{"id":14194,"date":"2020-06-05T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-06-05T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=14194"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:19:09","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:19:09","slug":"the-notorious-television-versions-of-universal-studios","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/the-notorious-television-versions-of-universal-studios\/","title":{"rendered":"The Notorious Television Versions of Universal Studios"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In 1984, David Lynch\u2019s ill-fated adaptation of Dune<\/em> was released in theaters to poor reviews and disappointing box office. Given that Lynch had shot about a half-hour of material that was cut from the theatrical release, distributor Universal Studios and their partners at MCA Television prepared a four-hour TV version for syndicated broadcast in 1988. Lynch took an \u201cAlan Smithee\u201d directing credit (a then-standard pseudonym) for this version that was made without his approval, and also went a step further when requesting a pseudonym for his screenwriter credit, insisting on being called \u201cJudas Booth,\u201d a combination of Judas Iscariot and John Wilkes Booth. On the surface, this seems like a childish overreaction from a filmmaker responding to his movie being recut for TV, as numerous films were in those days. Yet upon examination of that edit, as well as many of the TV versions Universal and MCA TV were behind during the \u201870s and \u201880s, it seems Lynch had cause to be so incensed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u201cTV version\u201d is a mostly outdated trend of theatrical films being reedited for network television broadcast, a relic from a time when home video was still in its infancy and streaming over the internet was a pipe dream. Most TV versions, as the disclaimer went, were \u201cedited for content and formatted to fit your screen,\u201d and were either prepared by the studio or the networks themselves in a fairly standard fashion\u2014cutting any nudity and excessive gore, and either dubbing or simply dialing out profane dialogue. Oftentimes this would leave films running short of a two-hour time slot, so editors would replace trimmed scenes with deleted material, making these versions unofficial, lightly alternate cuts. Universal MCA\u2019s TV versions, on the other hand, tended to be flat-out revisions unsupervised by the original filmmakers, not only edited for content with unused footage put back in, but in many cases with new material added to either panderingly clarify characters and plot points or change the theme, tone, and pace of a movie altogether. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Discovering these TV cuts is fairly easy, as many of them are available either on YouTube or on physical media releases as extras, and some still air as part of broadcast syndication packages, but who was responsible for them and why is still largely a mystery. In the 1970\u2019s, Universal\/MCA TV was a result of a then-recent merger, with the TV division highly lucrative for the company as the largest provider of television shows to networks at that time. As filmmaker Don Coscarelli observes in his book \u201cTrue Indie,\u201d Universal had an \u201cimmense editorial factory with literally dozens of post-production crews laboring round the clock to create \u201cproduct.\u201d As such, there were many editors working at MCA TV as studio employees, meaning that work on TV edits of the company\u2019s theatrical films didn\u2019t necessarily need to be credited\u2014perhaps the studio was using the broad banner of \u201cedited for content\u201d as a loophole with which to do as they pleased with these versions, passing them off as the genuine article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One verifiable name to pin a few of these TV versions on is Gene Palmer. Palmer was a lifelong editor for MCA, beginning his career at their old Revue Studios in the \u201850s and continuing on through the Universal merger. When NBC sought to air Universal\u2019s 1974 disaster film Earthquake<\/em> over two nights on their \u201cThe Big Event\u201d prime-time showcase, rather than add in deleted material from the movie, Universal gave Palmer the go-ahead to create additional scenes to fill the runtime. What Palmer ended up with can politely be called a hatchet job, as he shot a few scenes with stars Marjoe Gortner and Victoria Principal that merely reiterate their subplot, a scene with the supporting characters played by Jesse Vint and Michael Richardson that recontextualizes their deaths in order to make Gortner\u2019s character more villainous, and an entirely new subplot that sees a married couple on an airplane (Debralee Scott and Sam Chew) barely miss the earthquake and spend a lot of time editorializing on the film\u2019s events. In between, Palmer makes a series of bizarre choices that don\u2019t just remove network-unfriendly material but seem to attempt to \u201cimprove\u201d the effect of the film by looping and recutting most of John Williams\u2019 score cues, along with adding needless ADR lines of dialogue to clarify character motivation and plot points. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The TV version of Earthquake<\/em> still had more or less the same story as the theatrical release, something that can\u2019t be said for Palmer and MCA\/Universal\u2019s TV version of another Charlton Heston-led disaster film, 1976\u2019s Two-Minute Warning<\/em>. When preparing the movie for broadcast in 1979, NBC made it clear that they had issues with the film\u2019s entire plot, not just a scene or two, as it was a movie about an anonymous, motiveless sniper menacing a crowded football stadium. This time, Palmer wouldn\u2019t add a handful of scenes, but would instead end up reshooting about 50% of the entire film. This resulted in his only on-screen credit for work on a TV version, with his name replacing original director Larry Peerce\u2019s. In addition, the writer of this new material, Francesca Turner, was added to the \u201cscreenplay by\u201d credit, while the new actors (including James Olsen and Joanna Pettet) were added to the cast list. Palmer even managed to wrangle original star Heston to return to shoot two brief new scenes to help fit the new material into the old footage, with Heston wearing a mis-matched toupee to add insult to injury. Now Two-Minute Warning<\/em> was about a gang of art thieves who commit a heist during a championship football game at a museum across the street, hiring a sniper to fire (non-lethally!) into the crowd as a distraction. In numerous ways, the TV version of Two-Minute Warning<\/em> is not at all the same film that was seen in theaters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Universal\u2019s TV versions never got as egregiously dishonest as that again (at least not to this writer\u2019s knowledge), Palmer and Turner\u2014allegedly\u2014continued to work their magic on TV edits throughout the \u201880s. They not only bungled Lynch\u2019s Dune<\/em> (beginning it with a near 20-minute introduction to Herbert\u2019s world that over-explained the plot via voiceover and illustrations), they also came up with some creative dialogue replacements for De Palma\u2019s Scarface<\/em> (\u201cthis town is like a great big chicken, just waiting to be plucked\u201d), gave each character in John Carpenter\u2019s The Thing<\/em> an introductory voiceover with character descriptions (and lessened the impact of its ending), concluded David Cronenberg\u2019s Videodrome<\/em> with a pan over a bizarre illustration while dialogue from the film was repeated, and recut Carpenter\u2019s Prince of Darkness<\/em> to make it seem like the whole film was the protagonists\u2019 dream. All of these TV edits leave a bizarre legacy of a man (or a man and woman, or very possibly a team of men and women) who for some reason were given creative license to change these films as they saw fit. Since it was implied that these TV versions were the films as originally released rather than new, shoddy cuts, they not only created a series of Mandela effects (in some cases, this was the only way these movies could be seen before home video became more ubiquitous), but took the filmmakers\u2019 trust in the studio and betrayed it numerous times over. \u201cJudas Booth,\u201d indeed. \"\"\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1984, David Lynch\u2019s ill-fated adaptation of Dune was released in theaters to poor reviews and disappointing box office. Given […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":459,"featured_media":14198,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381],"tags":[162],"class_list":["post-14194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/459"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14194"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22815,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14194\/revisions\/22815"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}