- Messages
- 5,800
- Reaction score
- 304
- Trophy Points
- 123
Fan Editing: An Emerging Digital Art Form
By Gaith, May 2009
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom without the notorious heart-removal sequence. 2001's Pearl Harbor without the love story. The climaxes of several Marvel superhero movies mashed together in a real-time presentation. Until recently, only copious uses of a remote control would render the first two scenarios possible, and the third would be entirely unachievable - but in the early years of the twenty-first century, such experiences are within easy reach of millions. All these modified films and more now sit in shadowy corners of the Internet, waiting to be discovered.
Welcome to the world of fan edits. Thanks to the proliferation of digital media, inexpensive high-powered computers and ever-more-sophisticated home software, the final cut of a film released by Hollywood studios can no longer be considered the unalterably final cut. Beginning around 2000, when Mike J. Nichols' The Phantom Edit, a revision of 1999's Star Wars Episode One - The Phantom Menace was released, the ability to change professionally-made, feature-length films has gone from being a privilege of a select few to a potential hobby for the masses - if they know where to look, that is.
For the vast majority of human history, most works of art have been fundamentally malleable, and subject to peer review. A prehistoric human carefully painting scenes of a hunt in a cave of Lascaux, France five millennia ago could hardly be sure that a friend of his wouldn't sneak in later and add several spears for good measure, thus changing the original composition. Myths and legends both diversified and thrived in their retellings, with the inevitable result that classical literature often gives many conflicting accounts of heroic and deific figures. Music can be transposed, texts re-written, and each artistic performance is an entity unto itself. Yet for the better part of the first century of its existence, the motion picture - the 20th century's dominant artistic invention - was largely unchangeable to the common viewer. Granted, a government might dub, censor or shorten a film, but that required sophisticated and expensive technology. The general public thus learned to think of films as inviolable.
Yet George Lucas, that quintessentially rebellious filmmaker from Modesto, California, did not. Widely co-credited (along with his friend and sometime collaborator Steven Spielberg, director of 1975's Jaws) as the father of the modern blockbuster film, The Flannelled One, as he is sometimes called by uncountable geeks nationwide, has left an indelible mark on filmmaking as we know it. After reinventing the serial tradition with his Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, Lucas, along with an army of groundbreaking employees, pioneered radical advances in digital effects (apart from the world-famous Industrial Light and Magic effects house, one of his personal studio's ventures would grow into Pixar), sound design and immersive multimedia experiences. And while Mike J. Nichols is often created with popularizing the fan edit, the form was arguably another invention by Lucas himself.
For, in order to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Star Wars' debut, Lucasfilm re-released all three installments of the original trilogy to theaters in "Special Edition" form in 1997. The prints that were shipped were not merely copies of the old films, however, for in addition to the expected restoration work, a number of digital effects and minor editorial changes (the most dramatic being the insertion of a previously unfinished and unseen encounter between Harrison Ford's Han Solo and a newly-rendered CG Jabba the Hutt) had been made, thus shattering whatever illusion of films' inalterability an increasingly tech-savvy age might have. In the most notorious artistic change, Lucas added a new blaster bolt to a scene in which Solo cold-bloodedly shoots a bounty hunter attempting to capture him, thus weakening the character's evolution in the eyes of millions of outraged fans. The ensuing mantra "Han shot first!" would become an internet meme and a cultural shibboleth for Star Wars-ians worldwide.
Of course, Lucas, as the creator and overseer of the franchise (sometimes but not always in the writing and directing capacities), was and is no ordinary "fan", but the equalizing forces of modern computing made this distinction a rhetorical one with the release of The Phantom Edit, an abridged and modified version of the official home DVD that was hailed by many fans (and Salon.com critic Daniel Kraus) as superior to the official, theatrical film. Since then, studios eagerly searching for new revenues from old product have taken to issuing large numbers of director's cuts, extended and unrated editions of films, while editing-enabling hardware and software has become steadily cheaper and more widespread. The Age of Malleable Films had arrived.
