Remake Your Own Hollywood Movie
Dissatisfied with the director’s cut? Direct it yourself!
Illustration by Tim Lillis
Really, it’s all George Lucas’ fault. By 1999, when The Phantom Menace was released, two generations had grown up regarding Star Wars with a kind of religious awe. A lot of these hardcore fans were disappointed with The Phantom Menace, and by the time Revenge of the Sith was released as the last film of the new trilogy, they felt betrayed. This wasn’t the first time fans had felt ripped off by a movie series, but this time, they had the tools to do something about it.
With video editing programs illegally copied or purchased from a software store, they dropped Lucas’ shabby effort onto their hard drives and went to work.
The technical part of editing wasn’t difficult. Once the film was on their disks, they could even use something as basic as iMovie to slice and dice the film into individual scenes, leave some on the cutting room floor, rearrange others, and then put them back together.
BANISHING MR. BINKS
The first fan-edited movie to make a splash was known as The Phantom Edit, a shorter, punchier version of the original film. It exploded across the geek movie world via bootlegs and later BitTorrent — a savagely efficient global distribution system.
In The Phantom Edit, long stretches of Lucas’ talky political scenes were eliminated. The most radical change, however, was that the almost universally loathed Jar Jar Binks suffered a digital “extraordinary rendition” and was virtually excised from the movie.
FAN FARE: Numerous “fan cuts” of The Phantom Menace (above) and Harry Potter (left) have proliferated online. With dirt-cheap software, you too can remake a movie the way you think it ought to be.
Photography above by Keith Hamshere © Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.
The radical surgery was performed by someone known at the time only as The Phantom Editor, though he was later revealed to be professional film editor Mike J. Nichols. Not only did Nichols re-edit Lucas’ movie, he added commentary to his cut justifying his revisions. You can still download The Phantom Edit at such torrent sites as mininova.org and torrentreactor.net.
The Phantom Editor’s bold move set off a wave of fan film remixes. There are now dozens of versions of the most recent Star Wars trilogy floating around the BitTorrent world. Some simply tweak the film; some alter not just the running time and chronology of the scenes, but contain technical contributions such as enhanced sound effects.
EDITS UNLEASHED
In response to these fan edits of his movies, Lucas released 250 movie clips from the Star Wars series on an official mashup area of starwars.com.
Powered by idiot-proof drag-and-drop editing tools provided by eyespot.com, fans are encouraged to edit the clips in any way they like. It’s an acknowledgement that fan edits are here to stay, but it also smacks of a kind of avuncular desperation. Even a notorious control freak like Lucas must know that trying to limit fan edits by choosing which parts of the films to make available is pretty much the definition of too little, too late.
Having whetted their appetites on Star Wars, fans have now started in on other movies and series. Wizard People, Dear Reader is a reworking of Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone, the first Harry Potter movie, but this time only the soundtrack is altered. Brad Neely, a comic artist from Austin, Texas, rewrote The Sorcerer’s Stone in his own demented and abusive style. Voldemort is renamed Val-mart. At one point, Harry refers to himself as a “beautiful animal,” and his chunky cousin, Dudley Dursley, is redubbed Roast-Beefy O’Weefy. Neely’s version of Potter is a profane, surreal experience, which wanders off into tangents, tall tales, and weird asides. Wizard People, Dear Reader doesn’t follow the Potter book or movie, but is its own unique and “beautiful animal.” It too is available at numerous torrent sites, such as myspleen.net.
Other fan edits available online are less invasive, such as an effort by Crappy Logo Productions in which the three Evil Dead movies are spliced together into one huge zombie epic.
A fan identified as Aztek463 has produced perhaps the most existential fan edit that I’m aware of, a reworking of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction in which the movie is dismembered and reassembled into a “trilogy,” separating the tangled storylines in chronological order. This utterly destroys John Travolta’s feel-good strut out of the diner at the close of the original version.
This wasn’t the first time fans had felt ripped off by a movie series, but this time, they had the tools to do something about it.
AUTHORIZED MASHUP: George Lucas has tried to co-opt the fan editors by letting them reshuffle just a few selected clips on an “official” site (left).
Since this demented effort annihilates not just the structure, but the whole point of the original film — its disregard for chronology in favor of clever storytelling — the re-edit is both the most pointless and most brilliant fan remix ever. You can find copies at the torrent sites listed earlier.
MASHUPS AS A LITERARY TRADITION
In one sense, none of this unauthorized editing is new. A couple hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson chopped up the Bible, taking out all the spooky God stuff in favor of what he considered the book’s useful moral teachings. In the mid-1980s, John Oswald’s Plunderphonics created mashups of other artists’ songs back before the word mashup existed. Emergency Broadcast Network edited music and film clips together into evening-long dance club extravaganzas. What’s changed now is that you don’t need anything more sophisticated than a standard PC to create your own samizdat film epics.
It’s possible that in a few years a new Tarantino or Sofia Coppola will emerge from this underground world. What better way is there to understand how movies work than by taking them apart, seeing how the parts sync up, and then putting them back together again?
“Fan editors” of Star Wars, The Matrix, and Harry Potter might constitute the next generation’s film school, the movie equivalent of a young guitarist hunched over in his bedroom, learning the solo from Eric Clapton’s “Layla” one note at a time. And when these new filmmakers invade Hollywood to produce their own original films, you can bet that their fans will be waiting in the wings to hijack their work, remake it, and start the cycle all over again. The genie is out of the bottle, and it’s about damned time.
RESOURCES
Where fan editors and their fans hang: faneditforum.com
BitTorrent: bittorrent.com
uTorrent: utorrent.com
Azureus: azureus.sourceforge.net
Other BitTorrent sites: thepiratebay.org, mininova.org, torrentreactor.net