Countdown - Long Cuts

FYC: "Countdown - Long Cuts" - Thought long lost, this is the director's cut of one of Robert Altman's earliest films, a ponderous cold-war sci-fi about the race for the moon released a year before the first actual lunar landing. This version primarily restores three hours of extra footage of sixty people talking over each other at Houston mission control and an insipid jazz soundtrack, and also has Altman's secretly filmed alternate ending in which James Caan's lead character uses up all his three hours of oxygen terminally playing the sax on the moon.