Episode 75 : Cliff MacMillan of Scream Factory

Jose and Ryan have a great talk with Cliff MacMillan of Scream Factory about his recent announcement about Clive Barker’s Nightbreed Director’s Cut Deluxe Edition and Clive Barker’s Director’s Cut.  We talk a lot about the progress, Clive Barker’s involvement and a lots of other things too.

You can find them for sale at the Scream Factory website right now. (Clik through for Scream Factory page)

Read more: http://www.dreadcentral.com/news/68819/exclusive-michael-plumides-talks-nightbreed-cabal-cut-heading-home-video#ixzz36R6weh9g

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Transcript Below

DANHAUSER: Welcome to episode 75 of the Clive Barker Podcast. This one is Cliff MacMillan of Scream Factory on the eve of his recent announcement about the new Clive Barker Nightbreed Director’s Cut. There are recent announcements about what it is, where you can order it. (You can preorder it right now.) Anyway, if you’re wondering why we didn’t ask about Lord of illusions, we actually did, but it’s not time to make any announcements about Lord of illusions yet. So anyway, here we go. Episode 75, Cliff MacMillan of Scream Factory.

LEITAO: Hello and welcome to episode 75 of the Clive Barker Podcast. We Are Ryan and Jose and we have with us today bluray producer and responsible for acquisitions and production, Cliff MacMillan from Scream Factory that has just announced the preorders for the amazing Director’s Cut of Clive Barker’s Nightbreed, available in both deluxe and special editions. He took the time out of his busy schedule to talk to us and enlightening our listeners about this new release of a 24 year old cult movie. Thank you very much for taking the time, Cliff MacMillan.

MACMILLAN: You’re welcome. Thank you for having me.

LEITAO: It’s been crazy after the announcement of the release, especially over at the Occupy Midian group on Facebook and other websites. So we would like to ask you a few questions about this release.

MACMILLAN: Sure.

DANHAUSER: Shout Factory and Rhino have, I guess in evolutionary terms, sort of common ancestry, right?

MACMILLAN: Yes. Shout Factory was started by Richard Foos, Garson Foos and Bob Emmer, they all were at Rhino Records;  Richard Foos was the creator of Rhino records. He started it way back when there was just a record store actually. So that was how it started, was just as a record store.

LEITAO: At one spot, Rhino released some Iggy pop. A huge box set that had all these live concerts on it. It was really amazing.

DANHAUSER: I bought the Alice Cooper one… And of course Scream Factory is the horror division o Shout Factory. What’s your favorite movie that you’ve worked on? So far,

MACMILLAN: Oh, that’s too difficult. I’d actually probably say right now the one I’m working on the Halloween collection. That’s probably gotta be the best because I’ve been a Halloween fan since I saw it originally in the theater back in…when was it 78 or so. Dad took me to see the movie. So I’m a bit a fan since I first saw it. To be able to actually work on it and with people that have worked on the series over the years is, it’s been great.

DANHAUSER: Which movies are gonna be included in that?

MACMILLAN: Every Halloween movie.

DANHAUSER and LEITAO: Wow! Oh Man!

MACMILLAN: It’s a big box set.

LEITAO: Nice.

MACMILLAN: But I mean it’s also to the work…I was a fan of Nightbreed when I saw it in the theater and I didn’t, of course at the time, know, all that was going on behind the scenes and I still enjoyed the film for the theatrical version. To be able to work on this and restore it and work with Clive and the people at Seraphim, there’s just been a delight as well. I’m working on two great titles back to back. It’s pretty great. But it’s also pretty busy.

LEITAO: And then sometimes you guys have to navigate international distribution rights. Not right now because you guys always market things, thanks for the American and Canadian market. But…

MACMILLAN: Yes, we’re a North American company. We don’t do any releases in other countries and a lot of the fan base is pretty mad, you know, which you saw on our Facebook page when we made the announcement.

DANHAUSER: (laughter) Yes. We’ve been getting that too.

