Stephen King Collection - Riding the Bullet, Bag of Bones etc- 18/10/23 - Via Vision

[DMRI2006]

Originally Posted by Ruined

The above bolded line is "mostly false," if you read the history of the film. You imply the theatrical cut was a studio-mandated cash-in via its forced-to-be-cut scenes for "increased showings" at theaters.

However, the director considers the theatrical cut his preferred cut, the director's cut if you will. The extended TV-cut was what was created solely for a cash-in, not the theatrical cut.

The director intended the movie to only be a theatrical feature, but in creating the theatrical feature filmed a lot of material, the best of which could then be edited down to theatrical length - that was his intention, per the director. However, at the time there were a number of King miniseries that performed well on TV. So, after the fact, they offered a pile of money to take all the stuff that was edited out for theatrical run and put it back in so they could make some cash on the TV miniseries aspect. And that is all the TV cut is, a TBS cash-in; its not the director finally getting to restore his vision, because the director has stated his vision was the theatrical cut.

While one may like the TV cut better (it is certainly a lot different), I just find it hard to do so based on all its faults; there are even parts where the censorship makes it hard to figure out WTF is being said by the characters (like the shit on the sheets scene) and the film moves at a snails pace, and it doesnt always make as much logical sense as the theatrical. Portraying the theatrical cut as edited down for monetary purposes is really not true - the director considers the theatrical cut his preferred version, and its actually the TV cut which padded up for monetary purposes - created after the fact solely to cash-in on King miniseries popularity. And in doing so, using cutting room floor footage that was not intended to be seen in the final cut by the director, in order to pad out the runtime for TV.

Ruined, you sound like Fraser Heston was Orson Welles with this "grand vision" for the movie. Fact is he was a replacement for Peter Yates, who developed the movie and worked on the script before Heston ever got there, backing out at the last minute seemingly. We can argue it any which way but the reality is Heston wasn't a very good replacement for Yates either judging by his short-lived career in features. I'd also argue it wasn't his "vision" that kept the movie at 2 hours -- it was almost certainly the studio that held to that.

And you also act like it's 1 or 2 useless scenes that were taken out of the movie. It's a FULL HOUR of material. If it was so useless why did he ever shoot all of it? The script was structured to hold all of that material. That was the point of it. It wasn't written so an entire 1/3 of the movie would end up on the cutting room floor.

Plus, Heston himself admits in the commentary the film should have been longer. No, not the full 3 hours of the TV version, but he eventually and kind of reluctantly admits there was too much left out.

For me the theatrical cut doesn't work at all as a movie. It has far too many compromises and the movie has its own issues. The TV version plays more like one of the zillion mini-series made of King's works, sure, but with this adaptation being so mild to begin with, I don't have an issue with it. It's more watchable for me when viewed that way.

My big problem is the encoding on the Kino version. Hopefully Via Vision does a better job.