Miramax vs. Michael Myers

Daniel Farrands, screenwriter of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (aka Halloween 6) (1995). Despite posturing as champions of independent, iconoclastic directors, former Miramax and present Weinstein Company honchos Bob and Harvey Weinstein are very much cut from the classic cigar-chomping Hollywood studio mogul cloth. Their propensity for re-cutting films without the director's input, demanding drastic re-shoots, or burying films because of some petty personal grievance have befallen directors as notable as Bernardo Bertolucci, Martin Scorsese, and Guillermo del Toro.

Miramax's genre division, Dimension, was no exception, and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers was a casualty of Harvey Scissorhands. The released version was an incomprehensible, sloppy mess, with a baffling cobbled-together ending that left me fuming. Much re-shooting and re-editing occurred, despite the death of star Donald Pleasence, making the original storyline into a hash, the worst kind of focused-grouped, by-committee filmmaking imaginable. The much bootlegged "Producer's Cut" which restores Farrands' original story, isn't really any good (it's still a Halloween sequel, after all) but at least it make sense and has a singularity of purpose.

Farrands had obviously put the whole mess behind him. "Hey, it gave me a career," he remarked when I caught up with him at Screamfest 2007. Recently, he wrote the well reviewed adaptation of Jack Ketchum's novel, The Girl Next Door and the upcoming The Haunting in Connecticut with Virginia Madsen.

Instead of cheese, we said, "Fuck Bob Weistein!"

Update: Fangoria.com reports Farrands is working on an official release of the "Producer's Cut" of Halloween 6. Check it out here.