Most film directors shoot far more footage than they'll ever use; the quality of the finished product is shaped via subsequent trimming and sequencing by the director and editor(s). Given that studio commercial considerations sometimes triumph over artistic preference, satisfaction can be obtained via later "director's cut" editions for home video and/or streaming release. But even those rarely use everything the director originally shot.(Alfred Hitchcock was a notable exception. His vision of a film was so precise, that he almost never shot more than he used ... which made it impossible, during post-production, for potential "tampering hands" to mess with his cut.)
During the three years spent gathering films and TV shows that fit the parameters of this project, some were included more out of personal desire, than an adherence to my own fairly rigorous rules. When I ultimately emerged with a manuscript that was five times what my contract specified, and it remained almost three times too long after judicious editing, McFarland graciously permitted the single-book contract to be re-written as a two-volume set. But even though they tolerated a slightly higher per-book word count, I still had to trim some more text. The easiest — and least painful — solution, in order to retain the documents' integrity, was to lose some of those "marginal" entries.
They'll be resurrected here, from time to time. Think of this as an ongoing "author's cut," or a series of little bonus features. They'll also open a window to process, because these are the full-length, first-draft versions of each essay, prior to two rounds of editing. (Very few entries ran anywhere near original length, by the time of the manuscripts' final draft; I initially included a lot of production and/or plot detail — as you'll see here — that ultimately proved superfluous.)
I also get to include a lot more pictures...
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Biographical dramas about abusive, mean-spirited and self-destructive jazz musicians were a cinematic cliché in early 2016, with three released within weeks of each other: Nina (Nina Simone), Miles Ahead (Miles Davis) and Born to Be Blue (Chet Baker). All share a spiritual ancestor with the independently produced A Man Called Adam, which covers much of the same overly melodramatic territory; the primary difference is that the title character played by Sammy Davis Jr. is fictitious. Since this is a fairly straight drama, with no criminal activity to speak of — although drug use is vaguely suggested at one point — its inclusion in these pages might raise a few eyebrows. [Of course, it ultimately wasn't included.]
Adam gets a pass because Jack Priestly’s occasionally arty black-and-white cinematography has neo-noir touches — if self-consciously pretentious ones — and also because, frankly, the jazz is too choice to ignore.
