilliant film with a studio-tacked-on ending that even the film's strongest proponents recommend ignoring. Why'd they do it? Welles was never a cash cow director. He was admired, but he was not loved by the masses. The studio's meddling did nothing for anybody and only nursed bitterness and resentment from those who would care about the movie in the first place. Welles' "Touch of Evil" also suffered from studio meddling, so resented decades after the fact that a rerelease of the film restores what film restoration artists and historians believe was Welles' preferred cut, based on his notes and recovered footage.

Again, I'm not (currently) on a tirade about studio-forced cuts in *general*. I'm just saying, geez, studios are STUPID to hire a Welles or a Scorsese -- with the full understanding that these directors are not commercial giants -- and then cut their films in an utterly *hopeless* attempt to milk more money out of the box office. As Poland put it, "If Miramax picks up a film like Cinema Paradiso and feels that this unknown film from an unknown filmmaker will be better received at a shorter length, the logic is hard to fight. But if you choose to invest in a Scorsese movie, why try to change it into something else?"

I suppose, though, that I can at least be thankful for the modern trend of director's cuts in videos and DVDs, although I'd rather the original release were the "right" one in the first place. This way, though, at least the original vision is available *somewhere*. And, to be fair, often the director's cuts of films *are* inferior cuts; sometimes it's better if a film is tighter and more brisk. But in an age where studios (often rightly) figure audiences only have 20 second attention spans, the tendency is to cut too much -- rip out everything but the high points, not realizing that it's the glue in between that holds them together.