Gentlemen, will you share your work with your fellow board members? I would be happy to come to you if that would help make it possible. In fact, I just checked with my airline, and they've got a mileage awards flight I can afford departing this Saturday for Vancouver. Say the word, and I will be with you this weekend. (I hope that doesn't sound too scary).
I have a lot of ideas what a perfect version should look like. I even think that some of the shoot-outs (especially the turkey chase shoot-out) should be cut differently, like such scenes are always cut in Peckinpah films.
Rip Torn passed away recently, so I thought I'd revisit one of his best starring roles:
Tropic of Cancer (1970) - Down and out and getting laid in Paris. Joseph Strick, having adapted Joyce's Ulysses, decided (I guess) to take on yet another literary challenge. It was a deft stroke to get Rip Torn for the part of Henry Miller. Torn usually does a lot of his acting with his eyes, but here a considerable amount of the performance has to be credited to his teeth. Was that makeup, or were his choppers really that ugly? There's a lot of female nudity in this film. An uncredited Ellen Burstyn shows up at the beginning and goes full frontal. It's not a bad as you might think--in fact, Ellen in 1969/1970 looked pretty good without clothes. She only turned dumpy later.
Yeah, I made my own cut... (The 2005 cut was almost the one to go for, unfortunately they made some terrible mistakes.). I don't think a lot about that film, it is all too sad: the 2005 HD version was screened at the Berlin festival back then, yet it was never released on Blu-ray... Warners just don't care. I could make a fine feature-length doc using all the interviews I filmed + some nice ones from the film's set etc. etc. I rather forget about it .
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