THE MOVIE THEY KEPT CUTTING HAS COME BACK UNCUT

Hollywood has always had an interesting relationship with dangerous movies.

First it makes them.

Then everybody gets scared, and cries like a bitch. 

Ken Russell’s The Devils arrived in 1971 looking like somebody had thrown religion, politics, sexual repression, architecture and institutional power into the same furnace. Oliver Reed played the doomed priest Urbain Grandier. Vanessa Redgrave became the unforgettable Sister Jeanne. Derek Jarman constructed a seventeenth-century France that looked disturbingly like somebody's idea of tomorrow.

Then came the scissors.

The film encountered censorship in Britain and the United States, with controversial material removed and different versions circulating over the decades. That turned The Devils into something stranger than a cult film: a movie whose missing pieces became part of its mythology.

For years, enthusiasts hunted alternative cuts, bootlegs and surviving footage, including the notorious material generally associated with the so-called “Rape of Christ” sequence.

Now the archaeology has reached the negative.

In 2026, Warner Bros. completed a new 4K restoration from the original camera negative, with sound remastered from the original 35mm magnetic composite. Cannes Classics presented the restoration in May as the uncut version of Russell's film.

That distinction matters.

Restoration isn't always about making an old movie sharper. Sometimes it's about determining what the movie actually was before institutions became uncomfortable with it.

And The Devils remains uncomfortable.

Strip away the decades of scandal and the film isn't simply Russell trying to shock an audience. It's about authority manufacturing spectacle, religious hysteria becoming political machinery, sexuality mutating under repression and institutions discovering that fear is enormously useful.

Perhaps that's why the picture still feels radioactive.

The censors eventually disappeared.

Russell died in 2011.

The culture changed.

The film waited.

Fifty-five years later, the scissors finally lost, and reminds of what could have been had I not been cut a few days after my birth. 

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BEFORE YOUTUBE, NEW YORK ACCIDENTALLY GAVE THE UNDERGROUND TELEVISION

There was a moment when television lost control of television.

Beginning in the 1970s, New York public-access cable opened a small hole in the wall separating people who watched television from people who were allowed to make television.

The underground promptly crawled through it.

Artists, musicians, drag performers, activists, comedians, eccentrics and assorted Manhattan nocturnal wildlife suddenly possessed something normally reserved for corporations: airtime.

The results weren't polished. Thank God.

Shows like Glenn O'Brien's TV Party looked less like television than somebody had accidentally left the cameras running at the best downtown apartment in New York. Debbie Harry appeared. David Bowie appeared. Jean-Michel Basquiat appeared. Iggy Pop appeared. People smoked, argued, performed, wandered around and occasionally seemed uncertain whether they were even on television.

Now the documentary Public Access is excavating that world from surviving analog footage, including material rarely seen since its original transmission.

And that's what makes this more than nostalgia.

Public access was an early experiment in democratized media. Decades before YouTube, livestreaming or podcasts, ordinary people discovered what happened when the machinery of broadcasting became briefly available without the usual gatekeepers.

Some produced political television.

Some made art.

Some apparently just wanted to get extremely weird at 11:30 on Tuesday night.

The tapes now look like transmissions from another civilization—not because the technology is primitive, but because the people don't yet seem trained by algorithms to behave like media personalities.

Nobody is optimizing a thumbnail.

Nobody is begging you to smash Subscribe.

They're simply broadcasting.

And buried inside those deteriorating videotapes is something today's infinitely larger internet occasionally struggles to manufacture:

genuine local weirdness.

For a few glorious years, New York didn't merely watch television.

New York got inside it.

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THE FIRST HOLLYWOOD UNDERGROUND FILM? TAKE THE ACID AND CHECK THE RECEIPT

Hollywood in 1967 was undergoing a transformation. The old studio system was fading, the counterculture was expanding, LSD had moved from laboratories into popular culture, and exploitation filmmakers were paying very close attention.

Enter The Acid Eaters.

Directed by Byron Mabe and produced by exploitation veteran David F. Friedman, the film follows a group of weekend thrill-seekers into a psychedelic landscape of sex, hallucinations and increasingly surreal imagery, including its famous LSD pyramid.

The movie was advertised as “the first Hollywood underground film.”

That's a great tagline. As film history, it deserves some scrutiny.

By 1967, American underground cinema was already well established. Experimental filmmakers, independent productions and countercultural screenings existed far outside Hollywood's conventional distribution system. Calling The Acid Eaters the “first” therefore tells us less about chronology than it does about a remarkable cultural moment.

The underground had become marketable.

Exploitation filmmakers recognized an audience that mainstream Hollywood was still struggling to understand. Psychedelia, sexual liberation, drugs and anti-establishment imagery weren't simply cultural developments; they could sell tickets.

Nearly sixty years later, The Acid Eaters is receiving treatment nobody making a quick exploitation picture in 1967 could reasonably have expected. American Genre Film Archive and Something Weird have restored the film from its original 35mm camera negative, pairing it with Mabe's Space Thing for a new release.

That restoration represents a broader reconsideration of exploitation cinema. Movies once regarded as disposable grindhouse product are increasingly being preserved as cultural artifacts—films that captured attitudes, anxieties and visual experiments respectable Hollywood sometimes avoided.

Was The Acid Eaters really the first Hollywood underground film?

Probably not.

But the advertisement itself may tell the better story.

By 1967, Hollywood's outer edges had discovered the underground.

And they knew there was an audience waiting there.

 

By the way- it's hot out - wouldn't you like to make slushies? 

