Wednesday, February 28, 2007

The Rap Sheet; Payback

Some very intersting material about The Rockford Files on The Rap Sheet today. Ed Robertson talks about how the show changed and temporarily declined after creator Roy Huggins left it (I've never understood why Huggins and James Garner split up after so many years together--I just remember Huggins saying on an interview show "I love Jim and Jim hates me") but that Stephen Cannell turned it around eventually.Really interesting material. http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/
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I haven't seen this covered anywhere but the current issue of Premiere magazine. Nothing showed up on Google either. The 1999 Mel Gibson crime thriller Payback is coming out an DVD in April. The whispers were that Paramount held it this long because of Mel Gibson's rep. People forget...maybe. The other whisper is that director Brian Hegeland wanted to do his own final cut, which is the one that will be released.

Premiere says that Hegeland wants to excise Kris Kristoferson's villain role entirely and restore most of the footage that Gibson cut when he fired Hegeland. Fair enough. I guess.

The magazine gets in a funny shot at the last. ""Gibson himself was not involved in the DVD release, due to his controversial plan to translate the entire film into the Pitchtish dialect and disembowel 17 background actors in the film's final scene."

1 comment:

MysterLynch said...

Payback will be released on April 10th.
In addition to being the director's cut, it will also feature a commentary by Hegeland as well as the usual bonus features.