Forty years ago, George Romero's Knightriders reached theaters. It was the first film of a three film deal that Romero and producer Richard Rubinstein had negotiated, capitalizing on the remarkable box office success of Dawn of the Dead. That deal required a sequel to Dawn but allowed Romero a kind of freedom that would be utterly unique in his career. After Night of the Living Dead, Romero and his collaborators in the Latent Image had enjoyed a great deal of artistic liberty, but on relatively paltry budgets. Knightriders was the first time in his career that Romero had the support to make whatever kind of movie he wanted, and he made the unexpected choice to spend that creative capital on a transposition of Arthurian legend to a modern day troupe of "knights" who joust on motorcycles at Renaissance Faires. It hit theaters alongside another Arthurian re-telling, John Boorman's higher budget, higher profile Excalibur, itself a radical re-envisioning of the traditions but with the expected period trappings. 

Audiences and critics didn't quite know what to make of Knightriders. It was a passionate, utterly sincere film about the ideals and convictions of motorcycle jousters, and as such, it didn't fit too comfortably into any of the expected boxes. There had been counteless biker exploitation movies in the 60s and 70s, but none of them were set at a Renaissance Faire, which was itself a new and not particularly well-known phenomenon. Unlike Excalibur or Richard Lester's Robin and Marian, it didn't offer the fun, escapist spectacles of medieval pageantry. It was an action movie, but one that is very talky, in which the primary narrative conflict comes from several of the knights being tempted to form their own offshoot by a couple of sleazy promoters. And it was coming from a filmmaker who was known exclusively as the director of a couple of gross-out zombie movies. In fairness to the distributor... how do you sell that? It is, in essence, a wholly unique object, one that touched on a bunch of different categories but which delivered something different from what ticket buyers would expect from anything marketed along those lines. And it was almost two and a half hours long.

It was a deeply personal project for Romero, one in which he was clearly working through his own convictions and internal conflicts about his own chosen profession, filmmaking. As a filmmaker who had gutted out almost twenty years in the trenches of regional filmmaking making commercials, sponsored films, and TV documentaries alongside his mostly horror-ish features, he was fiercely committed to remaining independent and to working in his adopted home of Pittsburgh, developing relationships with cast and crew that he'd return to again and again. Knightriders is, clearly, an analogue for his own idealistic committment to a certain way of making films, one that emphasized community and collaboration, one that Romero contrasted with the glitz and glamor (and money!) of Hollywood. He was always an outsider, but Knightriders was his argument for that outsider status as an essential aspect of his filmmaking. 

His first cut of Knightriders ran 2 hours, 45 minutes. He screened it for his financier in his offices in Pittsburgh in early February, 1981. This was his preferred version, one that he tried to convince his financiers to release. The archive contains a VHS transfer of this "director's cut" on two tapes. 

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this cut is how little was changed for the theatrical release. Tasked with cutting the running time down considerably, Romero and editor Pasquale Buba removed twenty minutes primarily by trimming scenes: shortening or removing establishing shots, cutting out a line of dialogue here and there, and tightening up the jousting scenes as much as possible. That in itself tells us just how fervently Romero believed in that first version.

The most substantial loss from that original version comes early on, when the director's cut establishes more about the wider Renaissance Faire community: shots and brief scenes of vendors and other supporting characters, including a scene of Merlin - played by the amazing Brother Blue - performing a routine selling some kind of miracle snake oil to a skeptical crowd. Other scenes take us behind the scenes of the troupe, fleshing out some of the minor characters and exploring the dynamics within the community. But it's also clear that Romero and Buba retained as much of the film and as much of each of his characters as possible. A Hollywood editor could easily cut the film down to well under two hours just by removing some of the detours into exploring the lives of supporting characters and focusing on the primary narrative conflicts. But that's never been Romero's interest, especially here. In a film about the importance of communal, collaborative creation, the story cannot be extricated from each of the members of that community. Minimizing the role of any of them would go against the ideals professed by the film! 

-Adam Charles Hart