Matt LaCroix posted his own, online-only version of the altered ending on Vimeo. That's because another movie fan responded to the Kickstarter campaign by eliminating the rat for free. He's got the money - but there might not be the demand for his new version of "The Departed" that he had expected. But if I don't receive a cease-and-desist letter and we hit $4,000, it will happen." Mainly, I don't know if I'm allowed to do this. "Now, of course any project as ambitious as this has its challenges. "Will you really do this?" he says, reciting his most frequently asked question. He acknowledged that he cannot sell the altered version because of copyright issues.īut for $70, he says he can purchase a Blue-ray copy of the movie, throw away the disk and mail the consumer the rat-less version of "The Departed." The $4,000 is needed, he says, to purchase a Blue-ray copy of "The Departed," buy a Blue-ray player and converter, hire visual effects specialist Ed Mundy, print the altered version on 35-millimeter film and covert it to an online file, and purchase 50 blank Blu-ray disks to print the "improved version" of the movie. He says it won't be cheap to digitally alter a film in a way that honors Scorsese through the use of 35-millimeter film. "But unlike Lucas and Spielberg's changes, this will make 'The Departed' a much better movie." Sacks continues that "in the tradition of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas" - who oversaw changes to "ET" and "Star Wars" long after they were released - he wants to digitally eliminate the rat from the end of "The Departed." "It's insane to me that he would end any movie with such a painfully, on-the-nose metaphor." "In the last shot, Scorsese has an actual rat crawl across screen. "Unfortunately, the movie has one giant, glaring flaw," Sacks says in a video outlining his cause. So concluding the movie with a rat - which appears on the screen right after Damon's character is shot and killed in the apartment - might seem like an appropriate metaphor.īut for Sacks, it's simply too literal and too cheesy, a real head-scratcher coming from the great Scorsese. It's a race to see who can expose the other. "The Departed" is all about "rats." Billy Costigan, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, infiltrates a South Boston Irish-American gang led by Frank Costello, played by Jack Nicholson. DiCaprio is an informant for law enforcement. He's matched by Colin Sullivan, played by actor Matt Damon, who is tied to the gang and infiltrates state police. See the final scene of "The Departed" here: "That rat was a bad idea and we can fix it," his campaign motto reads. Believe it or not, he quickly raised more than $4,900 toward his effort, surpassing his goal of $4,000. Sacks, of New York, this week launched an online Kickstarter campaign to "digitally remove" the rat from the movie. It happens at the end, when a healthy-sized rat races along the railing of an outside balcony of a Beacon Hill apartment with the Massachusetts State House in the background. It grossed more than $290 million in the box office.īut one piece of the film has never sat right with fan Adam Sacks. The Boston-based gangster movie "The Departed," widely heralded more than a decade after its release, stands as the only of legendary director Martin Scorsese's films to win an Oscar for "Best Picture."
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