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82 The Recutting of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid: Ethical Problems in Film Restoration Stephen Prince Sam Peckinpah knew about outside editors coming in at the behest of studios to work changes on his films. Columbia Pictures reedited Major Dundee (1965), removing copious amounts of Peckinpah’s footage. Warner Bros. removed the flashback sequences and other material from The Wild Bunch for its release in 1969. MGM chopped eighteen minutes out of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid for its 1973 release. In all these instances, the editing was done against Peckinpah’s expressed wishes and resulted in films that he bitterly denounced. Happily, The Wild Bunch has been restored to its former glory, and Peckinpah’s preferred cut of Pat Garrett surfaced at a University of Southern California screening in 1986 and was shown on cable television’s Z Channel in 1989. It was released by Ted Turner to the home video market on VHS tape and laser disc. During the past quarter century, the restoration of neglected, incomplete, or formerly lost films has become a vital part of archival practice and of contemporary film culture. With very old titles that have circulated in altered versions, scholarship as well as fortuitous accidents have disclosed the most complete extant prints and aided restorers in reconstructing an approximation of the original from the surviving materials. Impressive examples in recent years include restorations done for the Friedrich-Wilhelm Murnau Foundation of Nosferatu (1922) and The Last Laugh (1924), for Deutsche Kinemathek of Battleship Potemkin (1925), and for the Danske Filmmuseum and the Cinémathèque Française of The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). The ancillary market of home video has helped to foster popular affection for “director’s cuts” of films that were released amid acrimonious or contentious circumstances. The revenue stream this market generates also 83 The Recutting of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid furnishes an important incentive to organizations in undertaking restorations of older pictures. In some cases, the director may authorize the restoration , as Ridley Scott has been doing with his evolving iterations of Blade Runner over the years. In some situations where a filmmaker no longer lives but has left detailed instructions behind, these can guide a posthumous reconstruction of a lost or contentiously altered film. Walter Murch’s reconstruction of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958), for example, was based on copious editing instructions left by Welles. In 2005, Warner Bros. reissued Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid in a new edition that featured a reedit by Paul Seydor of the existing versions of the film. At first glance, the Touch of Evil and Pat Garrett reissues seem like parallel cases. Welles and Peckinpah both had been locked out of the editing room by studio executives who didn’t like what they were seeing and who were interested only in marketing conventional, easily exploitable films, not the moody and unusual works that the directors were creating. Universal Pictures’ officials were chagrined by the novel camera setups that Welles had employed, by his unconventional editing approach, and by his bold and aggressive use of audio elements. They wanted a simple crime film, a formulaic B movie that could be put together quickly and released in short order. To get this, Welles was taken off the project. Analogously, the executives at MGM cared little for the meandering, atmospheric cut that Peckinpah prepared. The studio’s chief, James Aubrey, wanted product moving quickly to theaters because MGM had to recoup revenues that were being plowed into hotel construction. Aubrey demanded that Peckinpah’s two-hour-plus film be reduced to a conventional run time, and he didn’t care whether the film suffered from this radical surgery. Peckinpah was removed from the editing room, and Aubrey worked on the picture with Roger Spottiswoode and Robert Wolfe, editors whom Peckinpah had employed. An additional parallel between the cases lies in the fact that the contemporary reissues of these films were prepared by professional Hollywood editors who had great regard for the films and their directors. Walter Murch admired Welles, and in American Graffiti (1973) and The Conversation (1974), two of the films that he edited, he worked out many of the same methods for creating complex montages of audio sources that Welles had planned for Touch of Evil.1 Paul Seydor, who recut Pat Garrett, started out as an academic, an assistant professor who published a well-regarded book on Peckinpah and who then changed career paths...

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