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Penn Jillette’s ‘Director’s Cut’ to be released by Epic Pictures


November 9, 2017

In what is either the worst decision ever – or the best – but Epic Pictures will be releasing Penn Jillette’s “Director’s Cut,” the movie about a crazed superfan who goes to extreme lengths to make his own movie, perhaps as early as spring 2018. If you’re not familiar with the film, here’s the extremely not safe for work trailer: 

If you didn’t follow all that (and totally fair if you didn’t), here’s how director Adam Rifkin tried to sum up the film when he spoke with Entertainment Weekly

Director’s Cut is a movie about a film-obsessed stalker, who is played by Penn Jillette and is fixated on his favorite actress, Missi Pyle. He gains access to the set of her current film by contributing to that movie’s crowdfunding campaign. Once on-set, he kidnaps her, steals all of the footage from the film, and, in his dungeon-movie studio, he films additional scenes of the movie, casting himself opposite his captive leading lady as the romantic hero. He takes footage from the real film, and footage from his amateur production, and cuts them all together into his version of a director’s cut.”

Penn says he wrote the movie as “an intellectual challenge, to see if I could justify two plotlines, running simultaneously, and have it be believable.” He pitched it to various studios, all of which turned him down. After connecting with Rifkin, Jillette turned to crowdfunding to finance the movie, and the campaign’s backers are the only audience he’s really concerned with.  “If we can get money from 5,000 people, and please 5,000 people, we’ve done it perfectly,” he said. 

Intellectual exercise or hot mess (or both), whatever – we’re 100% on board. It seems a virtual certainty that Director’s Cut is headed for the same kind of cult status as Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. Oh, hi, Mark.