Does any one have any leads on how I might get ahold of the 6 Hour Rough Cut Of Apocalypse Now?
A 289min long workprint version exists. It contains the following extra material not included in either the original theatrical release or the "redux" version:
*A longer opening montage, the entire 10 minute song "The End" by The Doors is heard.It intercuts longer helicopters/jungle images with Willard in the hotel room in a drunken rage, as well as a scene where he is with a prostitute. There are various shots outside depicting the streets of Saigon.
*When the two soldiers pick up Willard in the hotel room there is a brief conversation while they help him shower and shave. They notify him that his wait for his new mission is now over.
*The scene where Willard is given his assignment is longer and contains much more dialogue. The general informs Willard that the mission is purely voluntary and he can decline it. The general also offers Willard a promotion to major upon completion of the mission. For some reason Colonel Kurtz is referred to in this scene as "Colonel Leevy". There are some external shots of the military base.
*A brief scene where Willard is introduced to the crew of the Navy P.B.R.
*Carmine Coppola's score is not present in this version. Many more songs by The Doors are played throughout the film instead.
*None of the narration or dossier voiceovers are in this version.
*There is no audio dubbing in this version. All the audio is from the sound recorded during the actual filming. Much of Robert Duvall's dialogue is unitelligable due to the sound of the helicopters in his scenes.
*A much longer first cavalry "Ride of Valkyrie" attack scene (30+ mins)showing much unused footage and alternate takes.
*A much longer playboy bunnies performance.
*Various extended scenes on the boat, and alternate takes and shots.
*A scene where a miniature toy boat passes the Navy PBR. Lance tries to grab it out of the water. The Chief yells at him to leave it alone claiming it's a booby trap. To prove it the Chief fires some shots at it to which it explodes.
*When the P.B.R. reaches Do-lung bridge, the soldier that greets them gives a more detailed explanation of the chaos around the bridge.
*When Lance is reading his letters on the boat, he suddenly stops to machine gun a water buffalo on the shore. The Chief yells at him to stop.
*The sequence where Clean is killed is omitted.
*A slightly longer French plantation sequence. After the French woman strips she crawls into the bed with Willard and they begin kissing.
*The sequence where the Chief is killed is omitted.
*More dialogue between Willard and the photojournalist when they first reach the Kurtz compound. The Journalist reveals that it was HE who was able to get the montangnards to break off their attack on the boat in the previous scene. Willard repeatedly asks the Journalists name but he refuses to answer.
*The character of Colby, (the soldier who was sent before Willard to kill Kurtz, played by Scott Glenn) has a much more substantial role in this version. As Willard inspects the compound, Colby tells Willard that the night before, NVA soldiers had attacked (which explains all the bodies laying about the compound). Willard then enters Kurtz's house, much to the dismay of the journalist. Willard sees Kurtz empty bed and his medals, also his journal with the inscription "Drop the bomb, exterminate them all" (many of these scenes were in the final version but re-inserted in different places).
*The scene where Willard talks to Chef about the air strike on the boat is omitted.
*In this version. The first time Kurtz appears is the scene where a mud caked Willard is tied up (seated) to a pole in the rain. Kurtz appears with camouflage face paint, Willard asks...."Why he is being mistreated?" and tries to bluff his way past Kurtz by telling him that he had just completed a secret mission in Cambodia, and only stopped for supplies. Kurtz says nothing to him, but plants Chef's head in his lap. (Only a portion of this scene was in the original version).
*The scene where Willard meets Kurtz in his bed chamber contains more dialogue....as Kurtz makes it clear that he knows why Willard is there.
*A scene where Kurtz talks to Willard in the bamboo cage while two children sit on top of the cage and dangle insects in Willard's face. He tells him that Willard is "like his colleagues in Washington, master liars who want to win the war but don't want to appear as immoral or unethical".
*A lengthy scene where the montangnards in a ritualistic display pick up the bamboo cage (with Willard inside) and poke him with sticks (Lance and Colby participate in this). The natives dance around the bamboo cage, chanting and singing while a squealing pig is tied up and killed.
*A 10 minute version of the scene where Kurtz reads the poem "The Hollow Men", intercutting between his reading and the journalist talking with Willard.
*A scene where the journalist meets Willard to tell him that he thinks Kurtz is about to kill him because he took his picture again. During which Colby comes behind the journalist and shoots him three times, killing him. Willard throws a knife at Colby's stomach to which he falls, but before he dies he asks Willard to talk to his family for him and asks him to kill Kurtz.
*Kurtz speech about the horror and the children vaccination are omitted.