__________________
boon23, or "Boon" for short (though he signs his edits as CBB), is a small red panda who uses chopsticks and takes delight in not answering questions put to him on the "Ask Boon ..... ANYTHING!!!!" thread. Well, not really, of course. Boon is the user name of the Fan Edit Forum's main administrator, a happily married German preschool teacher of "almost forty years", and his avatar is a picture of Shifu, the mentor-character the 2008 hit film Kung Fu Panda. Like the characters of the Matrix franchise, who eschew their birth names for spiffy monikers and virtual representations of their core personalities, Forum users develop real friendships (heck, some have even met in person) as they engage in vigorous and thoughtful debates on how to improve films, what they think of films, and other Internet subjects of the day. Real-life matters such as politics, personal aspirations and relationships are sometimes discussed, but a shared love for movies, and a fascination with how they might be improved, is the glue that binds the community together.
Boon first developed an interest in fan editing around 1996. His first projects were a Kirk-free version of Star Trek Generations and a cut of Speed without the subway climax; both were done on VHS, however, where even the best cuts were rough and the video quality low. "I think the [original] idea came from being a musician, repeating tracks, putting them into a different order and re-arranging them," he writes. When digital copies of films started appearing on peer-to-peer file-sharing programs such as Kazaa, Boon made a few edits with the primitive Windows Movie Maker software. After releasing a few edits to the public, in collaboration with a few friends, he was referred to the forums of originaltrilogy.com.
Lucasfilm released DVDs featuring the untouched, theatrical editions of the first Star Wars trilogy in 2006, but for several years prior to that, the company had insisted that the Special Editions of the films would henceforth be considered the only editions. This policy alarmed not only those who worried about the historical implications of burying the original films, but also dismayed many fans who objected to artistic decisions made to new versions. In this interim, originaltrilogy.com was created as a forum in which Star Wars connoisseurs could list the changes made and advocate for the release of the originals. (After the release of the 2006 DVDs, its focus largely shifted to Star Wars fan edits.)
After some "drama and bumps", Boon and a few friends decided to create a site devoted to all fan edits, Star Wars and otherwise. For a while, download links to edits were publicly available, but a 2008 warning from the Motion Picture Association of America prompted fanedit.org's administrators to remove them for their own legal safety. The listings, reviews and contests remain, but the links have gone underground, so to speak; while they can often be found without too much trouble, some effort (and a greater implicit burden on the viewer) is involved.
Fan edits operate in a legal gray area; the community demands that anyone who views a modified film own a legitimate DVD of the original version. United States Fair Use laws are generally argued to support the right of consumers to make one digital backup of any CDs or DVDs they have legally acquired, and fan edits are argued to constitute one such backup. Since this requirement is generally acknowledged to be unpolicable, the honor system is employed.)
But despite this setback, the Forum is more robust and diverse than ever. While the technical means of producing fan edits are fairly inexpensive and easily downloadable, making seamless works often involves confronting a myriad of software glitches, file conversion difficulties and other headaches. One of the Forum's most important functions is to help newcomers find mentors; one never knows when the next "groupie" will turn into a "firstling", and then a widely-respected, full-fledged editor in his own right. Yes, I wrote "his" - while a few Forum members are known to be female, and at least one, 3Raz0r, has produced five edits (all of gruesome horror films, incidentally), most editors and Forum members are male. And while edited films tend to be drawn from stereotypically geeky material - in April 2009, some of the most anticipated cuts are versions of Batman Begins, Spider-Man 3 and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, there are a number of outliers, and the community is generally supportive and new and unexplored material.
Stephen Ujlaki, a producer of more than twenty-five feature films, takes a dim view of the fan editing practice. "I think it's legitimate in a classroom setting to teach people how to edit," he says, "otherwise I think it's lame [, and] illegitimate to boot. I never wanted to re-edit someone else's work. Only to learn from what worked and what didn't, and apply those lessons to my films." But while some editors (such as ThrowgnCpr, or "Throw", a career ornithologist) have no interest in professional editing ("It probably wouldn't be fun for me anymore then," he writes), others see fan editing as the closest they'll ever come to being involved in real, big-leagues moviemaking. One InfoDroid, for instance, writes that "the Kenner line of Star Wars toys allowed me to tell the story the way I wanted to as a kid. Now, as a grown-up, I get to play with the actual movies themselves...I can manipulate the characters to say and do what I think is best...a dream for a kid who grew up in a world of corporate-controlled media."
