20th Century FoxTerry Gilliam has produced some of the most inventive, strange and amazing films in the history of cinema - and if you ever got a chance to see some of them, you'd agree. Thing is, the amount of the director's filmography that's widely available is kinda slim, owing to the numerous occassions that studio wrangling and release strategies have completely buried them, or even stopped them from being finished in the first place. Which is probably why he's been lowered to reuniting with his fellow ex-Monty Python members for their money-grabbing reunion shows at the O2 Arena, coming soon! The story of his transcendent, 1984-inspired dystopian black comedy Brazil has been well told, with enough studio hoo-ha to provide material for a whole book. Literally, Jack Matthews wrote a book called The Battle Of Brazil, detailing the struggles between Gilliam and Universal Pictures. The downbeat ending didn't test well amongst executives, demanding a new happy ending and some serious cuts to the film's running time, which the director was obviously resistant to. After delaying the film's release for months, Gilliam took out a full-page ad in Hollywood newspaper Variety, urging Universal to release Brazil in its intended version. Brazil actually got released, and whilst Universal didn't do much to publicise it, the furore that Gilliam had whipped up certainly helped it from being totally forgotten. Worse was his experience with The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, a decidedly lighter affair that still ended up being totally abandoned by its distributor. The director himself remembers "we were ultimately the victim of Columbia Tri-Star being sold to Sony, because at that time all they were doing was trying to get the books looking as good as possible." Munchausen was delayed from release because the new execs were getting back at the old execs, basically. They spent no money advertising the film and produced the bare minimum of prints, less even than the weirdest art film gets. Since then Gilliam's fortunes have fluctuated, his 2005 fantasy film Tideland, which was edited against his wishes and summarily dumped following mixed festival reviews, and his latest The Zero Theorem, another dystopian sci-fi which was finished in 2013 and has yet to find a US distributor. Gilliam has not only had loads of his films buried by studios, but it looks like he might get buried himself. Like this article? Let us know in the comments section below.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
20th Century FoxTerry Gilliam has produced some of the most inventive, strange and amazing films in the history of cinema - and if you ever got a chance to see some of them, you'd agree. Thing is, the amount of the director's filmography that's widely available is kinda slim, owing to the numerous occassions that studio wrangling and release strategies have completely buried them, or even stopped them from being finished in the first place. Which is probably why he's been lowered to reuniting with his fellow ex-Monty Python members for their money-grabbing reunion shows at the O2 Arena, coming soon! The story of his transcendent, 1984-inspired dystopian black comedy Brazil has been well told, with enough studio hoo-ha to provide material for a whole book. Literally, Jack Matthews wrote a book called The Battle Of Brazil, detailing the struggles between Gilliam and Universal Pictures. The downbeat ending didn't test well amongst executives, demanding a new happy ending and some serious cuts to the film's running time, which the director was obviously resistant to. After delaying the film's release for months, Gilliam took out a full-page ad in Hollywood newspaper Variety, urging Universal to release Brazil in its intended version. Brazil actually got released, and whilst Universal didn't do much to publicise it, the furore that Gilliam had whipped up certainly helped it from being totally forgotten. Worse was his experience with The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, a decidedly lighter affair that still ended up being totally abandoned by its distributor. The director himself remembers "we were ultimately the victim of Columbia Tri-Star being sold to Sony, because at that time all they were doing was trying to get the books looking as good as possible." Munchausen was delayed from release because the new execs were getting back at the old execs, basically. They spent no money advertising the film and produced the bare minimum of prints, less even than the weirdest art film gets. Since then Gilliam's fortunes have fluctuated, his 2005 fantasy film Tideland, which was edited against his wishes and summarily dumped following mixed festival reviews, and his latest The Zero Theorem, another dystopian sci-fi which was finished in 2013 and has yet to find a US distributor. Gilliam has not only had loads of his films buried by studios, but it looks like he might get buried himself. Like this article? Let us know in the comments section below.