Hey folks, Harry here.... I have heard about a legendary cut of APOCALYPSE NOW that was gags longer, but awesome beyond words... but when it tested, it was just too long. Are we more tolerant now as an audience? Are we being conditioned for the 4 hour film? Can top directors make 88minute films anymore and do we want them to? Well, it seems from the below that Coppola is doing the 'director cut' thing... and this is a film that I'd love to see it done with. Here ya go...
Harry,
Don't know if you heard about this or not, but this was reported in the MIPCOM 2000 edition of Variety:
With a little prompting from the French, Francis Ford Coppola has re-edited and re-mixed his 1979 classic, 'Apocalypse Now,' making the two-hour-and-33-minute pic roughly an hour longer.
The film will be re-released theatrically, though no date has been set. Coppola will show execs at Paramount and Canal Plus the re-edit in several weeks.
"The film audience today is more sophisticated and more tolerant," Coppola tells Variety. "We felt now that some of the real unusual things we had in the original cut would bring it back to a level of avantgarde-ness and length that it lacked."
Paul Rassam, who had worked at Pathe in the late 1970's and saw an earlier cut of the film, got the ball rolling, encouraging Coppola to re-edit 'Apocalypse.' Coppola agreed but only if he could get one of the pic's original editors, the legendary Walter Murch.
When Murch committed, Coppola returned to the original negative, adding in several more "razor slices," as Coppola calls them, of Marlon Brando, and more humorous scenes.
Returning to the musical score Coppola had worked on with his late father, the director discovered sections that needed new music. "We found some scraps of paper in my fathers stuff, some sketches," says Coppola. "In particular, we found two parts, one very romantic, the other for the death of the Laurence Fishburne character. Using these was like working with my father again, across the great divide."
Transcribed by Monkey_King Original article by Charles Lyons
Monkey_King