MACMILLAN: We’re a North American company; we have no experience in releasing things in other countries and you can only do what you can do with the infrastructure that you have; we’re not ready to do other releases. And, in our deals, we only have the rights to North America; we can’t sell stuff overseas. Now, if you order one off of Amazon and they ship it to you, there’s nothing we can do about that, but we abide by our terms in our contracts with people and that’s the way you stay in business. If you start deciding you’re going to ship stuff to other locations, you’re putting your ability to license from those folks in jeopardy and it’s not worth it to us.

DANHAUSER: Does that also include the region coding?

MACMILLAN: Yes, it is in our contract that we must region code the releases. A lot of smaller labels don’t seem to have to do that. That’s great for them, but for us to be able to be in business as we are with all of the major studios it’s because we follow our contracts and we do what we’re supposed to.

 LEITAO: Right. So far you mentioned Amazon and also the Scream Factory pages mentioned that some online vendors will start offering the sets for sale. Of course, this involves the Amazon schedule. I don’t know if you’re going to be able to answer this, but will Amazon get preorders or just after October 28?

MACMILLAN: No, it’ll be up for preorder. I would imagine in a couple of weeks. So I know a lot of people have been worried that did go through the first one thousand in a day. But the Amazon will have product, there’s no doubt about it.

DANHAUSER: There was also an online store that one of our Occupy Midian people (on the Facebook page)… one of them found, Diabolik DVD or something.

MACMILLAN: Yes, Diabolik DVD.  Yes, we’ll make sure they get product as well and I think they’ll all start to take preorders soon, but there’s a process that our distributor has to go through before the stuff loads up on the Amazon site. So this was kind of an early announcement and it’s not scheduled to go up onto Amazon yet, but it will and it will be definitely up for preorder and I don’t think we’re gonna sell out the 5,000 that quickly. But you know, the first thousand went very quickly.

LEITAO: That is very great news for the fans. I’m sure they’ll be happy about it.

MACMILLAN: Well we’ve seen that. We’ve seen a lot of people complaining about it being limited to 5,000. Trust me, that’s not what we wanted to do. The only way Warner Brothers to allow us to include the theatrical cut was to limit it to 5,000 units.

DANHAUSER: Oh Wow.

MACMILLAN: You know, Because I think at some point they will probably release the theatrical version so they wanted to limit us to the amount that we could sell.

DANHAUSER: So they’re using you as a litmus test to see if they’re gonna make money releasing Nightbreed…

MACMILLAN: I think once they see the fact that we’re doing well, that they will probably put it out on their Warner archive page at the very least. I’m sure they’ll do that. So, we would have loved to have made a 10,000, 15,000, but, you know, we were very lucky and very happy that Warner Brothers would do the deal with us for the 5,000 units. So we were happy to do the 5,000 even though we wish it had been more. But when we did the deal with Morgan Creek, we had no ability to include the theatrical cut and so we went to Warner and discussed it with them because we were in business with them for TV series and so forth. And they were kind enough to allow us to do it. So, we’re happy to be able to offer that.

LEITAO: Wonderful. I have a little question to clear up about the deluxe edition, which will include the theatrical cut of Nightbreed. Is this going to be an HD transfer of the theatrical cut?

MACMILLAN: Yes. We did a brand-new transfer about a month ago from the inter-positive that warner brothers has, because the only other HD transfer that Warner had was an interlaced transfer and there was no way we were going to use that for this release. So we did a brand new transfer, so the theatrical cut is from the new transfer for and then the Director’s cut, will be using that new HD transfer. And when we transferred the missing footage, we transferred it from the original camera negative. So the actual footage, that footage may look a little bit better than the actual movie does because an inter-positive is a generation down from the negative.

LEITAO: Wonderful.

DANHAUSER: And we had read that you had searched through over 600 boxes to find the lost footage. Was that in a Morgan Creek warehouse or like 20th century Fox or where did it end up being?

MACMILLAN: Well, when we originally contacted Warner brothers they gave us a list of what they had and it was all the materials that they had here in Burbank and I just kind of pleaded with them, I said, “Can you please look in deep storage?” And they said, “Okay, we’ll get back to you.” And they came back to me in a few weeks with this massive list of film elements and this stuff had been sitting on pallets from when the deal from 20th century Fox for the Morgan Creek Library went over to Warner Brothers and I think 20th century Fox put everything on pallets and shifted to this mine where they store film elements because it’s always at a constant temperature.

DANHAUSER: Thats crazy.

MACMILLAN: I went through the list and found and checked off those boxes that were listed as trims from the film. We had absolutely no idea what that could be. It could be scenes that are in the theatrical version they got trimmed at some point or whatever. We didn’t know. They shipped the stuff from the Midwest all the way out here and it was over 600 boxes and each box had just a little film reel. We had to string all of those together so that we could run them through the equipment and the first day we were sitting there and we ran the first reel and here’s this stop motion footage of this creature and this woman and she looks like a panther riding this creature. And I was like, “oh my God. We found it.”

LEITAO: Amazing story.

MACMILLAN: That’s just the beginning, and the more and more we started looking at reels we started finding…I mean, we found footage that isn’t in either version of the film. We’ve found more footage that’s been shot.

DANHAUSER: More than what’s in the Cabal Cut.

MACMILLAN: Yeah. There’s a bedroom scene between Peloquin and Shuna [Sassi]. It’s amazing.

LEITAO: You found it! I can’t believe it! I’m sorry, I’m just very enthusiastic about this.

MACMILLAN: Yeah, we found that footage. We found just tons of footage.

LEITAO: Wow, that’s amazing.

MACMILLAN: And some of it won’t have audio, but we’re doing the best we can to find audio and I think in places where we don’t have it, we may use the original script to bring up subtitles, so at least you know what people are saying. We’ve been going through all the scripts to find all the missing a dialogue and so forth.

LEITAO: Wow.

MACMILLAN: So it’s been quite an adventure so far and still have many weeks to go to finish this and piece it together.

DANHAUSER: So, Clive Barker and Seraphim have been pretty active in helping decide like which things stay in which things go.

MACMILLAN: Yeah, we’re just starting to edit now. So we’re actually editing at Clive’s office; Clive would be partaking on it. People have wondered why this is not called the Cabal Cut. Clive has decided to lose that name and just call it the Director’s Cut and he probably will trim some things from what was the Cabal cut and those will just end up as deleted scenes on the third disc and the deluxe version. So that all the footage was made available for everybody to see, but we’ll keep the cut the way Clive wants it to be. It’s his baby.

LEITAO: Of course, it’s his directorial vision, so I completely understand that.

DANHAUSER: Well, and I think it’s kind of good to differentiate because the Cabal Cut was an event and it was a thing. But this is starting all over again.

MACMILLAN: Exactly. The missing footage that we found; I can’t believe what good condition it’s in. It’s not that dirty, It doesn’t have scratches, It’s like brand new. It looks like it was shot yesterday.

DANHAUSER: That’s amazing.

LEITAO: Is there anything that you can tell us about the included booklet that will be in the deluxe edition?

MACMILLAN: There’s an essay in it by Mark Miller who works for Clive at Seraphim Films  He was there from the beginning of trying to find the footage and putting it together so nobody knows how the process has gone since day one better than Mark. We have an essay for Mark and then it’s also full of a lot of photos we found at Morgan Creek. They’d sent me a handful of photos through the Internet, and I said, “Do you have any more than this?” And they go, “Oh boy, do we!” Next day I get this massive box that’s got slides that were taken for most of the production and then there’s definitely scenes missing. So, the guy who was only there for a certain amount of time, but there’s actually some slides of that bedroom scene too that we found as well. It will be full of photos of the monsters and stuff.

DANHAUSER: Is this also part of why the Deluxe Edition has an entire blue ray disc just dedicated to special features?

MACMILLAN: Yes. It will have a lot of content that, anything that we’ve found with Clive’s blessing that isn’t in either cut we want to put on that third disc so that people can see all the footage that was shot.

LEITAO: Going into the audio part of the Director’s cut: Have any of the character voices been redubbed or restored to prevent the voice changes due to the different sources?

