A slightly shorter version of William Friedkin's 1971 classic is now the only version available to stream in the United States. The cut changes the film at a fundamental level.
Unfortunately, it has to *be* available on physical media first - the merger probably means the Fox archive is off-limits for who knows how long. (For example, here in the UK, Indicator have had to delete their Fox titles, and cancel the upcoming standard release of another, with seemingly little notice.) And if and when they do licence titles out again, this might be the only cut they offer.
Yeah, after I posted that, someone else linked the Glen Kenny article addressing this same issue of the cut, and Kenny pointed to the 2011 Blu Ray release that is going for $150 on Ebay right now (!). That's admittedly hard to justify for a great movie that I don't need to rewatch that many times. It sucks, but it indicates that apparently these days we need foresight to know which titles will be chopped and butchered in the future.
Ironically the Blu-Ray transfer for this is color graded completely differently (it's bluer or cooler looking) and Friedkin said he was trying to adjust the visual tone and whiffed it.
Huh. I just watched this film on the Criterion Channel for the first time, basically not aware of Friedkin's work besides the Exorcist. It did indeed seem like a vaguely racist film to me, with the ending's sudden bleakness and social commentary coming as a complete surprise that didn't totally work. Not to say I didn't enjoy it, I just took it mostly as an extremely taut thriller outside of the ending.
Would I have felt differently with the excised footage present? I don't know... I think I would have just thought the movie was more racist. With the additional context you've presented I can see what Friedkin was going for but I'm so used to cop narratives before 2020 being all about that thin blue line. Any time a film follows a "bad cop" protagonist I assume the creators intend him to be sympathetic and in the right unless he's literally shown snorting and distributing cocaine.
I would levy that it is extremely uncharitable, and even blinkered, to imagine that you the viewer are aware of the ills of the US police state while no other filmmaker creating something about police is aware of the same. It takes a certain amount of superiority and ignorance of history to think many people 10, 20, 50 years ago weren’t having similar conversations about police violence and racism, and I think that’s worth investigating in yourself.
Uh, that's not what I said. I'm very aware of the fallacy of thinking that people were "just racist" in the past and that there wasn't outrage to racist entertainment.
But there are SO MANY cop narratives that ask us to side with racist cops that I naively assumed this was one of them as well.
"Any time a film follows a "bad cop" protagonist I assume the creators intend him to be sympathetic and in the right unless he's literally shown snorting and distributing cocaine."
I'm having trouble what this means otherwise, but alright.
You get to decide if you “side” with any character in any film. The film’s putative endorsement of its characters is a separate issue and a second, discrete moment when a film opens itself up to your judgment. Popeye Doyle is a thug and a bigot, and when it comes time to decide what you as a viewer make of him, well, it’s all on the screen. Or, at least, it used to be.
Oh yeah I've heard that one's awesome, I'll definitely be watching it in the near future. New Hollywood is quickly becoming my favourite era of American filmmaking!
I’ve been reading unconfirmed but persuasive chatter that he’s not in good health. If this happened a year ago, I have to believe Friedkin would be outside Disney HQ with a flamethrower. o
Is (presumably) Disney going through the whole Fox catalog and making cuts like this? Have any other examples been spotted? I’d like to see an investigative piece about it all.
The kind of people who made that cut are the reason why Substack flourished. I would posit that not many critics would’ve dared to write this piece from 2017 to 2021. “You just want to hear the N-word” is much quieter and more easily dismissed now than it was a few years ago.
Maybe nuance will make it all the way back, and we’ll start seeing French Connection levels of artistry again. Everyone in your art (or your politics, for that matter) isn’t supposed to be a Hero or a Villain. Humans haven’t generally been built that way.
Well, I would say he co-opts the ballast rather than it is given to him. Because his thing is sort of reverse-engineering a contrarian screed against whatever he'd like to shoehorn his opinions into. Making targeted assumptions that these changes are a result of "too-PC Police" from "The Left" while ignoring that Disney*, a major global corporation, is the likely guilty party, just bolsters the notion that he is a fraud peddler of the first order.
*and no, Disney is not "liberal" just because Ron DeSantis picked a fight with them
I love this piece, Keith, I really do. But it's worth pointing out that the same attitude that presumably motivated Disney is the one that makes you feel you can't even write the word in quotation marks. Because somewhere along the line we decided that the word was so heinous it couldn't even be referenced, let alone used. If Disney feels it, so do you.
