Hello!

We’ve seen the long version of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate and have always admired parts of it … The official UA cut-down release was a mess, that’s for sure. Ten years ago Steven Soderbergh uploaded a fan cutdown, that’s equally curious.

I’d never have dreamed that Soderbergh’s post would still be online, but it is. Joe Dante pointed to it again a few days ago, so I’m-a pointin’ to it too. It’s a fun exercise, even if we’d all chop it up differently. Beautiful as it is, I’m not sure that the Harvard prologue fits anywhere. We more often daydream about films that were chopped down before they were released, that we wish we could see un-butchered.

So here it is again, Mary Ann Bernard’s ‘Butcher’s Cut’ of Heaven’s Gate.

Film fanaticism intersects with Super Bowl fever, when Martin Scorsese directs a million-dollar commercial for a website company.

The Super Bowl spot Hello Down There qualifies as Science Fiction. It uses clips from an imaginative Japanese space visitor movie that’s never seen much respect here, at least not until now.

This article by Umberto Gonzalez in The Wrap lets the deep-pockets website company explain their motivation, giving us a quote that sounds genuinely chilling:

“At Squarespace, we have always said that an idea isn’t real until you make a website for it.”

Yes, and “A day without a Wicket is a day without sunshine.”

On a personal note, it’s been confirmed that friend and associate Mike Hyatt has passed away. We talked at length a couple of months back, and another friend talked with him even sooner than that.

Mike was a professional film restoration expert and had also worked as an art director. But he was also a big-time film collector known to the collecting community, and a frequent sight at repertory & revival screenings in Los Angeles. A chapter in the recent book A Thousand Cuts is devoted to his never-ending restoration of the 1963 movie The Day of the Triffids.

I have part of the inside story of why Triffids took so long, and why Mike’s work saw only a few scattered screenings at film get-togethers, such as the 2009 Academy Halloween party. That’s where I took a number of photos of a beaming Mike, that have been circulating on Facebook. This is Mike’s personal story, so I’m not in a rush to ‘explain’ him. Just know that the folks that came to know Mike, knew him a kind and generous friend.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson