"A STAR IS BORN: JUDY GARLAND AND THE FILM THAT GOT AWAY".......WHEN DELETED SCENES MET OBLIVION.....

"A Star Is Born: Judy Garland and the film that got away" by Lorna Luft and Jeffrey Vance (2018)

            We know we've been around a while.......having lived through three versions of "A Star Is Born"........

           (Movie buffs can determine their age by judging how many "A Star Is Born" remakes have been produced in their lifetimes........like the rings on a cross-section of a cut down redwood tree....)

           The 1954 version, directed by George Cukor and starring Judy Garland and James Mason, is the only version that's truly worthy of a 'Making of...." coffee table book.

            How come?  The film became a perfect storm collision between the brilliantly gifted and tormented Garland and the irascible, cold-hearted Warner brothers......Jack and Harry.

             The sad result: an penultimate musical epic that ended up permanently vandalized and years later, could only be partially restored to its original form.

            Garland spent her adolescence and young adulthood as Louis B. Mayer's doped-up prize race horse in his MGM stable of stars. Kicked out of the studio when her drug dependency rendered her unreliable, "A Star Is Born" was meant to serve as a grand and glorious comeback......a heartbreaking epic meant to showcase Garland's incandescent talent as an actress and singer.

               And that it did......in George Cukor's original 3 hour version which how audiences saw it at its world premiere.

               But not for long.......

               The brothers Warner, already unhappy with the cost overruns on the film's budget, felt stuck with an overlong movie that theaters could only show 4 times a day, due to its running time......

               So out came the scissors........which Jack Warner took to the film with the same finesse that Leatherface applied to his "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" victims......

                Sliced to ribbons and devoid of over a half hour of footage (including key dramatic sequences), the new Warner-ized, botched version never found favor at the box office. (And Garland left films for the rest of the 50's, concentrating on concerts....)

              Decades and generations before DVDs and Blu-Rays would preserve every scrap of every movie's raw footage, Jack Warner destroyed the deleted "A Star Is Born" scenes.........with the only remnants of them left in still photos and the isolated soundtracks......

               Tragically, when the time arrived for an overdue restoration of the film, those remnants were all that remained of Warner's brutal attack on the original 3 hour cut. Watching it now on DVD or Blu-Ray, the best you can do is imagine the missing scenes through the photos and accompanying sound.

                Garland's daughter, Lorna Luft and Jeffrey Vance offer a well written, comprehensive and revealing history of the film and its aftermath.......liberally illustrated with loads of behind the scenes photos. The book offers a telling observation of both the tough business of Hollywood and the star-crossed tragedy of Garland's career.

               4 stars (****) a must have holiday gift for hardcore classic movie buffs