M.Such artists are happy when they have completed a project. The American director Francis Ford Coppola is not one of them. Even decades after a film he made was shown in the cinema, he is still preoccupied with the work. He recently said in an interview that he still had all the early versions, unused scenes and other remnants of his films in his private archive. So it’s hardly surprising that new versions of his classics are created every few years.
Coppola only re-edited the third part of the mafia epic “The Godfather” last year. There are now even three official versions of the Vietnam War drama “Apocalypse Now”, which added between thirty and fifty minutes of film material to the two and a half hour original from 1979. And the youth drama “The Outsider” has recently been added to the series of mutated Coppola films. This winter, a digitally post-processed version with a good twenty additional minutes was shown for a short time on the big screen and then appeared as a “Special Edition” for home cinema.
The longer version was made a few years ago, explains Coppola as an introduction to the DVD bonus material when he showed the film in the school class of his granddaughter Gia Coppola, who is now a director herself. “The students knew the book better than I did, and so many important scenes had to be left out in the original version.” In fact, in the early 1980s the distributor Warner Brothers insisted that Coppola limit his material to just under ninety minutes. The novel by Susan E. Hinton was a classic book for young people, so the film was intended for a young audience; before social media, adolescents were trusted to concentrate on one medium for more than an hour.
What Coppola has now added fits so organically with the familiar that one wonders how the film could even have existed in a different version. Ten minutes serve as a new beginning, which, on the one hand, brings out the social tensions between rich and poor young people in Tulsa and, on the other, lets the actors shine. poses in front of a mirrored door, mimicking Newman’s casual movement as he tries to get upstairs as a small-town pool player. A couple of rich kids in the Ford Mustang discover the boy and chase him into his neighborhood, where the front gardens are no longer well-kept and rusted cars have to be pushed before they start with a decrepit sigh.
The rich boys attack Howell with a knife and steal a pomaded lock of hair that gives him and his buddies the nickname “Greaser”. Then six teenagers get into a brawl, and what follows is an appearance by the first division of Hollywood actors before they became first division: Rob Lowe jumps over the hood, Patrick Swayze rolls up his shirt sleeves and gives a beating, Emilio Estevez tries too Kick, Matt Dillon grabs a club and goes for the polished Ford with it. Somewhere in the scuffle is Tom Cruise, who already stands out here in his physical presence because he apparently took the gymnastics exercises ordered by the director more seriously than the rest. Cruise almost pulls an attacker out of the car, later does a somersault from a car roof, rubs it his head after falling and then runs on. None of these later superstars had played major roles before this film, only Matt Dillon was known from a few youth films; here he makes James Dean’s rebel poses his own. For Rob Lowe “The Outsider” was the debut.
New faces of a wild young cast
The entire scene, from the brawl to hanging out in the overgrown front yard, was improvised. Coppola let the camera roll, trying to capture the boys moving as naturally as possible. That explains the energy this scene still has today. The sentences don’t sound rehearsed, because instead of letting the actors learn their lines, the director had his ensemble rehearse situations that the characters experience in the film. In the DVD commentary, Coppola reports that he gave the actors of the poor working-class children poorer accommodation and less daily allowance. The community-building tactic went far beyond the shooting, most of the young actors in the “Greaser” gang remained closely connected to each other for the next few years and essentially formed what newspapers later called the “Brat Pack”: the new faces of one wild young cast. For the new version, however, Coppola not only brought previously unknown information to light, but also made changes, especially in the revision of the music.
Originally composed by his father Carmine Coppola, it was elegiac and heavily influenced by themes from Gone With The Wind. Coppola had pointed out to his father that Margaret Mitchell’s novel played an important role for the young people in the film – some scenes were shot as direct quotations, for example when two childhood friends, lit by the blood-red evening sun, discuss life in front of a church. For the son’s taste, Carmine Coppola then shot a little beyond the target in terms of composition, which is why you can now hear songs by Elvis in the revised film while the young people from the working class roam the city. The courageous intervention shows what the whole company means: other directors may devote themselves to remaking foreign classics, Coppola succeeds in innovating his own alone at the editing table.
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