Not ‘The End’ : TV, Cable, Video, Laser Give Films a New Afterlife

There was a day not long ago when excited moviegoers could plunk down the price of admission at the box office and enjoy a motion picture with the knowledge that the work on screen was a complete package, a finished product, the summit of a filmmaker’s hard work and vision.

Today, however, with home video, laser disc, cable television and network television all fighting for the lucrative afterlife of a theatrical film, movies are getting sliced, diced and analyzed before viewers’ eyes. To distinguish their presentation of a movie from the rest, marketing executives are increasingly focusing their efforts behind the camera, scooping up footage from the cutting-room floor and gathering insightful comments from directors about the making of their films.

* Paramount Home Video’s new “Directors’ Series” bows March 12 with the video and laser disc release of the 1987 box-office hit “Fatal Attraction,” featuring an introduction by director Adrian Lyne and scenes left out of the theatrical movie, including the controversial original ending that shows Glenn Close committing suicide.

* Showtime’s March 6 premiere of “L.A. Story,” starring Steve Martin, will be followed by a brief segment that includes a five-minute scene cut from the theatrical movie. In November, Showtime presented two lost scenes from Lyne’s psychological thriller “Jacob’s Ladder.”

* The Movie Channel in April will show the longer, re-edited “director’s cut” of Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show,” which was released on laser disc by Voyager Co. last year. Negotiations are under way to premiere a similar cut of that film’s sequel, “Texasville,” now being assembled by Bogdanovich using 25 minutes of additional footage.

“As a movie buff of long standing, I never thought I’d see the day when the word restored would be considered a commercial buzzword,” said Leonard Maltin, a film historian who edits an annual movie reference book.

“I take offense when a revised version of a film comes out on video or cable and it’s either stated or implied that the way the movie was shown in theaters was not what the director wanted,” Maltin said. “So what did we pay money to see, a rough draft? You were seeing a work in progress in theaters, and now you can take home the real thing? That doesn’t thrill me. Sometimes there’s a good reason scenes were left out, and to put them back can be an indulgence.”

The leftover footage resurfacing is generally tacked on after the presentation of a film, often accompanied by the director discussing how the movie was made, or is edited back into the film. Whole scenes are often taken out of films to keep their theatrical running time close to two hours, which is what exhibitors prefer to maximize the number of screenings--and potential audience--each day.

The networks were among the first to use extra film footage creatively. In 1977, Francis Ford Coppola combined his first two “Godfather” films with unseen footage into a 450-minute NBC epic, which was later released for home video. When “Superman” aired on ABC in 1982, 40 minutes were added to turn the movie into a two-part event.

But for the most part, networks add minutes to movies to help them fit a particular time slot. ABC, for example, is expanding two upcoming, unscheduled movies--”Police Academy 6: City Under Siege” and “Look Who’s Talking, Too”--to fill out a 9-11 p.m. time slot.

The difference today is that when networks add footage, they are not letting the promotional opportunities pass them by. When CBS inserted 13 minutes of previously unseen footage into “Dead Poet’s Society” last month, network press releases touted that fact.

In repackaging movies with extra material for home entertainment, marketing executives argue that they are merely feeding the voracious consumer appetite for film knowledge that was created by the home-video industry. In 1991, consumers rented 4.09 billion videocassettes and spent $10.2 billion renting those videos, according to Alexander & Associates, a New York firm that tracks the home video industry. Consumers spent another $4.6 billion purchasing videocassettes.

“The video revolution has really created a whole society of film buffs by bringing movies to millions of people in a way that is frankly unprecedented,” said Eric Doctorow, senior vice president and general manager of Paramount Home Video.

Some critics, however, contend that important movies meriting study are conspicuously absent from current mass-marketing efforts and that the additional material showing up on the marketplace is largely being used to squeeze more money out of already successful studio films.

“They can take a super-popular movie like ‘Fatal Attraction,’ which has already been wrung out financially, add a few gimmicks and put it out again. It’s stunt marketing,” suggested one film critic.

In addition to “Fatal Attraction,” “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home,” with an introduction by Leonard Nimoy, will be available in March as part of Paramount’s new Directors’ Series. Both videos will be presented in a wide-screen, letter-box format with black margins above and below the picture.

