When should a director stop messing with a movie? - Film Salon - Salon.com: Category No. 3: Resuscitations
Definition: Cuts undertaken by parties other than the director, often with the purpose of reassembling a film that was cut down, reworked and in some cases butchered without the director's consent.
Examples: I'll fixate on just one example here, because it exemplifies pretty much every factor involved in this sort of cut. Orson Welles' 1958 thriller "Touch of Evil" was recut, remixed and partially reshot during postproduction by Universal without the director's supervision or consent. Or so Welles claimed: The studio countered that it had asked Welles to return from Europe, where he was working on his next movie, to supervise and revise "Evil," but Welles declined.
Thirty years later, film editor and sound designer Walter Murch (who worked on many Coppola films, including both versions of "Apocalypse Now") supervised a "restored" version, working from a wish list memo that Welles sent to Universal in 1957. You could almost call the 1998 cut an alternate universe version of "Touch of Evil" for its good-natured attempts to visualize the film described by Welles. The biggest change is in the legendary opening tracking shot, which removes the studio-mandated Henry Mancini score. As the bomb-rigged car rolls through the town, you still hear the film's main theme issuing piecemeal from barrooms and apartment windows, arranged in different musical genres.
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