4. Once Upon A Time In America Re-Edited Into Incomprehension
Sergio Leone's crime masterpiece is a film that just shouldn't be tampered with, even with its beefy 229-minute run-time, but that didn't stop the studio from having a go anyway. Without Leone's supervision or approval, a 139-minute cut - that's a whole 90 minutes shorter - was released, in which the plot is completely butchered, and Robert De Niro and James Woods' characters don't show up until the film is basically a third over. So drastic was the studio's interference that reviewers championed the original cut while deeming the studio edit a "travesty", and in one critic's case, "the worst film of 1984" (while Woods noted that the same critic saw the full cut and deemed it the best of the 1980s). Clearly, here's a studio that didn't give a damn about what the master director was doing, and if a filmmaker as talented and revered as Leone couldn't escape the studio's scissors, then is anyone really safe?