‘Going All The Way Is Finally The Movie Mark Pellington Envisioned 25 Years Ago
In 1997, Mark Pellington made his directorial debut with Going Everywhere, based on Dan Wakefield's novel of the same name. The film, which tells the story of two Korean War veterans returning to their hometown of Indianapolis in the 1950s, featured formidable strangers at the time: Ben Affleck, Jeremy Davies, Rachel Weisz, Rose McGowan and Nick Offerman. The film premiered at Sundance, received rave reviews and a distribution deal...then disappeared for 25 years. While Pellington was proud of the film, he never felt he fully captured what he loved about Wakefield's book, and the film went through several changes: from a three-hour edit to a 112-minute Sundance version in 1997 - The one-minute film that eventually hit theaters undermined the story.
Decades later, Pellington made an interesting discovery while poking around his office during the COVID lockdown. "I found an old Betacam tape," Pellington told IndieWire. "In three and a half hours, and when my editor Leo Trombetta got back from filming in Indianapolis, he had everything he had collected." Pellington and Trombetta looked at the footage and decided to create a new publication to use during the pandemic occupy. After digitizing the Betacam footage, they took about 20 minutes of the footage and added 50 minutes of clips, completely reinventing Any Progress and merging the film with the spirit of the source material.
"We did it just for fun," Pellington said, but then he realized that Village Roadshow, which produced series based on Arlington Road and The Mothman Prophecies, owned Going All the Way. As part of the acquisition of the Lakeshore Pictures library. "I said, 'You know, you have a Ben Affleck movie that's never been on cable, or on TV, or on television. Seeing the financial benefit of reselling this film, Lakeshore brought in Oscilloscope Laboratories as a partner. for repair and conversion. At first, Pellington thought he could create a new version by compressing the Betacam and correcting the color, but it "looked awful" and he began detectively collecting elements from the original film.
"It was like an archaeological dig," Pellington said. Working with Betacam frame numbers and a VHS copy of the Sundance cut, Pellington began working with Fotokem to try to find negatives of the relevant scenes and then hired editor and videographer Joe D'Augustin to view films. Dig what you need. Some scenes were only available as working prints, others as original negatives, but eventually Pellington and his collaborators were able to find everything they needed, scan it in 4K, and colorize it, mostly to fix inconsistencies. The suicide scene, which wasn't in the cinema but was incorporated into the recast, was from a working copy, so it was, in Pellington's words, "really bad", but the raw quality makes the film feel really emotional, like all that. The Going Everywhere viewers saw more changes in 1997 that made the film very different.
Laboratories for oscilloscopes
The end result is not only more faithful to the novel, but the film is richer, more complex, and more powerful; The middle-aged director has recreated a young boy's coming-of-age movie, bringing his whole life and knowledge of cinema to the table. "I've only shot commercials and music videos, so it felt good in every scene, but I put a satirical scene next to something more realistic with a wide-angle lens, and it looked uneven," says Pellington. "Over the years I've seen movies like American Beauty and other stuff that taught me how to mix and match those tones as I got a little more experience."
One way the new "Director's Cut" fits the audio is through Trombetta's voice-over narration, which includes more of Wakefield's text. "Leo recorded Todd Field's 'Little Children' and I loved the sound of it," said Pellington. "I felt like this book finally allowed me to capture the feeling of loving growing up in a way that no other film version could." Pellington also hired regular collaborator Pete Adams to create a new, almost to compose an hour-long score that replaced the original opening titles with Sergio Pinheiro's sequence, setting the film's haunting, haunting tone and more. The original version's emphasis on teen sex comedy has now turned Pellington into a darker, more dramatic, and ultimately more poignant and emotional film.
The film is also a fascinating time capsule of a time when its fame was on the brink of collapse. "Looking at it now, I remember the things that made me fall in love with it in the first place," Pellington said. Oscilloscope will hit theaters nationwide, and with the planned deluxe Blu-ray/DVD release, audiences will also have a chance to relive the memories. After two years of hard work on the project, Pellington is grateful and excited to see his first work again. "The director doesn't have that option," he concluded. "I'm proud that I did it."
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