Paramount filmed Lyne’s commentary two years ago and Nimoy’s a year ago, but the studio has been waiting until the market reached a “critical mass” before releasing them.

“Consumers, whether they like it or not, have become very sophisticated and film literate,” said Jim McCullaugh, home entertainment editor for Billboard magazine. “They know who the directors are. People who didn’t know Adrian Lyne five years ago could have a conversation with him today about his movies. People are in a position, by virtue of having rented so many movies, to know something about film history.”

Previously, these types of special-edition projects only have been available on laser disc to film devotees. Seminal laser releases--featuring audio tracks by film historians, director’s voice tracks, missing footage and archival information--of such classics as “Citizen Kane,” “King Kong,” “The Magnificent Ambersons” and “The Last Picture Show” have carved out a niche market for film enthusiasts.

And the laser market is rapidly expanding to include recent theatrical releases. Director John Singleton is planning a voice track and additional scenes for a laser edition of “Boyz N the Hood,” and Terry Gilliam will do the same for “The Fisher King.”

“We’ve been watching the laser-disc market grow with these special projects, and they’ve become a powerful marketplace,” said Doctorow, who has had discussions for Directors’ Series videos with directors Steven Spielberg and Bernardo Bertolucci. Bogdanovich filmed a director’s commentary for “Paper Moon” two years ago, but the video release is being held up because of difficulties obtaining music-clearance rights.

“We wanted to wait until the point when the market was sufficiently large enough to maximize these pictures’ potential on video,” Doctorow said. “I think we have that market, and now is the time for us to jump in and take advantage of it.”

Special-edition laser discs sell for as much as $100, and 1,000 sales could be considered a hit. Paramount’s new video series, on the other hand, is priced at $29.95 each, and Doctorow hopes to sell at least 25,000 copies of both titles. To date, “Star Trek IV” has sold 1.9 million copies on video, and “Fatal Attraction” 860,000 copies.

“Regular sales on ‘Fatal Attraction’ have run their course,” said Steven Apple, executive director of Video Insider magazine. “The target now is the film buff, the aficionado. In the record industry, it’s the same people who buy the bootlegs of an artist they already have. It’s the Grateful Dead mentality--people want everything they do.”

In addition to “L.A. Story,” Showtime executive vice president Jim Miller is looking at “four to six” other movies coming to the cable channel in 1992 that could be presented with missing scenes. He mentioned last year’s thriller “Deceived,” starring Goldie Hawn, as one possibility because he heard that two to three alternate endings were filmed.

“We were also told that they shot a different ending to ‘Thelma & Louise,’ ” said Miller, referring to the dark climax of the popular female buddy movie with Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis. “If that’s true, and if the filmmakers and Ridley Scott would be amenable, we’d love to present the movie as it was in theaters, and then do an addendum show with the alternate ending.”

Miller said that pay movie channels are suffering from “price-value relationship problems” because they are now near the bottom of the entertainment food chain. “Movies we were spending a lot less on 10 years ago have been devalued,” he said. “Millions of dollars are spent to market movies on videocassette first, and there’s even more dissolution when they are presented on pay-per-view.

“So we’re trying to find as many ways as we can to present these movies in a way that makes them fresh and gives the viewers some added value. That’s the big buzzword in pay television.”

For marketing executives in search of extra footage, there appears to be no shortage of material. Multiple versions of theatrical films are common, and footage left out of recent films routinely finds its way back into video releases these days.

Recalling his 1986 sexual saga “9 1/2 Weeks,” starring Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke, Lyne said, “I put together a number of versions of ‘9 1/2 Weeks’ during editing. And this shows how many versions there were--there was a version K, still ingrained on my mind, which I thought was the most successful version.”

For the video release of “9 1/2 Weeks,” Lyne inserted a brief sadomasochistic scene that didn’t make the theatrical cut. A slightly more complete version of the film was released in Europe. And Lyne has been approached to put together an extended director’s cut of “9 1/2 Weeks,” which would be almost an hour longer than the original. He said one day he will probably get around to it.

“Maybe all this is in keeping with the revisionist times of the ‘90s,” said Bogdanovich, who has director’s cuts of two other of his films--”They All Laughed” and “At Long Last Love”--that he eventually plans to release. “People want to know what really happened, what really went on behind the scenes. The more information they see, the closer they get to the truth of a film.”