Don’t you hate it when an otherwise perfect movie is ruined by one awful, cheesy moment? Like the icky makeover scene in The Breakfast Club, the flying car in Grease, or the hobbit pile-on in Return Of The King where Frodo looks like he’s trying to pass a kidney stone.
For one guy, the one that keeps him up at night is the final shot of The Departed.
Martin Scorsese’s otherwise gritty and morally complex crime film ends with a moment about as subtle as throwing someone off a building: a rat scuttling along a windowsill as we slowly zoom in on a view of the Boston state house.
Get it? Do you get it? Because it’s a literal rat? Like the rat in the ranks that Jack Nicholson talks about?
So Sacks has decided to create a version of the film with the rat edited out, and he’s crowdfunding to get it done.
“It’s always bothered me that a movie as good as The Departed has such a cheesy ending, and I recently realized it could be fixed by digitally erasing the rat from the last shot,” Sacks says on the project’s Kickstarter page.
He’s done his research, and he’s trying to raise precisely US$4000 for the following steps:
- $18.91 to buy a Blu-Ray of the film, because he wants to support the filmmakers instead of torrenting an HD copy.
- $141.54 to buy a Blu-Ray player.
- $59 for Blu-Ray ripping software.
- $599 to pay visual effects artist Ed Mundy to do the actual digital erasing. $599 precisely, “because if you pay someone $600 dollars or more, the IRS requires you to send them a 1099 MISC form at the end of the year, and that’s too much work for me”.
- £318 (US$414.59) to print the edited scene onto 35mm film, to stay true to the non-rat elements of Scorsese’s directorial vision and keep things official-like.
- $169.92 to digitally scan the film and put it back onto Blu-Ray so he can watch it himself on the aforementioned Blu-Ray player.
- $57.69 to subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud for one month so that he can edit the fixed scene onto the end of the movie.
- “I need $38.31 to buy a 50-pack of blank Blu-ray discs, and $2.71 to buy a black Sharpie marker so that I can burn 50 Blu-ray copies of my improved version of The Departed and properly label them.”
- $375 to hire an intern to burn the 50 copies, because he doesn’t believe in unpaid internships.
Sacks says that he’s actually definitely going to do this, unless he receives a cease and desist from Warner Brothers.
But he’s even thought of a way around any accusations that his project could take away from sales of the official Blu-Ray:
“[E]ven though it’s obviously a far better version of The Departed, I do not own the rights to the movie. So, if you’d like to receive one of the 50 limited edition copies, you’ll have to contribute $70 or more. This will allow me to buy you a legal Blu-ray of The Departed, throw that disc away, replace it with my superior version, and mail it to you.”
It's not every day that someone uses the medium of Kickstarter to comment on the trope of Kickstarters, MPAA restrictions, the limiting burden of the IRS on freelancers, and Scorsese direction," but somehow @AdamSacks has managed to do all of the above: https://t.co/aHqTlAztUp
— Erin Sparling (@everyplace) February 19, 2019
The project has raised US$1321.96 of its goal from 52 backers so far, and it’s only been up a few hours.
You can follow its progress on Twitter at @RatErase, or just via the Kickstarter.