The $5 Million Tragedy: Why Warner Bros. Destroyed 'A Star Is Born'

This is one of the wildest stories about the making of a Hollywood film ever

and many of you have probably never heard it before. In 1984, film librarian Merle Ray Harlan was charged with stealing 419 films

One scrap found in his vast collection was a missing scene from the 1954 film A Star Is Born

starring Judy Garland. So many stolen films that could have been lost to history

and so many more we don't even know are lost. Unfortunately, that loss still includes seven minutes of A Star Is Born

If you try to watch the entire, originally-screened cut of A Star is Born now, it's a pretty odd experience

About 41 minutes into the film, it briefly ceases to be a motion picture

instead suddenly consisting of still images like some avant-garde thing your Brooklyn boyfriend would drag you to see

And he's used your wonderful shape, huh? He'll sleep it off on the plane

It's odd. You see, only four missing minutes from A Star is Born were recovered from Merle Harlan

There are still seven minutes of the full cut of the movie that are presumably lost to time

resulting in a somewhat incomplete film. So, who stole those last seven minutes

Well, the people who steal everything beautiful from us, my darling. Capitalists

Back in the 50s, Hollywood was feeling a bit nervous about the growing popularity of television

so they were getting a little gimmicky. Originally A Star is Born was going to be a 3D movie Then it was decided it would be shot in something called Warner Super Scope to compete with the new hotness CinemaScope Then it was decided a week into filming that no actually let just shoot it in CinemaScope

because people like CinemaScope, and that'll make us more money. Between the studio constantly changing its mind about how to shoot the movie

and Judy Garland's erratic behavior that might have been due to her struggles with addiction, the movie sounds like it was hell to make

It blew past its production schedule, needed extensive reshoots, and ultimately cost over $5 million to produce

Warner Brothers' most expensive film to date. But after all the drama

A Star is Born was screened for critics and audiences in New York and L.A. and received rave reviews

Judy's performance was incredible. George Cukor's directing was sharp and evocative. The songs by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin could be instant classics

All that work was apparently worth it, resulting in a three-hour-long masterpiece

The issue? Movie theaters didn't want a three-hour-long anything, even if it was a masterpiece or whatever you nerds are calling it

In order to recoup the enormous costs of production, Warner Brothers wanted the movie to run multiple times a day, and a three-hour movie limited the number of showings

Without input from director George Cukor, Jack Warner, one of the bros, sliced 27 minutes out of the movie, including two musical members

The final product went to wide release, and audiences weren't thrilled. It barely earned back its budget, and while the film was nominated for six Oscars, it received none

A sad end to a sad story. Until... Fast forward nearly 30 years

The Oscars are doing a retrospective for Ira Gershwin and they include one of his numbers from A Star is Born People are suddenly interested in the movie again and want to see the original version

But there's a big problem. When Jack Warner sliced it up, the studio destroyed the original

negatives. So in 1981, film historian Ronald Haver got the blessing of Academy President

Faye Kanin, who convinced the board chairman for Warner Brothers to let Ronald dig through

the Warner Vault to see if, even by accident, some of the scrap scenes survived. He was able

to find alternate takes of the two missing numbers, as well as a few other moments, but there were

entire scenes with shots missing that were simply impossible to recover. But rather than give up on

the project, Ronald and Faye decided to use production stills to patchwork over the missing

bits. Better than nothing, but as mentioned, it still feels off. It's still a beloved rumination

on Hollywood, a vision of Judy Garland at her finest, but we'll never see what the movie could

have, what it should have looked like. So here's a question for you that might feel a little out of

the blue. Is this a good use case for AI? Full disclosure, I myself am opposed on moral grounds

to the use of AI in cinema and, frankly, everywhere. It's resource-hungry, it isn't additive to the

creative process, considering it is incapable of generating genuinely new ideas. But with that in

mind, would it be acceptable to use AI here, in this circumstance, to try to get us closer

to the original vision of the filmmakers? In honor of its director and star who did their damnedest to make something unique and beautiful and were sabotaged by studio meddling Well I still going to say no

And the reason is that the movie is incomplete, yes, but its incompleteness is now part of its story

As Faye Kanin put it in a 1983 New York Times piece about the restoration

this will dramatize better than anything else what a violation those cuts really made

We sort of take it for granted that someone, somewhere, is preserving all of these movies

But a study done in 2013 by the Library of Congress revealed that only 14% of silent films produced in America from 1912 to 1929

still exist in their entirety. There are thousands of movies we'll never see

because at the time, no one thought to preserve them, or couldn't afford to, or could afford to

but thought it was a waste of money. If not for folks like Ronald Haver, who cares so deeply about cinema that they work long hours in an attempt to preserve it

there would be large swaths of our history that would be lost to time. If we tried to paper over this with AI

we would be denying that real people screwed up for a little extra money, and that real people tried to fix it through passion and perseverance

This movie, as originally screened, was about the madness of the Hollywood machine

And now, in its current form, it's even more so about that

by its ability to illustrate what happens if we don't take pains to preserve this art form

Thank you very much for watching. If you have any comments, please leave them below and don't forget to like and subscribe