‘BRAZIL’: A BLURRED BATTLEFIELD

The keen moral lesson to be drawn from the fuss over Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” was known to and often quoted by my grandmother. It is that the best time to padlock the stable is before the horses have been purloined.

In the hugely different days before television, the studios kept a steely hand on their productions from wispy idea to release prints. Films, as the saying went, were not made they were remade: re-edited and even reshot until somebody got it right.

Some directors resisted the pressures more adroitly than others--John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock come to mind--but they, too, wore scar tissue from their battles.

Universal’s dispute with Gilliam and his producer, Arnon Milchan, over “Brazil” measures how much things have changed. The film was a co-production, Universal paying $9 million for the North American rights, Fox paying $6 million for the rights to the rest of the world.

Gilliam’s version of the film was in fact already playing in Paris when Universal decided that it had not got what it ordered and that some trims in length and a retailoring of the end were necessary.

The resulting outcry has given “Brazil” a few million dollars’ worth of publicity (always a useful salve); the film is being released unchanged for Academy Award qualification; the cloak of peace has descended on the battleground.

And, as always, it is the customers who will decide whether Sid Sheinberg of Universal was going to smudge a masterpiece or whether he and his colleagues were right to think that “Brazil” was brilliant and flawed but reparable (which is to say, that it could have been made more commercially viable).

What does seem clear, however, is that the timing was always wrong. As with “Heaven’s Gate” and “Once Upon a Time in America,” two films with far more grievous commercial problems than “Brazil,” the reductions were attempted too late; the houses, with all their idiosyncratic dormers and gables, were in place.

In the two cases it was the artists’ visions and versions the customers wanted to see, if they wanted to see the films at all. As it turned out, there was no commercial gain in the severe editing, only more costs.

Even setting aside the principle that the film maker’s work should be seen as he saw it, not as the studio saw it, I’m not convinced that the adjustments on “Brazil” (which would have been minor in the whole context of Gilliam’s extravagant film) would have made a significant difference at the box office, although the publicity pretty surely will.

But it is on the principle that the battle has been fought, and been joined by the critics and by producers and directors who have had their own fights with the studios.

It is the oldest of Hollywood’s battles, art vs. commerce, the rights of the artists to do their thing vs. the rights of the financiers to try to recoup their investment and make a profit. (The cost figures out of Hollywood grow larger and more whimsical all the while, but $9 million is still not nothing.)

It’s just that the battlefield is not what it was. Partly by default, many film makers have won a degree of independence even the giants of the Hollywood past never had. Universal has probably continued to function most like the traditional studios in keeping a firm hand on the creative process. More generally, however, the decline of the expert and creative producer and production executive as a breed has removed from film making a kind of dynamic tension that was often constructive.

But “Brazil,” as a co-production and a foreign production, was presumably out of reach as it was being shot. At that, Gilliam’s darkly comical vision of a bizarre bureaucratic future, with Big Brother as a kind of supremely tyrannical office manager, is so personal and so heavily a matter of style not plot that the original script can have given only the vaguest clues to the end result.

When the reviews are in next week, I’m not sure that Universal’s, or Sid Sheinberg’s, overall evaluation of “Brazil”--brilliant but flawed--will be seriously contradicted. It may even be noted that the studio in the beginning was betting on a long shot, not a sure thing, was opting for an original not a sequel.

The film maker as artist has won a fight, with a little help from his friends, and the victory will have its resonances for the future. There are other resonances as well. One is that the weakening of the studio controls can deprive the film maker of constructive friends as well as oppressive enemies.