MACMILLAN: We haven’t even started that half of the right now we’re just working on the visual by finding the foota we need and then cutting it together because, like I said, it was 600 boxes. None of it’s in order. So we transferred all the footage and now has to be pieced back together again, like a puzzle.

LEITAO: I remember a year ago when Mark Miller tweeted just hours before the Scream Factory and the bloody flesh panel at San Diego Comic Con, how he found out he was going to be on the panel. Who puts you in touch with the Morgan Creek?

MACMILLAN: A friend who I had worked with before when he was the head buyer at Hollywood videos, name’s James Shapiro. He works for Drafthouse Films and originally Morgan Creek was talking to Drafthouse Films about doing the Cabal Cut. But they weren’t too crazy about having to use the videotape footage. Nor was I, but I was such a lover of Nightbreed that I was willing to. What we were going to do is try and see what we could do to that video footage to make it look better, which I think if we had never found the footage, I really don’t know that anything could have been done to that VHS footage, but they didn’t want to release something with VHS footage. I agree with them. To put out a DVD or even more so blu-ray and then add VHS footage into it is going to be a very jarring experience to watch. So they didn’t want to do it. So James had recommended they talked to me. That’s how it started. And they put me in touch with folks in Morgan Creek.

LEITAO: I’ve heard that Jim Shapiro is a huge fan of Nightbreed and has a life-size “Decker” head.

MACMILLAN: Yeah. When I finally told them that we found the footage he was very unhappy, and I don’t blame him. I would’ve been mad too.

LEITAO: Michael Plumides, who’s working on the TV pitch for the Nightbreed series told me about that and about the deal and Morgan Creek. So, the musical score I guess it’s also premature to talk about that.

MACMILLAN: Yeah, we’ll probably use a lot of what Russell had done with the audio to finish ours off because we’re a small company; we’re not a studio. So we’re spending a ridiculous amount of money on putting this back together again to have had to go through all of the audio because the audio and video are separate from the audience separate from the negative. So to have to go through every piece of audio to try and find the audio to match these things, it would have taken us years. We will use that original Cabal Cut audio and we will sweeten it, and work with it and, and get it to where it sounds as good as the regular film does.

LEITAO: Wonderful.

MACMILLAN: There’s just only so much we could do with the money that we have. It’s probably the most expensive project Shout Factory is ever taken on…

LEITAO: The official statement from director Clive Barker two days ago was “this is film history and beyond my wildest dreams of realization when Scream Factory told me that they found the Nightbreed film footage I was gobsmacked.” It was really rewarding to read this because we’ve been promoting this for almost two years now. It’s been a real struggle to come up with information and stuff that would please every fan. Of course not everyone is gonna to be pleased.

MACMILLAN: Oh no. we know that. We know that every day in this business.

LEITAO: It’s wonderful that the Director’s Cut is going to be a reality and it’s going to be there; never gonna be forgotten. It’s here to stay. So Ryan, Do we still have more questions or would you like to go to the listener feedback?

DANHAUSER: Is there anything you can tell us about special features on both versions of Nightbreed or is it still too early to go into that?

MACMILLAN: That’s still too early. We are working on it right now.

DANHAUSER: Okay. So we do have a few listener questions. Mark Seven said, will the limited edition have extras that in the collector’s edition does not. I was imagining with an entire Blu-ray dedicated to extras that it probably would have more.

MACMILLAN: Yeah, they will definitely have more than the regular version.

DANHAUSER: Elric Fraumeni said “What is the extra third disc and on the standard edition?” Okay, we just talked about that…

LEITAO: He also asked if there ever going to do more Paul Naschi titles.

MACMILLAN: Boy, what I love to. I love those movies. They didn’t sell very well, unfortunately. The fan base for Paul is a very passionate, but unfortunately a very small one. Luckily we didn’t pay for those restorations. The owner of the films did those meticulous, high-def transfer because, boy if we had done them… Well, BCI is not around already, but they would have been gone faster if I had spent that much money to fix those movies.

