"For nearly 40 years, Woo's preferred cut of the Hong Kong action movie had been considered destroyed. When it was being made, the studio demanded that Woo's workprint, which ran nearly three hours, be pared down to less than two, and he only had a week to deliver. Woo begrudgingly went to work on editing down one half, and his producer Tsui Hark - himself a director of numerous Hong Kong classics - the other."
"It's still a stunning picture, but it's clearly the work of two clashing creative forces cobbling something together under an absurd deadline. Action junkies have had to live with the fact that they'd never get to see it as Woo intended it - until, that is, film restorers dug deeper and discovered that the workprint was languishing in an archive this whole time, overlooked because it was mislabeled as an English release of the movie."
"Soon, a lost classic of American cinema may soon see release, too: the original version of Orson Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons" (1942), the director's follow-up to "Citizen Kane" (1941), probably one of the best movies ever made. Except, instead of actually showing audiences lost footage, the Amazon-backed startup Showrunner and app says it'll recreate the footage with the help of AI, according to the Hollywood Reporter."
A long-lost version of John Woo's A Better Tomorrow II (1987) was discovered and is slated for public release. For nearly 40 years Woo's preferred nearly three-hour workprint was considered destroyed after the studio demanded it be cut to under two hours with only a week to deliver. Woo and producer Tsui Hark each edited halves; Woo never saw the theatrical cut until opening night and disowned the film except for its final gunfight. Film restorers found the mislabeled workprint in an archive and are restoring it. Separately, the Amazon-backed startup Showrunner plans to recreate missing footage from Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons using AI.
Read at Futurism
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