10 Films That Suffered In The Editing Room

Studios have a habit of caring a little too much for their own good. Yet, sometimes it's wiser just to let the people you've hired to do the actual filmmaking... do the actual filmmaking.

Sergio Leone was widely regarded as one of the finest directors to have ever lived and that's why The Ladd Company roped him in to write and direct their epic crime drama, Once Upon a Time in America in 1982.

Yet, despite the dream collaboration of Leone combined with the likes of Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and James Woods, the film suffered from the director simply filming too much footage. After logging somewhere between eight and ten hours of action, Leone and his editor managed to get the film down to six hours and wanted to release the feature in two separate parts.

That idea was rebuffed and the runtime was then shortened down to four hours and 29 minutes. However, Leone knew this would still be too long for his employers and shaved nearly another whole hour off the runtime.

After all his painstaking work to cram an understandable narrative into the significantly shorter feature he put together for the 1984 Cannes Film Festival crowd, the studio still decided the film needed cutting further and took another hour and 30 minutes away from the movie - against Leone's wishes.

The shortened American theatrical release was a critical and financial disaster, which was labelled as a 'travesty'. After the incident Leone would turn his back on directing entirely and this now sits as a vital reminder of what can happen when a studio assumes too much creative control.