And Mick LaSalle, the lead film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, sees great potential in the form. "This kind of thing could possibly lead to a heightened aesthetic appreciation, a defining of the viewer's own aesthetics and a greater understanding of filmmaking mechanics," he says, echoing Mr. Ujlaki on that last point. Incidentally, though Mr. LaSalle claimed to have not heard of fan edits before I contacted him, he had in fact made one himself, on video, to the 1941 film Two-Faced Woman. "The film created a scandal with the censor boards, so a scene was filmed and inserted several weeks later [which] ruins the movie," he says. So he took it out.*
Fan edits can take many forms. Most are straightforward (though not necessarily simple) condensed and focused versions of a single film. Some blend several films together, whether from the same franchise or not, to create vastly different viewing experiences. (Cases in point: Jorge's Marvel 24 and Uncanny Antman's prequel Marvel 24 Episode 2). And some, such as Star Wars Revisited, are entirely singular undertakings. Revisited, a remarkable solo undertaking by the English editor Adywan, is a meticulous re-tooling of the original Star Wars, in which every single laser blast (a mere solid colored transparency in all the official versions) was painstakingly replaced with the revamped style featured in the prequel trilogy. Numerous visual effects and color corrections were undertaken also, and the edit took several years to complete.
Of course, there are limits to what individual fans can accomplish. Unless one is willing to switch to a homemade animation in the final scene, Rick Blaine will never leave Casablanca with his beloved Ilsa, and no matter how well an editor pares a film down to its essentials, one can't always add emotional or thematic depth to material that doesn't contain any. Still, the mere process of trying can be both enlightening and engrossing (if often rather frustrating also). Now that the filmic equivalent of Pandora's Box has been opened, fan editing will not disappear. And, as Mr. Lasalle himself mused, "We may [someday] get some filmmakers out of this."
Further Reading
Still interested in the history and nitty-gritty of fan edits? Here are some starter nuggets of wisdom:
- More editors' stories and pearls of wisdom, from the thread this article was built on.
- Another piece on fan edits by Mollo, a Forum regular, which includes an Adywan interview.
- A professional article on Adywan's Revisited from the Florida newspaper The Meridian Star, with great quotes from the man himself!
- A brief history of the form from originaltrilogy.com.
- Fan Edit Forum users dish on the origins of their avatars.
- Sometimes big corporations such as Sony make fan edits of a kind also.
A Singular Case
In September 2008, Tim Pope, director of The Crow: City of Angels, became the first director to publicly praise an edit of his/her own film. "It was quite emotional seeing 'the film that might have been'," he wrote. "Thanks for putting this together and for your enormous efforts..." (Boon has confirmed the authenticity of this post.) The edit in question is called "The Crow: City of Angels - Second Coming", and was released in December 2007 by one DCP. A rare edit that is significantly longer than the original, "Second Coming" uses animatics and title cards to restore produced but publicly unavailable scenes in order to (in DCP's words) "let people see the true intention of the film, before Miramax crapped all over [Pope]." The edit currently enjoys a 9.2/10 rating on fanedit.org.
* Mick LaSalle's full quote: in the film, "a woman pretends to be her own twin sister and seduces her own husband - she takes him away from his mistress, in order to get him back for herself. Anyway, the film created a scandal with the censor boards, so a scene was filmed and inserted several weeks later, in which the husband makes a phone call and finds out that the twin sister is really his wife. Thus, a film in which the wife was getting over on the husband became a story in which the husband, playing along, really has the upper hand with his wife. I edited out the scene on video, because it ruins the movie and didn't belong there in the first place."
