About 13 hours ago (i.e., roughly 6:30 pm Pacific on Monday, 4.28) Michael Nusair ventured into Steven Soderbergh territory and posted a whacked-down version of William Friedkin‘s Sorcerer. The original theatrical cut, contained in the recently released Warner Home Video Bluray, runs 121 minutes. Musair’s ADD version runs 57 minutes, a reduction of nearly 60%.

I don’t think the ’77 version is fatty or draggy at all. If you cut the “fat” out of any film you remove the connective tissue (atmosphere, downtime, minutiae) that made it a flavorful, semi-organic experience in the first place. The fat is an essential ingredient in the overall — this is what the ADD generation can’t seem to get. At least Nusair’s cut will fan interest in the real thing.

“My initial intention was to cut it down to about 80 to 90 minutes,” Nusair explains, “but I kept finding more and more stuff to cut, and eventually wound up under an hour. My broad goal was to take a film with a very 1970s sense of pacing and trim anything even remotely resembling fat. I wanted to see if I [could] give the movie a radically different pace without getting rid of what made it so great in the first place. I certainly succeeded in giving it a much faster pace, though whether I have excised the soul of the film is up to you.

“Most of the cuts were made to the first half of the film — I wanted to get them to South America and into the trucks much, much quicker. The character introductions have been trimmed down considerably, as has the mid-section of the film. Once they get into the trucks, the cuts are quite a bit lighter (though there was still some trimming just to maintain the faster pace).

“I hope that this is considered a unique enough product to not be taken down by Vimeo — I think so, since pretty much every scene has been cut down to some degree, making this a completely different experience than the original film.”