Cutting and Pasting

As I've mentioned before, I'm fascinated by what I refer to as 'Cut and Paste' filmmaking, whereby footage from one film is incorporated into another, or two different films are combined to create a new film, sometimes with new footage added, or even where one film is transformed into a new entity, by adding new footage.  One of the masters of this was the late Al Adamson, who regularly reworked one film into another over a period of years, (Psycho-a-Go-Go (1965), which was re-edited with added new footage into Fiend With the Electronic Brain (1969), which in turn was further re-edited and had more new footage added to become Blood of Ghastly Horror (1971), being the prime example).  Going back further, in the late forties Republic Pictures cut costs on the production of new serials by building each  new one around the action sequences from two earlier serials,matching the costumes of the new cast to those in the earlier serials.  Such practices were also common among B-movie producers.  Anyway, getting to the point, I indulged in a bit of 'cut and paste' story creation the other day, over on The Sleaze.  It's been a while since I did this but, while going through my old document files, I came across a story I didn't recall ever posting, yet still felt familiar, (not familiar in the sense that I'd written it, just that parts of it reminded me of something else I recalled posting).  After some investigation, I found that I'd incorporated a rewritten version of some of this into a new narrative framework for a story published many years ago.  

I eventually recalled that I'd abandoned the original, which was only meant to be one half of a story when I realised that I couldn't do the idea justice at such a short length and opted instead to expand the other half into a complete story.  So, being in one of those moods when really didn't feel like starting a new story for The Sleaze from scratch, (I'd been having a very frustrating week in which I'd seemed to run around a lot without actually achieving anything), I decided to finally rework this old story - after a delay of over a decade - instead.  After removing any dated references, the story ended up with a new opening, placing it in a more contemporary context, some rearranged text and some additional material which had occurred to me as i read the original version.  The end result was a pretty passable story which I was happy to publish as it was sufficiently different from the version previously posted..  It wasn't so much time that it saved me, as intellectual effort.  Whilst I'm still not the Al Adamson of vaguely satirical stories, it was still a satisfying exercise.  I used to do this more in the past, particularly when the site switched to Wordpress, taking the opportunity to rewrite and refurbish some older material to make it more contemporary.  Also, in the early days of the site, quite a lot of stories were extensively rewritten versions of stuff that had originally appeared in its short-lived and obscure print version, produced to amuse work colleagues, (circulation approximately ten).