10 Classic Movies The Directors Won't Stop Changing

When your director thinks that he's making a satirical classical political drama and your producer thinks that he's making a glossy porn flick, then it's probably inevitable that it's going to be hard to settle on a definitive cut.

Director Tinto Brass was only part way through cutting together his work print of Caligula when producer (and Penthouse magazine founder) Bob Guccione removed him from the production and snuck back onto set himself to shoot a bunch of additional hardcore unsimulated sex scenes.

Eventually, there were so many different editors and cuts of Caligula (and editors who didn't necessarily want their names associated with such a mess) that the credits just list "Edited by the Production".

The version released in cinemas in 1980 was Guccione's cut, over two and a half hours long and oscillating between A-listers playing depraved Romans and badly spliced in straight-up porn scenes. It was utterly panned, with Roger Ebert walking out before the end, describing himself as "disgusted and depressed".

Ever since, there have been numerous attempts at a director's cut recapturing Brass's vision, which have helped the movie's reputation recover to become something of a cult classic.

In 1981, Caligula was re-released in an R-rated form without the hardcore scenes (and therefore running to a considerably shorter 105 minutes), but still otherwise Guccione's cut. A 2007 "Imperial Edition" for home media both removed the explicit, unsimulated sex and rearranged the scenes closer to Brass's original intention.

A more definitive "director's cut" is currently being worked on by German director, and academic expert in Brass's work, Alexander Tuschinski with Brass's support, restoring and speculatively completing the director's original work print.