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3 Fables of the Reconstruction The Four-Hour Greed There’s surely no more famous lost film than Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, a silent film made in 1923 and 1924 and released by MGM in mutilated form in late 1924. If you believe the hype of Turner Classic Movies, what’s been lost has now been found—even though the studio burned the footage it cut almost seventy-five years ago, in order, according to Stroheim, to extract the few cents’ worth of silver contained in the nitrate. TCM’s ad copy states, ‘‘In 1924, Erich von Stroheim created a cinematic masterpiece that few would see—until now.’’ This is a lie, but one characteristic of an era that wants to believe that capitalism always has a happy ending, no matter how venal or stupid or shortsighted the capitalists happen to be. What TCM really means is that at 7:00 and 11:30 p.m. on Sunday, December 5, it will present a 239-minute version of Greed, which is ninety-nine minutes longer than the 1924 release. The ninety-nine minutes aren’t filled with rediscovered footage. Instead the original release version has been combined with hundreds of rephotographed stills, sometimes with added pans and zooms, sometimes cropped, often with opening and closing irises. There’s also a ‘‘continuity screenplay’’ dated March 31, 1923, a new score, and varying amounts of ingenuity. According to Rick Schmidlin , who produced this version on video, ‘‘This will be the single largest premiere of a silent film in the history of cinema.’’ (The largest, that is, in terms of audience size, not screen size. And because it’s on video, the prospects for theatrical showings are dim.) I hasten to add that it’s TCM’s ad copy I’m objecting to, not Schmidlin’s enterprise—which is a fascinating, instructive, and exciting undertaking, even if I have occasional bones to pick with it. In the interests of full disclosure, I should acknowledge that I was hired by Schmidlin as a consultant on another new version of a movie classic that was released last year by Universal Pictures, Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. I was also asked by Schmidlin to be the consultant on this new version of Greed, an offer he made in part because of my short book about Greed, published in the BFI Film Classics series in 1993. (I declined, mainly because there was no compensation. My employment by Universal had seemed close enough to charity work; it was demoralizing to think of performing compar- 4 ESSENTIAL CINEMA able services for the Turner empire for no fee at all, even if I supported what Rick was doing.) One advantage to watching from the outside is that I can now appreciate the difficulty everyone else had in sizing up the reedited Touch of Evil. For all the major differences between the reconfigured Touch of Evil and the reconfigured Greed, neither qualifies as a ‘‘restoration’’ or a ‘‘director’s cut,’’ regardless of what Universal or Turner might say. Unfortunately, both new versions are based on documents that aren’t publicly available in their entirety, which makes it difficult to evaluate the end product. The reconfigured Touch of Evil is based on a 58-page memo written in 1957 by Welles to the head of Universal, Edward Muhl, requesting editing and sound changes. Roughly two-thirds of this document became an appendix of the second edition of Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich’s This Is Orson Welles, a book I edited for HarperCollins in the early 90s. But no one apart from Schmidlin, editor Walter Murch, myself, and a few others has seen the entire memo.∞ The documents used to construct the new Greed include the aforementioned continuity screenplay and more than 650 stills, all of which Schmidlin came across in the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles when he started researching the film. None of these items is available to the general public. One can get another version of the script, edited by Joel Finler and published in London in 1972, and many stills have been published elsewhere, including the four hundred stills printed in a book assembled by the late Herman G. Weinberg, hyperbolically titled The Complete Greed (1973). Still, here too we have only a partial guide to what motivated Schmidlin’s major decisions. This is hardly atypical. Similar gaps—and in most cases much bigger ones—exist in the documentation...

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