*During the assassination scene at the end, before Willard enters Kurtz' home, one of the guards confronts him. Willard picks up a spear to defend himself as the guard picks up a child to shield himself. Willard runs the spear right through the child and into the guard. The final scene with Willard and the montangnards after Kurtz assasination are omitted.
[This message has been edited by Boondawg (edited 12-11-2009).]
IP: Logged
07:20 PM
PFF
System Bot
jimbolaya Member
Posts: 10652 From: Virginia Beach, Virginia Registered: Feb 2007
I am fairly certain I found this for someone a year or so ago on here. However... most the torrent sites have been taken offline now. But I will look around.
IP: Logged
08:05 PM
Boondawg Member
Posts: 38235 From: Displaced Alaskan Registered: Jun 2003
I am fairly certain I found this for someone a year or so ago on here. However... most the torrent sites have been taken offline now. But I will look around.
I was asking here awhile back. But the person could not find it again.
I will buy a copy/download if it is in a decent viewable condition.
The work print is the holy grail of film collecting. These are the vastly long, rough versions of a picture, containing much of the movie-making fat that is trimmed out by the editing process. For years, film collectors tap their keyboards until their fingers bleed in attempts to track down the bum-numbing versions of movies such as Dune and This Is Spinal Tap for the unseen gems they may or may not hold.
Of all the legendary work prints out there, the most persistently tantalising prospect is seeing the rumoured 289-minute version of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. The theatrical release print runs a mere 153 minutes, and the Redux reissue 202 minutes, so the work print offers almost an hour and a half of unseen footage. To a serious film geek, the prospect is unthinkably exciting - surely it couldn't be true?
Despite a lack of tangible proof that it even existed - including denials from the film's producers - the most dedicated collectors spent years searching for it, until something supposed to be this grail-like object found its way into the public domain. After exhaustive negotiations with an American film collector who had tracked down a copy, I found myself signing for an airmail package, booking the day off work and settling down for some serious viewing.
The first thing to point out is that to call this five-hour work print a "rough cut" is a mistake. It's an "everything-and-the-kitchen-sink" cut, which takes almost all the material from the 238-day shoot and tapes it together in a linear form. The work print moves at a snail's pace, with unfeasibly long scenes. The Ride of the Valkyries helicopter episode alone accounts for well over 30 minutes of footage. Scenes that, with expert editing, would become tense and compelling simply drift along aimlessly, interesting only to anoraks for the extra line of dialogue here and there.
There are, however, gems amid the mass of footage, which leave the viewer wondering how Coppola could have taken the scissors to them. Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz has three extra scenes, which more than quadruple the size of his part. In one, Brando reads from Time magazine to an imprisoned Martin Sheen. In another he delivers a monologue to Sheen about the "master liars" in Washington who "want to win, but can't stand to be thought of as cruel". In a third, he reads TS Eliot's The Hollow Men, while Dennis Hopper gets excited and says "man" a lot.
One of the things removed from the film for the cinematic release, along with the extra footage, is its political conscience. Scenes in which the characters question and criticise the US involvement in Vietnam and the conduct of American government are cut. Themes of politics give way to an exploration of the human nature and psychology.
Of all the cuts, the unkindest are dealt to Scott Glenn's character, Colby, Willard's predecessor, who was charged with killing Kurtz, but instead falls under his spell. In the work print, Colby is revealed to be a significant character who taunts an imprisoned Willard and, more importantly, shoots Hopper's character before being killed himself. Likewise, the character of Lance (played by Sam Bottoms) gets extra scenes designed to show his instability. In one, he inexplicably machine-guns a water buffalo, while screaming: "I control the destiny of every living thing which passes before my sights."
It took Coppola and his editors more than 700 days to turn a million feet of celluloid into a watchable film. What the work print makes clear are the choices editors are forced to make when faced with almost unlimited footage. Scenes that drove the crew to the brink of madness and Coppola to the edge of financial ruin were dropped without sentiment - simply because they didn't improve the story.
IP: Logged
01:10 AM
Boondawg Member
Posts: 38235 From: Displaced Alaskan Registered: Jun 2003
A lot of these extended versions were released on LaserDisc. Most of the movies that came out in the early to mid 80s, were released on LaserDisc because only the extremely wealthy at the time could really afford one. A single movie would typically cost a couple hundred dollars. Early LaserDiscs were encoded in AC3 using an RF Demodulator (through a higher frequency on an analog channel), otherwise it was just typical LEFT / RIGHT stereo. Only hard-core media enthusiasts at the time really had the necessary equipment to properly decode that stuff. This was at a time when normal "stereos" with a seperate left and right channel were the big hit. The video was encoded in I believe what we call MPEG-1. Stuff was almost always letterbox, and most of the stuff was basically the full directors version of the movie.
