What did the studio at Wonderland Avenue do?

[Jan Klimkowski]

Helen - lots of fascinating material in your post.

I think we also got our wires crossed a few times there, entirely unintentionally.

Fwiw I have an insider's view on editorial interference in the process of filmmaking because I've spent almost two decades making documentaries for the BBC, NatGeo, Discovery etc. I'm also very interested in movies in all their aspects - from technical minutiae to insider gossip to ongoing impact on audiences.

By gossip, I don't mean who's shagging whom. I'm talking more of the shifting creative evolution of the project.

An obvious example is the evolution of Apocalypse Now, from the original right-wing, Kurtz-loving, extreme Nietzschian, script of John Milius - inspired by tales of the Phoenix Program and, allegedly, Tony Poshepny - through rewriting by FF Coppola, the casting and filming of Harvey Keitel as Willard, his firing and replacement by the much blander Martin Sheen who goes malarially mad on location, onwards to the climactic scenes in the Montagnard/Hmong Laotian compound, TS Eliot & Joseph Conrad spirited through a seer, a very edgy Marlon Brando, back to California for Walter Murch to make editing decisions so fundamental that a radically different work of art, only dimly present in the original scripts, emerged.

Etc etc.

Apocalypse Now was only ever given solid form when the celloloid prints were made. And even these were altered days after release. Yes - I once saw the airstrike called in and blow Kurtz's compound, and its inhabitants, to smithereens. For years afterwards, I thought must have hallucinated it. Until I learnt that Coppola withdrew those prints and had them destroyed.

Enough.

The broader point is that a form of this creative process takes place in the production of every radio and television programme, every film or play. That process is driven primarily by the key creative personnel - director, actors, editor, DoP etc.

This creative evolution is not malign, and is usually a good thing.

Fighting that creative evolution is editorial interference by the funders of projects. This may be the studio or broadcaster, who are usually driven by the bottom line. They want to make money, and will demand changes that they believe will make a work more popular. Ie put more bums on seats.

An example is the original studio cut of Kingdom of Heaven. As is often the case, the film did badly at the box office precisely because the studio thought they were changing the movie to make it more populist, and in fact they just made it more crap.

This editorial interference has a more malign form, which is changes demanded in the service of a political agenda. I have a friend who was working on a major series for Discovery about the Vietnam War. He wrote a script line stating that America lost the Vietnam War. It was struck out, and he was told to avoid that notion in its entirety if he wanted to keep working on the project.

Any MSM documentary with "conspiracy" in the title or blurb will have as its raison d'etre the "debunking" of the "conspiracy" at all costs.

So, there are many layers of interference.

And interference is rather a good word for moving into the John Keel/Mothman territory.

Keel/Mothman reveals interference at the literal and material level. Men in Black. Deliberate distortions.

However, there is also interference at the metaphysical level.

As if some numinous figure is twirling the radio dial, and channels are bleeding into each other.

And the radio itself is, for want of a better phrase, able to receive intra-dimensional signals.

This is also David Lynch territory.

Polanski, rather like Lloyd the barman, exists in many forms.