README.txt
Erich von Stroheim's original edited version of his film was over 9 hours long. Many efforts to shorten it, by Von Stroheim and others, resulted in various versions at different lengths, but the only one that was originally released by MGM was the shortest of the lot, 2 h 15 m, cut by Joseph Farnham acting on orders from Irving Thalberg. This post is of a widely hailed 239-minute cut, a restored version (Turner Entertainment, 1999) by Rick Schmidlin using the existing footage and still photographs of the deleted scenes. This was produced according to an original and detailed continuity outline by director Erich von Stroheim to bring it as close to the Director's Cut as possible. This version also contains a stereo score by Robert Israel.
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