The Director's Cut S/D

Question: has there been a director's cut that has been SHORTER than the original?

Gangs of new York?

btw congrats on the Time Out thing!

Oh, and I can't think of any director working today - not independently, at least - who is contractually guaranteed final cut. Final cut is pretty much a myth.

D: Apocalypse Now

a fairly straightforward example however of a "director-approved" cut being superior to that preferred and released by the producer is "my darling clementine."

J. Rosenbaum on how DVD marketing is rewriting film history:

Arguably, one reason why the film industry has encouraged and promoted the concept of director's cuts, even though this might appear to be counter to its own interests, is that it enables a film's owner to sell the same product to the same customer twice—or even, in a few special cases, three or four times. Presumably, if you recut somebody's film, the damage isn't serious because it can always be "restored" on DVD. The basic mythology appears to be that every film has two versions, a correct one and an incorrect one. But in fact this isn't quite true. A better paraphrase of the mythology would be, more paradoxically, that every film has at least two versions—a correct one and a more correct one, to be succeeded in turn by further upgrades.

One good example is the 2004 version of Samuel Fuller's The Big Red One, available on DVD, produced by Richard Schickel, and subtitled The Reconstruction. To my mind, neither the 1980 release nor Schickel's alleged duplication or approximation of the original longer edit of the film qualifies as a director's cut....

To take an extreme example, what about the eight separate versions of Blade Runner, at least half of which have been widely shown? These have included, apart from the initial 1982 release, cuts known respectively as the "original director's version" (though, ironically, disowned by its director, Ridley Scott) in 1990; three subsequent versions, all purporting to be "director's cuts," growing out of Scott's objections to the 1990 release; and, finally, the one that was actually approved and released in 1992. Yet even these five versions—all described in copious detail, along with two more, in Paul M. Sammon's once-exhaustive 1996 book, Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner—have finally been succeeded by a more carefully wrought 25th anniversary edition, hopefully definitive, known simply as Blade Runner: The Final Cut, prepared by Scott and released in 2007.

The havoc played with ordinary language and its meanings by this slapstick history is duplicated, in smaller but no less telling ways, in the mainstream labels often attached to various works by Orson Welles, particularly by writers who want to simplify the issues involved. Welles was an industry outsider whose work methods confounded most of the usual categories, so his work has been wrongly described much more often than that of most other filmmakers, and I've encountered these obfuscations often as a Welles scholar. The bottom line is that Welles never had a final cut on either Touch of Evil or Mr. Arkadin, so claiming to "restore" something that never existed, as a good many publicists and commentators do, is tantamount to fibbing. And the same thing applies to deleting and then redoing part of Welles' original soundtrack for Othello (a film on which he did have a final cut), which is also, usually, called a "restoration" by marketers and reviewers alike....

http://www.slate.com/id/2220740/pagenum/all

Original 1972 version of Live At Pompeii = da roxor
90min director's cut of Live At Pompeii = hideous (tarted up with computer graphics and space pictures more suited for a mid-budget rave video from 1993)