It's the primary reason I don't own a lot of his films.

Maybe its OCD but I find it difficult to make an emotional connection watching some of Welles films. The thought is always in the back of my head that the film Welles intended to make, and probably the superior film, is not what is playing on my tv. It bothers me and distracts from my enjoyment of the film.

Am I alone in this?

Its probably happened with countless films that I love. Thankfully I'm blissfully unaware most of the time.

It doesn't bother me. I can approach the film as a film, independent of who made it. And it does happen more often than most people think, it's just not publicised. The producers have final cut, unless it is agreed in the director's contract in advance. Of course sometimes (often? Usually?) the producers accept the director's cut.

If you're not watching movies where directors didn't get the final cut, you're not watching a lot of movies.

There's a famous story of John Ford directing a scene on the set of one of his films and the producer walks in demanding to know why he's behind in his shooting schedule. How many pages behind, asked Ford. 20, or whatever number it was. And Ford responded by tearing the next 20 pages out of his copy of the script and discarding them on the spot. "There, I'm on schedule."

I don't know what film that was or even if the story is true or not. But the idea that there's a Ford film somewhere with 20 pages of script missing from the finished product is kind of intriguing. And this would have been before the war, when Ford was making several films a year. Not all of them would have gotten as much attention as he gave STAGECOACH or THE GRAPES OF WRATH and it's a safe bet Darryl Zanuck had a hand in the editing of many of Ford's films, since Ford was at Fox before the war (and right afterward, with MY DARLING CLEMENTINE, which DID have two versions).

This is one reason I'm drawn to so many B-movies and medium-budget genre films, like crime movies, sci-fi, swashbucklers and the average western. They were made quickly, on time and on budget and no one bothered to tamper with them. Granted, they may not be on a par, artistically, with Welles' films or Ford's or Hawks', but they have their distinct pleasures.

^ That sounds like it would be a disaster. Tod Browning was tearing pages from the Dracula script and it resulted in a huge mess of a movie with some of the biggest plot holes you've ever seen, such as the characters just forgetting all about Lucy becoming a vampire and preying on children in the park. (She's presumably still on the loose by the end of the movie. The Spanish version left the script alone and included 30 minutes of additional footage, including the scene of Van Helsing staking Lucy in her crypt.) Are there any Ford films with fuck-ups that big?

I'm guessing they filmed the 20 pages. John Ford was known for his temper so he probably did it because he was pissed off at the producer for bringing it up.

While it is certainly true that Welles made only one of his films His way, I feel there is enough brilliance in the rest of them to justify owning them. Tragic that this is the case, but the more I learn about Welles the more I realize he played as big a part in his destruction than any studio or producer.

The movie was Mogambo, and he apparently only tore three pages out. But he apparently never put them back in.

Especially from that era.

I've heard that story about tearing pages from the script attached to Menachem Golan. He came to the set and started tearing out pages until the director was back on schedule. Since I've seen both John Ford films and Cannon films, that version makes a lot more sense to me.

John Ford was the guy who shot so little film that there was nothing else available if some studio executive wanted to recut his movie. He basically edited his movie in real time.

Probably in part because many directors weren't even in the cutting rooms of their own films back then, from what I understand.

That story about John Ford was circulating long before Menahem Golan was even a gopher for Roger Corman.

And the second story was about Raoul Walsh who, when asked by a film student if the studios ever tampered or recut his films, said, "The way I shot 'em, no one could cut 'em."

True. Welles biographer Charles Higham said he had a psychological condition, a "fear of completion". He was literally scared of finishing a project, so always found a way to sabotage his own efforts. Welles himself admitted as much in interviews.