LEITAO: Elric Fraumeni also asked… I think we went through this before, “Any extra info on the restoration?, which really is the most extensive work I think even cliff has overseen.” And Phillip O’Neill from Sweden asks, “One thing that concerns me about the Director’s Cut of Nightbreed is the score by Danny Elfman. Since Elfman is not returning to do an additional score, are you guys recycling Elfman’s score cues for the Director’s Cut?” So you also briefly touched that you might go for the Russell Cherrington audio version, right?

MACMILLAN: Yeah, we’ll probably have to reuse some score. I just don’t think there’s any way we’re gonna be able to get Danny to come in and record something new. If we were a major studio and we were restoring a film like Blade Runner, maybe that would be possible. But we have to be realistic. We’re a small company and we’ve only got the budget that we have to work with and we’re barely making it as it is using our budget.

DANHAUSER: So there were, there wasn’t any additional audio besides what’s on the soundtrack CD.

MACMILLAN: It would have taken way, way, too much work to, like I said, to go through the audio. We went through 600 boxes of video if we had gone through the audio as well, you know, videos much easier to go through and quicker because you can look at it, but to go through the audio, to sit there and play everything and then you would need somebody like Danny who’s familiar with the music to do that. Would we have loved to have spent a hundred and $200,000 working on this? Yes. But it’s still a cult movie, it’s not going to sell 100,000 copies of it unfortunately.

DANHAUSER: Well, at Occupy Midian we’ll do the best that we can to get them sold.

MACMILLAN: Thank you. I appreciate it.

LEITAO: I remember when Lord of Illusions, there was the soundtrack by Simon Boswell and then a few years ago the extended soundtrack came out with extra cues. Danny Elfman probably has his tapes in a studio still for Nightbreed. Like you said, it would be complicated to have someone else score that in. It would be messing with some other artists work. So we understand that’s too expensive.

MACMILLAN: Danny is just, I think he’s sort of a private person. He’s married to Bridget Fonda and when we did a special edition of Lake Placid she flat out turned us down and said “I don’t, I’m not an actress anymore, I’m mother. Thank you, but no.” And when we went to Danny for Dark Man, he was like, you know, if Sam Raimi gives you an interview, I’ll give you an interview. Otherwise, I won’t. And you know, Sam doesn’t do interviews about his past work anymore. I think sometimes these people just want their private life and it’s difficult to get them to want to step back into the spotlight again.

LEITAO: Sure, I completely understand. On a personal note, I would just like to thank you for all the work you guys did for setting up this deal and coming up with such an amazing package. I already bought 2 deluxe editions and one of the regular ones

DANHAUSER: …and I bought one of each as well. Actually, we were just talking about how we were really blown away by the amount of detail you gave in this announcement because everybody was wondering ‘Is it going to be the release date?’ But you can preorder it.’ There are two versions and just all the information and details you gave about it was incredible.

MACMILLAN: We wanted to do the announcement and especially have Clive to be a part of it. And we’ll have another announcement when we get closer to be able to announce all the extras and so forth.

DANHAUSER: Would that be Comic-Con?

MACMILLAN: No, it’s probably gonna be in August. I would say probably mid-August.

LEITAO: That’s perfect. we’re not in a rush. We know you’re doing a great job. So thank you very much for this opportunity. Again,

MACMILLAN: thank you very much.

LEITAO: I’m looking forward to having those deluxe edition, those babies.

DANHAUSER: Yeah

MACMILLAN: You’re welcome. Take care.

LEITAO: Bye. So Nightbreed is coming out from Scream Factory. There’s gonna be the Director’s Cut deluxe edition and the special edition. Just to reiterate all the things that these two sets include, the deluxe edition you can only buy two per customer and it will have 5,000 numbered sets produced. The first 1000 will be numbered available from Shock Factory.com. The disc one will have the unrated Director’s Cut of the film on Blu Ray. The disc two will have the 1990 R-rated theatrical version of the film on Blu-ray through a special licensing agreement with Warner Brothers, which is also the reason why they can only sell 5,000, which was stipulation on the contract — which also restricts international rights. A disc three is exclusive to the set bonus Blu-ray disc pack with extras. And of course, details forthcoming because as you heard, Cliff Macmillan tell us they’re right now editing the movie in Clive’s office.

