Director’s cut of Blade Runner accidentally shown instead of the theatrical cut. I then mounted a campaign to get it released. And succeeded. https://twitter.com/duneho/status/1357096392401973248

This article covers it briefly. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-blade-runner-2-turan-19920913-story.html

I wrote of the screening in the Los Angeles Times Sunday Calendar. That got film-buffs aware of the print. Then I organized a letter-writing campaign to Warner Brothers on online film forums.

I don’t know how many letters it was. Maybe only a hundred or so, maybe a few hundred. And I don’t know if they had any actual impact.

But my letter in the LA Times was how the world knew that print existed. Impossible to express now what the Sunday LATimes Calendar meant in the 90s film industry. Everyone read it.

Every festival and art theater begging WB for that print read my description of it in the LATimes.

That was my goal, walking out of the theater that Sunday. Holy Shit. A 100x better version of Blade Runner exists and it’ll just go back into a vault forever unless we figure out a way to let the world know about it.

And the Internet had yet to broadly exist. And online forums were small and isolated. AOL predecessor “Prodigy” was about it. So I wrote the LATimes.

@portcasper was there with me. Who else? @jujuauju ?

Blade Runner was NOT widely acclaimed back then. It was a poorly-reviewed flop. Siskel & Ebert gave it 2 thumbs down. On video, it gained fans. But it was very much a cult film. Beloved by film students and few else.

Fans saw it as a flawed but very ambitious, brilliant film, before its time and undone by studio meddling. But this was an isolated view in the cinema landscape. An oddity of a film.

Anyway, there were maybe 25 people in the audience for that Sunday morning screening. Almost all were die-hard fans who knew the film line for line. The first change was the title card at the beginning.

Murmurs from the audience when the fly-in to Tyrell Corporation doesn’t show the closeup of Holden’s eye. Film is the same until Deckard orders sushi. No narration. The audience gasps.

4 or 5 people who are clearly new to the film ask their neighbor why people are gasping, and are shushed immediately and intensely.

By the time we get to the police station it is clear. There will be no narration. Nobody can believe what we are seeing. Nobody has phones that can film this, nor an internet we can tell people on. It’s a secret. And we are the only people who know it exists.

The discourse among fans back then circled around “Is Roy Baty an intentional Christ figure?” We readied to hear him confront Tyrell with a crude f-bomb. But the line was changed to “I want more life, Father” and the audience practically shouted. All theories confirmed.

When the film was over (no credits) the crowd frantically discussed what we had just seen for half an hour in the lobby. Then the theater closed and the discussion continued for another hour on the sidewalk.

We left, determined to tell the world what we saw. Blade Runner was indeed a hidden masterpiece. And 25 or so of us had seen the proof of it. We just needed to make sure that the rest of the world got to see what we saw.

Here's my letter to the LA Times May 13, 1990: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-05-13-ca-130-story.html