I have a copy of Cool Hand Luke on LaserDisc that's on THREE laser discs. The first two discs have parts of the movie on either side. It has another 10-15 minutes of film that I've never been able to see... although, it's been such a long time since I've seen it that I don't remember for the life of me what those scenes were.
I have a few things on LaserDisc that I've been unable to find anywhere else, which is why I haven't gotten rid of it yet. For example, I have the ENTIRE Jimmy Hendrix Wood Stock performance filmed, un-cut, 8 feet in front of him with full stereo sound.
My laserdisc player isn't even set up anywhere, but I've got it in a box with all my laserdiscs in the closet. One of these days I'll get the time to set it up and watch one.
I've been trying to find the long version of DUNE though... which I still haven't found. The FIRST copy of DUNE I ever watched, was one that I rented from Block Buster. I'm pretty sure that when we rented it, it came with TWO VHS tapes. The movie makes so much more sense in the long version than it does in the one that was in the theater.
It's been a REALLY long time since I've seen it, so I'll try my best to make this as accurate as possible. But after the Harkonnens invade the Attredies base on Arrakis, and they've killed the king and captured the queen. In the normal movie, you see her wiping something from her eye. In the full version, just scenes before... the old harkonen guy (the one from Guard Dog Patrol) had just spit right in her face and hocked a huge loogie on her eye, and that's what she's wiping off.
There's also a HUGE narrated Prologue... the prologue came BEFORE the queen's daughter gives the breif history (when she fades in and out). The prologue explains the entire time-line between present day earth, and how all the houses and planets came to be. The prologue in itself lasts almost 15-20 minutes. It talks about mechanized miners, and the freman on DUNE, and how they went into hiding, and all kinds of other stuff. AFTER the movie, there's a huge Epilogue too which lasts another 10 minutes. It goes into detail about what happens after the fact...
There were TONS of scenes too that I barely remember. I think in the Directors cut, they finally added the "Worm Thumper" to the film after the little plane crashed in the desert. Anyone remember that? This was set up to attract the worms AWAY from them as they tried to save themselves by going on the rock outcropping (before they were picked up by the fremen).
All kinds of stuff that was cut out of the directors and normal version is in this long version I saw.
This was at a Blockbuster in Northern Virginia (Vienna I think). But it was on VHS, and I've never been able to find it anywhere else. Well, I did find it on a store in Canada, but the guy wanted like $60 bucks for it... and that was 10 years ago and I was broke.
A lot of these extended versions were released on LaserDisc. Most of the movies that came out in the early to mid 80s, were released on LaserDisc because only the extremely wealthy at the time could really afford one. A single movie would typically cost a couple hundred dollars. Early LaserDiscs were encoded in AC3 using an RF Demodulator (through a higher frequency on an analog channel), otherwise it was just typical LEFT / RIGHT stereo. Only hard-core media enthusiasts at the time really had the necessary equipment to properly decode that stuff. This was at a time when normal "stereos" with a seperate left and right channel were the big hit. The video was encoded in I believe what we call MPEG-1. Stuff was almost always letterbox, and most of the stuff was basically the full directors version of the movie.
I have a copy of Cool Hand Luke on LaserDisc that's on THREE laser discs. The first two discs have parts of the movie on either side. It has another 10-15 minutes of film that I've never been able to see... although, it's been such a long time since I've seen it that I don't remember for the life of me what those scenes were.
I have a few things on LaserDisc that I've been unable to find anywhere else, which is why I haven't gotten rid of it yet. For example, I have the ENTIRE Jimmy Hendrix Wood Stock performance filmed, un-cut, 8 feet in front of him with full stereo sound.
My laserdisc player isn't even set up anywhere, but I've got it in a box with all my laserdiscs in the closet. One of these days I'll get the time to set it up and watch one.
I've been trying to find the long version of DUNE though... which I still haven't found. The FIRST copy of DUNE I ever watched, was one that I rented from Block Buster. I'm pretty sure that when we rented it, it came with TWO VHS tapes. The movie makes so much more sense in the long version than it does in the one that was in the theater.
It's been a REALLY long time since I've seen it, so I'll try my best to make this as accurate as possible. But after the Harkonnens invade the Attredies base on Arrakis, and they've killed the king and captured the queen. In the normal movie, you see her wiping something from her eye. In the full version, just scenes before... the old harkonen guy (the one from Guard Dog Patrol) had just spit right in her face and hocked a huge loogie on her eye, and that's what she's wiping off.