DANHAUSER: And right now they’re just editing the video portion. They’re not doing the audio.

LEITAO: It will also include a collector’s book with an essay by Mark Miller and rare photos of Nightbreed. The slip case will include newly designed artwork approved by Clive Barker. I think the new cover artists for this release is called Joel Robinson.

DANHAUSER: Oh yeah, the blue one, right?. And finally there’s a poster with Anne Bobby with Lori on it.

LEITAO: There was Lori, she was not in the cover of the normal DVD edition, right?. That’s one of the things I never understood. They put Boone there, but they don’t put Lori.

DANHAUSER: Yeah. And they put all kinds of monsters and stuff on some of the cover pictures or stuff.

LEITAO: And some of them we hardly see in the movie.

DANHAUSER: you know, and we’ve debated before, maybe Lori is even the main character because she’s the human one that we can Identify with.

LEITAO: I remember when we were discussing Cabal the book you asked me, “Who is the main character of this book?” And I was like, “It might be Lori because a lot of the story is seen through Lori’s eyes” and she is also in a lot of the sequences in this movie. Lori is the main actress in it; I would say a large portion of it. Anything that’s not about Decker and Boone, It’s Lori. And the special edition it’s going to be the Director’s Cut in Blu-ray. Disc one unrated Director’s Cut of the film and Blu-ray plus bonus features, which again, they’ll still figure out what that’s going to be because they found 600 boxes of footage to go through, And they found a lot of Nightbreed stuff. The disc 2, for this special edition has unrated Director’s cut of the film on DVD.

DANHAUSER: Yeah. And I have seen where people were mixing it up and saying that that was a DVD version of the theatrical cut and no, that’s not correct. The theatrical cut is only in the deluxe edition.

LEITAO: Yes, yes. That, that was also part of the stipulated contract with Warner to license theatrical cut.

DANHAUSER: There would be no reason to put a DVD version of the theatrical cut in there. And you can buy that, right?

LEITAO: Oh, and I was really excited to know that the theatrical cut is going to be a brand-new transfer.

DANHAUSER: Yeah, I can’t wait. That’s the movie that everybody fell in love with even though, you know, we all complained about wanting to see the Director’s Cut, and we do. I think a lot of us have still a special place in our heart for the theatrical cut.

LEITAO: Oh yes. Absolutely. That’s why all 8,000 people are in Occupy Midian in 2013 to sign the petition. They all started as fans of the theatrical cut.

DANHAUSER: So one thing that we didn’t get into in this interview is that people have been complaining about the price of the Deluxe edition. It’s a 5,000 print run. It comes with three blue ray disks and a book. So it’s a limited run and for all the time and effort, and for some of us money that we’ve put into this, I don’t think it’s that bad. I put it on my credit card so I’m not gonna, you know, maybe be paying it over time, but…

LEITAO: I bought my second copy of a deluxe edition today, but it’s not for me, it’s for a friend. So I already got my two copies per customer. There are online vendors who are going to sell this as well, like Cliff MacMillan said. Amazon is gonna have preorders for this maybe in a couple of weeks. The price; I understand. I think some people are more angry about the fact that this is going to be just a region A, a locked edition, but…

DANHAUSER: There are still a few complaints about the price too, which I was surprised about. You know that people would be so active in Occupy Midian.

LEITAO: I want to believe that they know about the two editions and they don’t think it’s just gonna be the deluxe edition. So that’s why I’ve been posting a lot of links to the regular one as well because that one is like, it’s $24.

DANHAUSER: Sometimes when a new Clive Barker movie comes out, I will buy it for $40 from Dark Delicacies because I know that there, they’re gonna get it autographed and send it to me like Dread. I spent way more money than that movie’s worth should get an autographed version of it. When it came out.

LEITAO: You got Dread. Yeah, You probably paid more than it was worth.

DANHAUSER: I think I paid forty bucks for Dread.

LEITAO: Ooooh!

DANHAUSER: But I didn’t know, I hadn’t seen it before.

