July 2004
Reconstructing Sam Fuller's The Big Red One
The following article detailing DGA member Richard Schickel's efforts to assemble a complete version of director Sam Fuller's The Big Red One originally appeared in the May/June 2004 issue of Film Comment.
BY RICHARD SCHICKEL
Lee Marvin in The Big Red One
It was always in the data base —boxes and boxes of footage, supposedly labeled The Big Red One, were allegedly stashed in the Warner Bros. vault in Kansas City. But as we all know, between data bases and palpable reality a shadow often falls. If everyone was very lucky those boxes would (a) actually still exist and (b) contain at least some of the footage — close to an hour's worth — excised by the studio from Sam Fuller's great war movie just prior to its initial release in 1980. If we were unlucky, the boxes might already have been shuffled out the door and into the limbo of lost films. Or they might merely hold footage duplicating the severely truncated version of Sam Fuller's episodic epic of World War II combat that first appeared in 1980. But there was a further problem. The picture had been made by Lorimar which went belly up not long after putting the film out. Its assets had been acquired by Warner's, which, in turn, had not had a fiscally thrilling experience releasing it on TV, tape and DVD. It had no friends in court. It was only among powerless cinephiles and cineastes that The Big Red One became The Great White Whale, ranking right up there with the 44 missing minutes of The Magnificent Ambersons as a dream quest.
Director Sam Fuller
The murderous German, Schroeder, now full blown in the restored version
But then luck began, ever so slightly, to turn in the film's favor. Sam's reputation, especially in Europe, began to grow after his death in 1997 and that gave impetus to our restoration project. I made a documentary about him, in the process converting myself from warm appreciator of his work to passionate advocate of it. Then I made another documentary, this time about Charlie Chaplin, for Warner Bros., during the course of which I worked closely with Brian Jamieson, a studio VP who also loved Sam's work. Together we mounted a campaign to at least locate and open those mysterious boxes. The first reports were discouraging — they found perhaps 20 rolls of film, unaccompanied by sound. Look again, we asked. Seven rolls of sound turned up. Again please? And again? Slowly the material began to accrete. Eventually about 70,000 feet of negative and 112 quarter-inch reels of location sound were located. When this stuff was printed and synchronized, we had close to an hour of film never before seen in public. We also had camera and sound reports and a copy of Sam's shooting script to help us properly place the recovered material in the film. Several boxes of film remain missing, but every scene in Sam's script, with two exceptions (which we think he may not have shot) is now present and accounted for. Also still missing, we think, are alternative angles from any number of shot sequences and there's one pretty good sequence for which we have picture, but no sound.
On the other hand, what we do have is, I think, remarkable: 15 entirely new sequences as well as inserts and extensions added to another 23 sequences. A film that went out 24 years ago at one hour, 53 minutes and 11 seconds is now two hours, 42 minutes and 56 seconds — within seconds, incidentally, of the lost Ambersons' footage. Some of these additions are (seemingly) minor: an opening title card ("This Is Fictional Life, Based on Factual Death"); The Big Red One, on the First Division's shoulder patch shown as the only splash of color in the film's black-and-white prologue; Sam himself playing a combat cameraman in short sequence. Some of them are major. For example, a battle between a German tank and some French horse soldiers in a Roman Amphitheater in North Africa; a heartbreaking sequence in which a little Sicilian girl is shot by a sniper as she embraces Lee Marvin (whose laconic tenderness constitutes great movie acting); a powerful sequence in which his habitual stoicism is shattered by the discovery of an infiltrator who has actually joined his squad for breakfast in a Belgian kitchen.
I think that by substantially lengthening Sam's realization of the D-Day landing in Normandy we have restored this sequence to its rightful place as the best representation of that engagement prior to Saving Private Ryan. Beyond that we have restored an entire character to the film — a German soldier named Schroeder, dark doppleganger to Sam's more innocent GIs. In the original release he was just a shadow; now he's a full-blown monster. And that's just the top of the line. A point Sam often made in interviews (and in all his war movies), about how orphaned children are omnipresent in war, on-site victims of its horrors, is vividly made by our restorations. So is his often stated observation that an ordinary soldier's main obligation is not to heroism, but to survival — "to live, live, live" as he once put it to me.
Of course our reconstruction restores narrative coherence to his work. But more important it restores emotional coherence to it. What was admittedly a pretty decent war movie is now a true Sam Fuller movie, full of that tabloid absurdity — sudden death and sudden laughter wildly mixed — that was his trademark. And his glory. We'll never know exactly what Sam's "director's cut" would have looked like. But I think we have come as close as humanly possible to realizing his intentions. And I've never done anything in film that I am prouder of.
Feature stories about the craft and challenges of directors and their teams working on feature films.
Even during the worst of times, directors all around the globe found ways of coping with crisis by holding a mirror to society—for good and bad.
Directors Damien Chazelle, Jon M. Chu, Bill Condon, Dexter Fletcher, Adam Shankman, Barbra Streisand and Julie Taymor tackle the genre's suspension of disbelief in varying ways, making the internal external and lifting our spirits in the process
For directors of fact-based dramas, fighting the good fight means knowing when to fortify the storytelling and when to pull their punches.
Far beyond the promo reels once popularized by MTV, the most penetrating documentaries underscore psychological insight and socio-political context.
Michael Mann, Gina Prince-Bythewood and Ang Lee expound on their opening sequences for The Last of the Mohicans, Love & Basketball and Sense and Sensibility.
For the DGA's reimagined theater, directors Michael Mann, Christopher Nolan, Jon Favreau, Michael Apted, Betty Thomas and Shawn Levy ensured that new enhancements matched their vision.
A rare glimpse into Terrence Malick's process by the 1st and 2nd ADs of his most recent film, A Hidden Life.
Marlon Brando lining up a shot on the set of the 1961 Western One-Eyed Jacks.
Alice Guy Blache is described as "a striking example of the modern woman in business ... succeeding in a line of work in which hundreds of men have failed."
Stressing the inner workings, motivations and artistic sensibilities of people who are passionate about film
Since the summer of 1978 David Fantle and Tom Johnson captured more than 200 performers and filmmakers on paper.
The daytime drama has proven to be one of the most popular and enduring forms of entertainment since its inception nearly six decades ago with many technological advancements that have impacted how these shows are made.
Reality shows are visually and logistically complex and require dozens of cameras. To incorporate all that takes forethought and planning; basically, it takes a director.
James Signorelli, who directs SNL's film and commercial parodies, and Beth McCarthy-Miller, who directs the live segments, discuss the challenges and pleasures of putting together 90 minutes of comedy a week.