Q: Good morning. What's your opinion on reediting and redefining a film, only to make the newer version the only one available on DVD as opposed to the version audiences may have fallen in love with in the theaters?
R. Howard: Are there examples of that, technically?
Q: Not technically at the moment, but George Lucas has said that when he puts Star Wars out on DVD he's only going to release the special editions and not the original 1977 versions.
R. Howard: That's interesting.
Q: Spielberg is putting ET out, and the original version is going to be available in a collectors set, but the mass price version is going to be the version [with the guns] removed.
R. Howard: What do I think about that? I think, again, when the filmmakers are controlling it, it's okay. If an artist wants to take something down off the museum wall and change something, I hope somebody takes a snapshot of the earlier version just for historical value, but I think the artist ought to be able to do that.
Hmm, at least he hopes "someone will take a snapshot" I hope he meant that he hopes the older version should be available to the public when he says that.
Chris.
Edit: sorry, changed it to what I meant to make it more clear
for that stuff. I accepted long ago that there was kind of a theatrical version and then the ancillary version, and I'm really delighted that for people who care that the original format doesn't just vanish with the end of the theatrical release.[That's my correction on "matte." The transcript is filled with such typos.]
While Ron Howard's answer to the follow-up wasn't encouraging, he did make it clear that he values OAR presentations.
By the way, those OAR questions were mine. The questions before mine were from the New York Daily News and Chicago Tribune; the Indianapolis Star followed me, but I don't recall the rest. It was real professional of Digitally Obsessed to remove the reporter's names and introductions, which are part of the transcript, in its bylined reposting of the transcript.