LEITAO: There’s stuff about this release that’s gonna blow people away. It’s gonna blow your mind. I am not worried about the region locking thing because I expect even with the complications that exist about the distribution rights for international market, I think it’s a matter of time until some company will decide to… Maybe even Morgan Creek, I don’t know… this is just me speculating, but they sold a thousand copies of the deluxe edition that’s $80 a piece in one day in less than 24 hours. So if there is a market out there for this and there was a huge market outside of America, maybe even as big or bigger than the market in America.

DANHAUSER: Definitely they’re leaving money on the table if they don’t do it. So that means if they don’t do it, is because it’s impossible.

LEITAO: There’s people in Mexico, in France and Germany in all sorts of places that had screenings of the Cabal Cut. And England! My God, how could I not say England the first time. England had almost as many screenings as America.

DANHAUSER: Well, and it’s also where 99 percent of the movie was shot.

LEITAO: Exactly. And a lot of actors were British, the production company. The studio, not a production company because that was Morgan Creek, but the studios shot at Pinewood. It was shot with a British crew… this movie at its essence is British. Stylistically it’s British, even though it was produced by an American company.

DANHAUSER: You have two main characters that aren’t British, but it’s still a British movie. In Canada they really only filmed helicopter shots. Right?

LEITAO: Right. Those shots where Lori’s driving to Midian or something like that.

DANHAUSER: And Boone driving to Midian too.

LEITAO: Yeah. So this is amazing. I’m really happy. And you can always get the special edition. The normal one.

DANHAUSER: Yeah. Gosh. And that’s awesome too, that’s incredible.

LEITAO: Yeah. You will get the Director’s Cut – The vision that Clive Barker had in his mind in 1989.

DANHAUSER: And if you don’t care about the theatrical cut being in HD buy the other one.

LEITAO: Sure.

DANHAUSER: It’s only $23 after the preorder discount too.

LEITAO: I relate a lot and I sympathize a lot to every fan out there right now that says, “I don’t live in America. I don’t live in Canada. How can I get this in? Why is it locked?” Distribution Rights, stipulated contracts, restrictions and stuff like that with Warner and because scream factory is an American company as well. The important thing to retain here is that the Director’s Cut is being produced, is going to be a reality. It’s never going away. This opens the door to other companies in the future, licensing the Director’s Cut and maybe releasing it in other parts of the world.

DANHAUSER: I think that if it can be done at all, it will be. Unless it’s just too difficult to get those rights back for whatever reason.

LEITAO: So please don’t direct your anger or your disappointment at Occupy Midian or a Scream Factory.

DANHAUSER: Especially not at Scream Factory. They’re doing the job that they were hired to do.

LEITAO: And just be a little more patient. We promise you guys we will stick by Occupy Midian and push for this at least until the end of this year. And then we’ll see. We’ll see what happens, because I’m sure that this will cause quite an impact in the Nightbreed community.

DANHAUSER: This announcement was made a year ago and Scream Factory never once said that they were gonna to try to make an international release. They’re the company for the North American release, somebody else is gonna have to make the international release.

LEITAO: Don’t ask Scream factory. How can I license this movie? Who can I put you in touch with to license this movie? If you want to ask someone that you need to ask Morgan Creek and that’s who you need to ask because they’re the ones who own the movie and I’m really happy that at least we got the Director’s Cut to be a reality. That was what we set out to do and now I think it’s a matter of time and patience for everyone else in the world to be able to see this. I mean, unless you got, of course a friend in the US or you can get it from one of the online vendors who is going to start taking pre orders for this who will ship internationally. You can also get this edition yourself. And let’s be honest, all a thousand people in Occupy Midian are not going to buy a copy of the deluxe edition. We know there’s a lot of people who just joined because they thought it was interesting to be in the group, but they are not interested in having a three Blu-ray edition.

DANHAUSER: I saw that price and, At first I was like, holy cow, but I would be kicking myself if I didn’t get that.

LEITAO: And again, the special edition, the one that’s just two DVDs of the Director’s Cut, Blu-ray and DVD of the Director’s Cut, that is not limited. There are gonna have that for some time. I mean essentially everything is limited of course, but this one is not limited to 5,000.

