As someone who edits for a living, I totally understand the impulse to keep going back and tweaking or even completely re-working a movie.

Like the article says- sometimes it's a good thing and sometimes not. The newer recuts of Touch of Evil and Blade Runner were definitely improvements. The director's cut of Donnie Darko just about ruined the movie. Crass, George-Lucas-style "updates" exploit a movie's fan base for cash. It's a different situation depending on the film.

I actually think that Lucas is sincere in his thinking that he's improved the original trilogy with his goofy additions. He's wrong but I don't think that it's a cynical money grab for him.

Coppola too with Apocalypse Now; the new cut just really just doesn't work and kills all the tension. It was fun to see some of the scenes that I'd only heard about like the French Plantation but he was right to cut them in the first place.

Blade Runner is different because that was pretty much the cut that Scott meant in the first place before the studio took it from him.

What I don't get is the teeny tweaks. Just saw Star Wars trilogy on TV: What difference does it make to change "Get the shelter up" to/from "Get the shelter built"? (It went back and forth once or twice, I think!)

Handel tweaked his "Messiah" oratorio all the time, depending on which singers were available to him. Tweaking has been around for a while. Do it all you want, as long as it's documented, and as long as it's not a cynical money grab. Once they're dead, though, forget it.

In general, I think when the movie is done, it is done. I can think of only 3 exceptions: the director's cut versions of the first two movies in LOTR, Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, and Blade Runner. All of these were essentially necessary edits. The movie release versions of Fellowship and Two Towers just left out too much of the book plots. (While Return of the King was perfect and didn't gain anything from director's cut.) And we've already talked about why Blade Runner needed the director's cut version.

But I'm a big believer in close and careful editing before release. I just think after that, let it go. Move on to another creative enterprise. Think how much better the world would be if Lucas had left well enough alone after the first three Star Wars movies and just gone to a different story.

Personally I think people can tweak their movies to their heart's content, so long as I have the option to choose which one I want to see. I'd be fine with Lucas throwing in twenty tons of CG nonsense if Blu-ray discs of the unaltered trilogy were sitting right next to the "special" editions on store shelves next year (spoiler: they won't be.)

I saw a quote recently from Lucas in which he calls the special editions "upgraded" versions of the original movies. I guess this makes sense, because it reminded me of a funny line about a software upgrade, probably AT&T Unix System V Release 4, that went something like: "Every feature you ever wanted, plus several you didn't."

His reasoning for not releasing the original versions on Blu-ray was that it's very expensive to do the sort of clean-up on the original films that's needed to make them look decent in a high-definition digital format, and since this is already done for the special editions, they're not going to pay all that money to do it again for the originals.

Except that this sort of implies they made the edits before doing the clean-up, doesn't it? Otherwise they'd have the cleaned up, but not yet "upgraded", versions of the films sitting around in digital format somewhere, and they could just use those. Which strikes me as kind of an odd sequence in which to be doing this kind of thing.

I think the first "Blade Runner" recut is the only time I've thought a director's cut was an improvement on the original. Every other time it's either been a disappointment or unnoticeably different.

For example, I didn't like Aliens special edition: it had sentimental additions, and it dragged on for longer which weakened the tension. That seems to be pretty common: directors often want to put their pet favourite scenes back in, but it generally weakens the overall movie in terms of pacing.

So basically, I think a movie should only be changed if something went specifically wrong with the original edit.

I'm not a big fan of the auteur theory though: I think movies are artistic collaborations. So when many years after filming a director goes into an edit suite to recut it, I think he doesn't have chemistry with his collaborators any more. It's been too long since he had a writer to talk to with a deep understanding of the script, actors with their own interpretations of the roles, a DP enforcing a consistent look, people around to say "no, that's self-indulgent crap, cut it". So, the result is usually less coherent, flabbier, shallower and generally worse.