The director’s cut is a wonderful concept and can be an excellent retroactive tool in cinema, but what happens when you get a director’s cut from an artist in decline? This seems to be the case with the newly released, “Lookin’ To Get Out,” the 1982 Hal Ashby oddball buddy comedy about two New York gamblers on the run in Las Vegas that was barely released and just dumped into theaters by Paramount.
Starring Jon Voight, Ann-Margret and Burt Young, the film was the second film of Ashby’s unfortunate losing streak in the ‘1980s (“Second-Hand Hearts” in ’81 was the first flub), ironic given “Lookin’ To Get Out” — which was co-“written”/improvised by Voight and screenwriter Al Schwartz — was essentially about a gambler down on his luck with one lost shot at redemption.
Just released on DVD on June 30, the “extended version” director’s cut has been getting a lot of press — Ashby was always then and now beloved, mostly for his 1970s Midas touch streak which ran from 1970 (“The Landlord”) to 1979 (“Being There”) and included such low-key humanist and satirical unimpeachable classics as “The Last Detail,” “Shampoo,” “Harold & Maude” and “Bound For Glory.” But no amount of revisionism can really save, “Lookin’ To Get Out.”
Ripped apart gently by critics at the time (Ashby always got a pass, or at least at first he did), the reconstituted version is better allowing for breathing space, meditative moments and a less truncated rhythm, but is still a fairly average picture with some middling humor that’s almost pratfall-ish at times.
What is impossibly tragic (not to mention incredibly frustrating) about Ashby’s terrible ’80s streak is how the Academy Award winner somehow ceded massive control to the studios and producers he was working with and it only got worse on each successive picture. After a while it seems like he started to give up and much of that attitude seemed to start on “Lookin’ To Get Out.” Much of this is well-documented in Nick Dawson’s recent biography, “Being Hal Ashby: Life Of a Hollywood Rebel,” which we just finished reading. These chapters towards the end of the book are heartbreaking and infuriating. Ashby seems to make a lot of bad decisions and continues to work with people that never seemed to have his best interest at heart. He would seem to be aware of this and contain major suspicion and then bitterness, but would strangely move forward for “the sake of the picture,” despite, nasty letters, in-fighting and eventually on some projects like, “8 Million Ways to Die,” ugly lawsuits.
Interestingly enough, in his exhaustive research, it was Dawson himself who realized that Ashby’s cut of the film still existed — Ashby had re-cut the picture and donated it to UCLA before he died in 1988 — so much of the credit for this picture coming back to life is his.
The L.A. Times wrote of the story, “Unhappy with the version of the film [Ashby] turned in, Paramount executives demanded a reedit, and Ashby, fed up and beaten down, left it to his editor, Bob Jones, who worked with Voight to produce a shorter cut.” Voight himself admits in the book he had no clue what he was doing. “I tried to come in and fix it,” Voight told reporters at CineVegas where the film recently screened in its new form for the first time.. “We had three days to make any adjustments.” The version that hit theaters was 15 minutes shorter than Ashby’s cut — “[It] was a big mess,” Voight said. “We all felt very badly.”
One of the things that should have been ditched in this new version is the egregious score by Johnny Mandel. The film was originally cut to the music of The Police, a band that Ashby had gotten into at the time according to the biography, but because of a clause in the contract that said only American musicians could work on the project, the idea to include the band’s music was scrapped. Instead, what’s given in the film is practically a parody of the Police’s sound, with an corny funk sound that was way too over-caffeinated. The Police’s sound was obviously syncopated to the hilt and it’s entirely conceivable that even using their original sound might have been a bad idea. Chase sequences in the picture to these rhythms just fall into poor slapstick moments that make you cringe.
In a move that would haunt most of Ashby’s ill-conceived films of the ’80s, “Lookin’ To Get Out,” was hurried into production with an unfinished script and the filmmakers were writing much of the film on set.
Fail or succeed though, we’re still glad Warner Bros. are releasing films like this on DVD. Other recent overlooked films they have re-released on DVD include David Cronenberg’s “M. Butterfly,” John Boorman’s “Beyond Rangoon” and Michelangelo Antonioni’s counter-culture picture gone wrong, “Zabriskie Point” which featured a score by Pink Floyd. All films worth taking a second look at it, even if they don’t succeed entirely (see ‘Zabriskie’ which has awesome and laughable moments).
Warner Bros. recently released a deluxe version of “Being There,” on DVD and to hear Dawson tell it there could very well still be director’s versions of “Second-Hand Hearts,” “The Slugger’s Wife” and “8 Million Ways To Die” (the latter of which went through drafts written by Oliver Stone and Robert Towne) out there as each film was taken away from Ashby, but not before he had his own crack at editing the films. Do they still exist? Are they, like “Lookin’ To Get Out,” only minorly more successful? Hard to say, but all cineaste’s love archival digs, so many of us would at least give them a shot.
Voight’s daughter Angelina Jolie also played his daughter in the film and made a brief appearance at the film’s conclusion.