DANHAUSER: So this Blu-ray is going to be around and it’ll probably… I would imagine it’ll be the more popular between that or the Warner Archive version.

LEITAO: I hope so. Otherwise, we are not doing our job, right?

DANHAUSER: Yeah. So Warner Brothers kind of dropped the ball. This is just my opinion, by not taking this on themselves.

LEITAO: Let’s see. I don’t know what’s gonna happen. Like I said, once the Director’s Cut is a reality and the discs are made and ready to order with the preorders and the sales when it goes on sale, I’m sure that Warner will be watching as well as Morgan Creek. They will be like, ‘Hmm, okay, maybe we can make some more money out of this with a huge international market’ and then the work will be done because the Director’s Cut is done. So the only thing they will have to do is slap it on a disk and make a distribution contract.

DANHAUSER: And what I was saying before about the price, if you compare it to the cost of like a set of two movies, some two other movies. Obviously, that’s a lot of money. But this is a special limited edition collectible piece. And I don’t think that the price is out of line for what we’re getting, especially if there’s only 5,000 copies of it.

LEITAO: yeah of the deluxe edition and they also set up something we didn’t discuss here. They also set up a new tagline for the, for this release, “A new reason to fear the night”.

DANHAUSER: Oh really? I didn’t even notice that.

LEITAO: It’s on the cover. It’s on the blue ray DVD Combo Pack and the Deluxe edition. They put at the bottom of the… I’m looking at the cover of the Director’s Cut Blu-ray / DVD combo pack, which has the Les Edwards cover, which is beautiful. I don’t know why this was not the main poster and instead they went with Lori’s eyes over blackness saying “Lori thought she knew her boyfriend. Lori was wrong!”. That poster is so terrible. This one’s much more beautiful. The Les Edwards cover where we see Decker looking on to Midian on flames. everything’s burning. And then you see in the smoke, the projection of Boone, Shuna Sassi, Kinski, Leroy Gomm, Peloquin and Narcisse. It’s beautiful. And then they added “a new reason to fear the night”. So that’s wonderful.

DANHAUSER: it’s cool. It seems like they kind of get it, you know, more than the, than the marketing people got it about Nightbreed in 1990.

LEITAO: Oh absolutely. You’ve heard Cliff MacMillan. He’s a fan. So, this is the best we could do for now, which is pretty good. And I’m really happy about this and just hang in there a little longer if you live outside of the United States or Canada, because I’m sure you’ll be able to get a copy of this at some point. This is not the end of Occupy Midian and, it’s definitely not the end of Nightbreed the Director’s Cut. This is the beginning because now we have also comic books coming from boom studios; There is a TV show that they’re developing right now. Just hang in there. There’s an explosion of Nightbreed right now and it’s amazing because this is 24 years old and you know, in 2009 before these work prints reemerged there was a community Nightbreed people, but it was like a smaller community. We just had no idea of how many people were out there, but ever since this whole thing got started with when they found these tapes with work print footage. It seems like a new generation of people have emerged along with the old generation of people and it’s like, ‘Hey, I never heard about this. This is a Clive Barker movie. Hey, let’s see what it is. Oh, this is amazing!’ We got people in Occupy Midian who just saw Nightbreed like last year and you know, they’ve been joining in and being vocal about having the Director’s Cut.

DANHAUSER: We’ve got somebody in, in Occupy Midian because it’s her parents’ favorite movie.

LEITAO: I mean it’s a second generation fan! So there you go. Mean it’s just wonderful that right now we’re having this explosion of interest back in Nightbreed with all these products coming out. Someone Was talking about action figures for Nightbreed, you know, and Occupy Midian like.

DANHAUSER: Yeah, like what would you like to see kind of a thing.

LEITAO: It’s not for me. I don’t think that’s too far-fetched to imagine that. Maybe if these things kind of explode this way, like we have the TV show and stuff. That there might be like a company that might do that. I don’t know. Why not? This is just the beginning guys. Hang in there.