Cats: The Butthole Cut gives a deep insight into the ills of Hollywood
"Cats" is one of the most fascinating cinema flops of recent years. Somewhere there is supposed to be a cut in which cats have anus. The search for the butthole cut reveals an insight into the terrible working conditions in Hollywood.
The cinema film "Cats" is one of the most fascinating films of recent years. Not because the Hollywood version of the musical penned by Andrew Lloyd Webber was so great, but because the film is so bad. Nothing about the film is okay.
Wild rumours are now swirling around the film. The most persistent one is that there was once a cut of the film in which the cats had anatomically correct genitals. In other words, every cat once had an anus. A visible anus. The legend of the "butthole cut" was born.
This is now a reality. At least for a few minutes. Because after the few minutes of "haha" are over, an abyss opens up in which the working conditions for Hollywood productions, the idiosyncrasies of a director and the invisibility of those who make your film in the first place are laid bare.
But first, the fun part.
The legend of the "Butthole Cut"
It's 18 March 2020 and comedian Jack Waz is talking about a friend on Twitter. He was working on the film "Cats" in Hollywood. His job was to make sure that the humanoid cats in the film did not have a visible anus.
He concludes: Somewhere out there must exist a cut of the film in which the creepy human-cat hybrids in the film have anatomically correct anuses.
The Butthole Cut.
It doesn't take long for #ButtholeCut and #ReleaseTheButtholeCut to trend on Twitter. While the media has been hot on the trail of the Cut, the 21 employees of XVP Studios in Chicago sat down and decided to make the world a better place.
Almost 900,000 viewers have watched this video.
The truth behind the arse
But have there ever been cats with anuses? Twitter being Twitter, there's always someone who knows someone who's had something to do with the topic du jour. Among them is film writer and special effects maker Ben Mekler, who earned his spurs with "G.I. Joe: Retaliation". He asked a colleague who apparently also worked on "Cats". The answer from his colleague:
There were never any pictures of cats with After. Or certainly not as a conscious design decision, not that I've seen them. But there were about a dozen shots where the cats' skin and fur was animated to actually look like pretty furry female genitalia and anus. Coincidence. The employees (as is usual with films that need a lot of CGI) fell to the 2D department, who had to fix things as soon as they were spotted. Daily meetings were then constantly strange discussions where people had to summon up all their courage and say: Does that look like a vagina?
Really funny.
The practice opens up a rather sinister look behind the scenes of Hollywood. Investigations by journalists dig up old tweets. After "Cats" was honoured at the Oscars in February by its own stars James Corden and Rebel Wilson were ridiculed, Yves McCrae has spoken out:
Hey guys, I didn't watch the whole Oscars, but I'm going to assume they were really classy and thanked me for the 80-hour weeks I put in until I got fired and the studio closed its doors.
Strangely, Yves McCrae's IMDB page doesn't list his involvement with "Cats". But IMDB is at least partly curated by users, so it's not necessarily complete.
But McCrae, involved or not, is not the only one to address working conditions on the film.
"Almost slavery" in Hollywood?
The magazine The Daily Beast talks to an animator on the film in the wake of the whole butthole cut thing. This one, or this one, talks about 90-hour weeks and sleeping under the office desk. All because director Tom Hooper doesn't understand the process of animation,
With computer-generated effects, individual sequences are rendered twice, i.e. calculated into a film by the computer. The first rendering process generates a so-called playblast, a raw version in which only movements and shapes are recognisable. Textures and colours are still completely missing in this version, as it takes a disproportionately long time for colours, light, textures and so on to be calculated by the computer. Playblasts are all about looking at a movement and, if necessary, improving it before the complex rendering process.
Tom Hooper, however, didn't understand this and always asked for fully rendered versions of his cats. If he did get to see a Playblast, he sent nasty emails to employees. Worse still: Tom Hooper often demanded that his CGI cats exactly imitate the movements of real cats. "And as we all know: Cats don't dance," the anonymous source tells The Daily Beast.
In the end, six months passed before the first trailer was completed. That left the animators only four months until the cinema version had to be finished. Because "Cats" was once due to compete in the race for the Oscars. The film was then only completed the day before the premiere.
"It was almost slavery for us. So much work, so little time and everything was complicated," the source tells The Daily Beast, "We were so pressed for time that we didn't have time for anything. So when people say 'Oh, the effects weren't good' or 'The animations aren't good' or anything like that, it's not the animators' fault. We don't have time. Six months for a two-minute trailer and four months for a full 90-minute film. I'm good at maths... and anyone can see that doesn't make sense."
So, that's it. I've run out of synonyms. Hence: cat arsehole. Just so that it's said.
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.
