Another week, some more videos. Andy and I both found a few buried edits to some of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters.

I figured we’d start out with the wildly popular “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”. The credit for director was given to Mel Stuart, a man who had never even really made a film before or after “Willy Wonka…”. Stuart only really dabbled in some lesser TV shows and biography-documentaries. I think by watching the original vision of “Willy Wonka…” that you can see the fingerprint of a much greater auteur- which was actually that of director William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist, Blue Chips). It’s obvious that this interpretation of Roald Dahl’s dark book came from none other than Friekin’s gritty and twisted mind. But like any other good director, he faced the studio system. And the studios lambasted the cut as being “too dark” and “not a children’s film”. When Friekin stood up for what he believed in- he was fired and the job of Director during editing came to Mel Stuart- who was completing his television biography, “The Unfinished Journey of Robert Kennedy” in the next editing suite down from “Willy Wonka…”. And the rest is history.

The cut of “The Terminator” was also based some-what in studio politics. James Cameron was creating a short film to submit into Slamdance back in the early eighties. He had been having very vivid dreams about what would soon become the “Terminator universe”. So he set off on a shoestring independent film budget to create the cult phenomenon “The Terminator”. Cameron’s main interest was in exploring the consequences time travel. In the short film version that Cameron constructed, he felt he had said everything he needed to in the Terminator universe, but it was Arnold Schwarzenegger and his lawyer that forced Cameron into making the feature and subsequent sequel Terminator films. Many accredit this lawsuit as the reason James Cameron is so difficult to work with. But as it turned out the film was Cameron’s launching pad into larger studio projects and many, many years later “Titanic”.

-Kyle