I was involved with Western Film while it was still a club, at the time we still ran in Middlesex College and had just converted to 35mm film from 16mm. My friend Mark Maclellan and myself were in charge of Western Film. We both were fans of the movie Basic Instinct, him more so than me. We heard that the British version had scenes that weren't in the North American version. We arranged to bring in a print of the British version and show it. I won't get into how much trouble and expense it was to get it.
So we had the print and had to decide how to market it. This was before the Internet and marketing films was harder and more expensive for small operations like Western Film.
The added footage was basically extra sex and violence, which is pretty much what the whole movie was about. We decided to market it as the Director's Cut. The term was just starting to be used.
Anyway to get to the point, as they say there's no such thing as bad publicity and nothing sells like controversy. We decided to write a fake protest letter to the Gazette and if they published it that would get word of mouth going. They published it and we went on to have 4 sold out shows and made over $10,000 which at the time was a huge amount for Western Film.
Some related trivia.
-The 'person' who sent in the protest letter was Trina Shoons, an anagram of Sharon Stone.
-A nun from Brescia sent in a real protest letter.
-The added footage was less than a minute but was quite shocking for the time.
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