Once upon a time, when movie studios had all the power and directors had none, there was no such thing as a "director's cut" of a film. After it was shot, studio chiefs had the final say on how a film would look when it made its way into theaters.
And back in 1924, MGM's head of production, Irving Thalberg, didn't flinch when it came to editing Eric von Stroheim's "Greed." The director turned in a finished cut that ran a whopping 9 1/2 hours, and Thalberg cut it to 2 hours and 15 minutes.The result nearly ruined von Stroheim's health as well as his career. And while "Greed" is still seen as a silent classic, the question of what might have been has never been answered -- MGM melted down the original film to recover the silver in the silver nitrate film.
"There were so many tangential stories that were just dropped," said Carol Littleton, the supervising editor of an effort to restore the film. "People would appear and disappear. It was just a mish-mosh. A total botch in the MGM version, which, of course, was not von Stroheim's.
"So we're trying the best we can to put the narrative back together," she says.
What with all that destroyed footage, it wasn't possible to entirely restore the film. But Rick Schmidlin, the producer of the remake, did manage to restore a good bit of the lost narrative.
" 'Greed' has been the greatest mystery in cinema history," said Schmidlin, whose other projects included the restoration of Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil." "Over the years, everyone has looked for what they considered to be the lost Holy Grail of this film. And to me, it's always been a puzzle."
Fortunately, he came across a couple of very important pieces of that puzzle at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library -- von Stroheim's original script and 650 still photos of the production.
"With 650 stills and the original continuity script, I think we can bring it as close as possible for the audience," Schmidlin said.
"Greed" centers on McTeague (Gibson Gowland) and Trina Sieppe (ZaSu Pitts). They meet because Trina's fiance, Marcus Schoulder (Jean Hersholt), is a friend of McTeague's -- and he steps aside when McTeague and Trina fall in love.
But when Trina wins $5,000 in a lottery, Marcus accuses McTeague of stealing her away for her money. Marcus ruins McTeague's dental practice, and McTeague vows revenge. The Sieppes sink into poverty, and Trina refuses to use her winnings to save her husband and herself, setting off deadly events.
The original 91/2-hour epic included many subplots, several of which Schmidlin and his team restored to the film -- subplots about the immigrant experience and the life of an abusive junk dealer and his Gypsy wife, among others.
The end result, which runs about four hours, uses those production stills in a manner not unlike what Ken Burns did in his PBS documentary "The Civil War" -- the camera pans over them to give them some resemblance to movement.
It's a thoroughly watchable film and one that film buffs will want to take particular note of.
"He had an incredible number of stills," Littleton said. "Every camera set-up had a representative still. So we know what the scenes were intended to be; we just don't have the motion picture footage.
"So we are using (the stills) . . . to re-create the scene, hopefully in the same style, as closely as we can. It's kind of like fitting the pieces to a puzzle. But we do have incredible notes, which are von Stroheim's notes, to follow. We're working in his shadow."