 

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OIDAR RADIO: THE INTERNET IS FORGETTING THIS SHOW WHILE WE WATCH

The Internet supposedly remembers everything.

That's adorable.

Somewhere in the digital rubble sits OIDAR Radio — “Radio Backwards”: an obscure program whose surviving footprint now resembles the contents of a desk drawer after an eviction. A Facebook presence remains. Old references point toward “OIDAR RADIO BACKWARDS EPISODE 1.” Search results produce fragments, dead ends and the occasional unrelated Android application also called OIDAR wandering through the crime scene.

Nobody had to burn the tapes.

The algorithm brought a pillow.

And that's what makes OIDAR interesting to FMPU. This isn't presently a censorship story. There is no evidence somebody ordered the program erased, suppressed its hosts or dispatched the Men in Black to repossess a podcast server.

Something arguably more ordinary—and therefore more unsettling—appears to have happened.

Digital entropy.

Feeds die. Domains expire. Hosting companies disappear. Facebook posts sink beneath fifteen years of accumulated debris. Search engines reward whatever currently attracts clicks, while yesterday's underground radio program slowly becomes archaeologically indistinguishable from an abandoned app.

OIDAR may still exist somewhere. Somebody may have every episode sitting on an old hard drive between vacation photographs and a pirated copy of Photoshop. We simply don't yet know.

And that uncertainty is the story.

Early internet radio occupied a peculiar historical window: technologically advanced enough to broadcast globally, yet apparently too young for anybody to worry seriously about preservation. The cassette freaks often labeled their tapes. The podcast generation trusted the cloud.

Whoops.

THE RECEIPT

We can document that OIDAR existed through surviving pages and episode references. We cannot yet document its complete run, how much audio survives, or exactly why its public archive fractured. There is currently no evidence of deliberate suppression.

The internet didn't necessarily delete OIDAR.

It did something more interesting.

It forgot where it put it.

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Object Relations Therapy: Session 1

Session 1: THE COMPLAINT

He arrived at therapy in middle age with a surprisingly long list of people who had disappointed him.

Some deserved their place on it.

A former lover. A relative. Two employers. Several friends. People who underestimated him. People who used him. People who disappeared when usefulness ran out.

He wasn't looking for sympathy.

He wanted an explanation.

"I'm beginning to think I attract these people."

The therapist didn't disagree.

That bothered him.

For most of the hour, he presented evidence. Names, incidents, betrayals, contradictions. He was articulate and occasionally funny. Years of thinking about these things had made him an excellent prosecutor.

The therapist listened.

Finally she asked:

"What happens when somebody disappoints you?"

He looked confused.

"I just spent forty minutes telling you."

"No. You told me what they did. What happens inside you?"

Silence.

He hadn't come prepared for that question.

Anger, obviously.

But beneath the anger?

He searched.

The answer embarrassed him.

"They become different."

"Different how?"

"I don't know. It's like I suddenly see who they really are."

She wrote something down.

He disliked that too.

The session ended without diagnosis, revelation or reconciliation. Eight people remained guilty. Possibly nine, depending on how he now felt about the therapist.

Walking to his car, however, one sentence followed him.

They become different.

Object relations hadn't been mentioned yet.

Neither had splitting.

There would be plenty of time for names.

For now, the therapist had done something considerably more irritating.

She had made him notice.

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JOAN CRAWFORD ESCAPES FROM COPYRIGHT JAIL

 

Hollywood can forgive almost anything.

Bad reviews. Bad marriages. Bad accounting. Occasionally even a bad picture.

But paperwork? Paperwork will bury you.

In 1932, MGM released Letty Lynton, starring Joan Crawford opposite Robert Montgomery. Crawford is glamorous, dangerous and dressed by Adrian like the Depression had been temporarily cancelled for her personal convenience. The picture was a hit—and one of its gowns became enormously influential.

Then came the lawyers.

A federal court found that MGM's film infringed material from the play Dishonored Lady. An injunction effectively removed Letty Lynton from authorized circulation. And there it sat.

For decades.

No repertory revival. No normal television afterlife. No respectable home-video parade. While other Crawford pictures became staples of classic Hollywood, Letty Lynton acquired the considerably sexier reputation of the Joan Crawford movie you weren't supposed to have.

Naturally, people had it.

Bootlegs and collector copies circulated because cinephiles have historically regarded "unavailable" less as a legal condition than a personal challenge.

The delicious part is that the movie disappeared while Crawford's dress escaped. Adrian's extravagant white organdy gown became one of Hollywood's most copied fashions, reproduced commercially while generations of moviegoers couldn't legally watch the film containing it.

Now the sentence is over.

With the underlying copyright obstacle finally expired, Warner Bros. restored Letty Lynton in 4K, and in 2026 the movie returned to legitimate circulation after nearly nine decades in legal purgatory.

That's not merely a restoration. It's Hollywood archaeology.

A movie can be lost because the negative burns.

It can be censored because somebody gets frightened.

Or, apparently, it can spend most of a century locked away because several extremely well-dressed people disagreed about who owned the words.

Joan Crawford waited long enough.

Roll the damn picture.

Buy something... 

https://amzn.to/4ziZ2ng 

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Triangulation - Seeking Your Comments!

"Ok - We are excited to present to you our brand of new-ish articles and I would like YOU to comment!  Anything goes, but try to keep it content-relative.  It's an experiment, but your participation is critical so see you all in the comments section.  If it's merited, a better platform will naturally occur."   - MMM & JP

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