There's also a HUGE narrated Prologue... the prologue came BEFORE the queen's daughter gives the breif history (when she fades in and out). The prologue explains the entire time-line between present day earth, and how all the houses and planets came to be. The prologue in itself lasts almost 15-20 minutes. It talks about mechanized miners, and the freman on DUNE, and how they went into hiding, and all kinds of other stuff. AFTER the movie, there's a huge Epilogue too which lasts another 10 minutes. It goes into detail about what happens after the fact...
There were TONS of scenes too that I barely remember. I think in the Directors cut, they finally added the "Worm Thumper" to the film after the little plane crashed in the desert. Anyone remember that? This was set up to attract the worms AWAY from them as they tried to save themselves by going on the rock outcropping (before they were picked up by the fremen).
All kinds of stuff that was cut out of the directors and normal version is in this long version I saw.
This was at a Blockbuster in Northern Virginia (Vienna I think). But it was on VHS, and I've never been able to find it anywhere else. Well, I did find it on a store in Canada, but the guy wanted like $60 bucks for it... and that was 10 years ago and I was broke.
Crap! Now I got to go looking for THAT ONE TOO! I would say thanx, but I now hate you.
IP: Logged
01:03 PM
jimbolaya Member
Posts: 10652 From: Virginia Beach, Virginia Registered: Feb 2007
Crap! Now I got to go looking for THAT ONE TOO! I would say thanx, but I now hate you.
Seriously, if you liked DUNE, I totally recommend it. I have the Directors cut, and it's just not the same.
I've NEVER seen that version since that one time (first time) I saw the movie on those two VHSes.
I know that BlockBuster video bought out some smaller video store, so my only thought is that maybe it came from a specialty store?
I've always wanted to see it again. It's really a shame because there are many parts of the movie that you would otherwise thing just don't make sense???
This full on version (with the prologue and epilogue) was about 4 hours long...
There's been a lot of speculation on the net as to whether or not it actually exists, but I have in fact seen it, so if you're willing to take my word for it, I can vouch that it does in fact exist.
It's interesting to mention of course too that through the epilogue and the prologue, there was a lot of really amazing artwork. The artwork was made to look "very old" but of course, it had robots and other crap in it... so it was modern (to us)...
Man, it was so long ago... but they also talked about... well, I forget their names... but the crazy looking guys with the huge eye-brows. They explained that they all came originally from some sort of Math organization. Like... Math is what created the universe, and that these people were more advanced than everyone else. Their culture grew up seperately from the other "houses". At some point, they were in a war, or something, and then there's only a few of them left, and those guys (don't remember their titles) go on to try to spread their knowledge... each house has one... etc...
crazy stuff...
EDIT: Just found some info on the internet about the PROLOGUE... I KNEW I wasn't insane...
Man, it was so long ago... but they also talked about... well, I forget their names... but the crazy looking guys with the huge eye-brows. They explained that they all came originally from some sort of Math organization. Like... Math is what created the universe, and that these people were more advanced than everyone else. Their culture grew up seperately from the other "houses". At some point, they were in a war, or something, and then there's only a few of them left, and those guys (don't remember their titles) go on to try to spread their knowledge... each house has one... etc...
"It is by will alone that I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion."
Those guys?
[This message has been edited by Boondawg (edited 12-11-2009).]
IP: Logged
01:32 PM
82-T/A [At Work] Member
Posts: 24992 From: Florida USA Registered: Aug 2002
"It is by will alone that I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion."
Those guys?
hahah... yeah, that guy... and he's Attredies counterpart (the one who has to milk a cat every morning to get the anticdote)
I say that every time before I burn a doobie: "It is by will alone that I release my mind from motion. It is by the smoke of Ghanja that the speed of thoughts diminish, the fingers acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I release my mind from motion."
It works everytime. To what end, I have NO idea!
[This message has been edited by Boondawg (edited 12-11-2009).]
IP: Logged
03:39 PM
WhiteDevil88 Member
Posts: 8518 From: Coastal California Registered: Mar 2007
I say that every time before I burn a doobie: "It is by will alone that I release my mind from motion. It is by the smoke of Ghanja that the speed of thoughts diminish, the fingers acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I release my mind from motion."
It works everytime. To what end, I have NO idea!
Smoking again? How long was your break? I'm pondering taking one. How was it?
IP: Logged
03:49 PM
Boondawg Member
Posts: 38235 From: Displaced Alaskan Registered: Jun 2003
