1. The 9 Hour Cut - Greed
Only 12 people have ever seen Erich Von Stroheim's original 9 and a half hour version of Greed, which included a hand-stencil ed gold tinting, achieved using the Handschiegl Color Process. "For stark, terrible realism and marvelous artistry, it is the greatest picture I have ever seen..." said Harry Carr, one of those twelve people. Greed's lost footage has since been deemed the "holy grail of cinema" by film archivists and historians. During the editorial process, Goldwyn-Mayer merged with Metro to form MGM, and a man who had previously fired Von Stroheim took over production duties. Because of this, some see what happened next as an act of spite, but it's really just an example of an idiot's attempt at commercialism killing an artist's vision. This whole fiasco would turn out to be the Greek tragedy that Von Stroheim had originally envisioned his film to be. In 1924, Von Stroheim would invite Harry Carr, Rex Ingram, Aileen Pringle, Carmel Myers, Idwal Jones, Joseph Jackson, Jack Jungmeyer, Fritz Tidden, Welford Beaton, Valentine Mandelstam, and Jean Bertin to view an advance screening of his original cut of the film. Carr would recount how " went into the projecting-room at 10:30 in the morning; we staggered out at 8:00 that night." Later, making the aforementioned statement, he regarded the film as the best ever made. Von Stroheim would implore studio executives to release the film in its entirety, in two installments, but knew in reality that it was too long for any commercial distribution at that time. Joel Finler, in his book on Greed, discusses how Von Stroheim would cut the film down to 24-reels (around half the runtime) in March 1924, with plans to screen it over two nights with intermissions. But this wasn't enough: the executives demanded more cuts. Von Stroheim then sent the 24-reel version to his friend Rex Ingram and his editor Grant Whytock, claiming he could not remove another frame himself. Under Ingram, Whytock would cut the film down to 18 reels, though the version retained most of the film's subplots. This is when the merger went down, which allowed Irving Thalberg (the aforementioned guy who had previously fired Von Stroheim from Universal) to become the producer of the film. Ingram would screen the 18-reel version for Thalberg and the MGM execs, but they still complained about the somber ending, arguing that it wouldn't be popular with audiences. They asked to re-shoot the ending so that the events depicted appeared to be sum of a dream, and had June Mathis cut the film down to 13-reels. She planned on cutting even more, but ended up taking off to Europe and passing the project over to another editor, whose specialty was removing footage in exchange for intertitles. He would be responsible for cutting the film down to 10-reels. Von Stroheim would disown this version of the film, and blame Mathis for everything. According to Wikipedia, the scenes that were removed from Von Stroheim's 24-reel version included: "McTeague and Trina's early, happy years of marriage, the sequence showing McTeague and Trina eventually moving into their shack, the family life of the Sieppe family before Trina's marriage, the film's prologue depicting McTeague's mother and father at the Big Dipper mine and McTeague's apprenticeship, the more suggestive and sexual close-up shots depicting McTeague and Trina's physical attraction to each other, the scenes after McTeague has murdered Trina and roams around San Francisco and Placer County, additional footage of Death Valley, additional footage of Trina with her money, and a more gradual version of Trina's descent into greed and miserly obsession." The film was a total flop, despite and because of the studio cuts. On top of its general unpopularity, it was also a critical and commercial failure, losing the studios a fine chunk of change in the process. It would also ruin Von Stroheim, similar to how the treatment of Ambersons would later destroy Welles. In 1999, film restorationist Rick Schmidlin would release a 239-minute "restored" version of the film for TCM. This version did not include any new footage, but rather filled in most of the gaps with pans and zooms of production stills, some extra intertitles, and a longer score. Schmidlin supposedly based his restoration off an existing "continuity script" - at least, according to film historian Jonathan Rosenbaum. This version is certainly commendable,but it is nothing even remotely close to what Von Stroheim's original cut would have looked like, though it's probably the best we'll ever get. In his autobiography, Von Stroheim claimed that the studio burnt the cut footage in order to scavenge the minute amount of silver nitrate it would produce, effectively rendering any hope of ever seeing a complete version of the film impossible.
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