*Note that if anyone is attempting to accuse me of hypocrisy because I didn't write it out either, I just kind of assumed my post would be auto-blocked if I did
Not sure why that's relevant - the same crazy world which tells Keith that he can't even write out a word in quotation marks is the one that convinced Disney (or whoever) to be censorious
If we were getting an article about how the only version of Bad Lieutenant you can get streaming is the one that censors out, amongst other things, sad, sobbing, full-frontal Harvey Keitel*, I would not expect it to include images of the scene - or if it did, I'd expect his genitals to be either cropped out or at least blurred. And while I guess doing so, technically, contributes to the world where that is the only version you can get streaming (as much as the rest of the article pushes back against that being the only streaming version available, even more forcefully), somehow I wouldn't describe the world as crazy or mad, for not having a screencap of Harvey Keitel's flaccid cock in such a context.
*: And for the record, it is the only version you can get streaming.
That’s fair, but I wouldn’t object in the slightest if thats what the Reveal boys wanted to serve up. Maybe we aren’t all adults, who’s to say, but if you’ve found this space you’re mature enough to handle it.
I didn’t know the Blockbuster version was the only one streaming--that’s actually another argument in favor of more liberal standards of speech. It’s a shame that we don’t have access to Ferrera’s vision in its fullest scope because 30 years ago Wayne Huizenga thought that penises are too sinful to contemplate.
In my high school days of Blockbuster Blue I once advised a customer who was trying to rent Bad Lieutenant to go down the street and get the real version from the mom n pop. I can’t imagine that came across as normal, but I stand by it.
100%. Keith’s piece is wonderful, as his pieces absolutely always are, and I generally and enthusiastically support proscriptions against white people using that word. I’m a progressive that moves in progressive circles, but assuming what happened to TFC was deliberate bowdlerization, it’s indicative of a troubling swing towards illiberalism among my cohort finding purchase in the greater culture. I have no idea what to do about it because there doesn’t seem to be a third position between outright censor and “white guy who needs to use the n word” that’s recognized as valid. Things like this look, at least to me, as a win for the corrosive forces of piracy, which is now what you have to participate in if you want to watch one of the greatest films ever made, and anti-woke crusaders, who now have one more damn thing to sneer at.
Also, is this not the most Substacky thing that’s happened on The Reveal to date??
It's the most Substacky thing for now. But I leave for France for 10 days tonight and I'm sure that will change when special guest Revealer Matthew Yglesias starts writing about movies in my stead. (This is not going to happen. I banked some stuff.)
OMG, I just looked up where TCW lives out of curiosity and it's the 10th arrondissement, which happens to be where our hotel is located. I will definitely say "hi" if I see him!
I don't think this is uniquely a streaming issue. Distributors, as they swell and acquire and fire essential staff, very quickly stop caring about maintenance. It's nice to think this is a malicious plot about rewriting history but even worse it's the fact we're losing history due to shitty version control maintenance at a server farm somewhere in Burbank.
from Criterion: "This is the only version that has ever been available to us for streaming."
I simply do not believe this is accurate. I streamed this in Feb 2021 on Criterion (Thanks, letterboxed!), and I 100% believe this scene was intact. It's pretty blatant.
Meant to write this earlier but this is very common. MGM kept the French version of Swamp Thing in streaming circulation for almost six years (all credits, on screen signs, etc. were in French with English language track) across Netflix, Prime and Hulu. It only got updated once the licenses ran out and they put up the latest version from a DVD transfer.
edit: so yes, the version you saw from 2/2021 could've been the normal file. This seems like it was either a TV edit or, like Hulu does now, an "All Ages" edit so it could be shown if some user profile is set to all ages.
My first thought was, Would a disclaimer at the start or on the menu screen not suffice? But then, is this cut not so different from the BBFC still refusing to pass animal torture, for example, which I don't have an issue with (the censorship, not the torture)? Does a disclaimer not put racism on the same level as, say, strobe lighting? Keith writes insightfully of the impact this cut has throughout the film, but truthfully how many viewers (many of whom probably watching it for the first time in a long time, if not ever) are going to be thinking that deeply about it? Does it make it any less of a terrific 70s cop thriller? If art should reflect the intent of the artist, should Friedkin have a say in the matter? And how seriously should we take that, given all the shit he pulled on The Exorcist? (Or on this one? Is a fictional character using a racial slur more or less dangerous than actual people nearly killing actual people when filming the car/train chase?)
I think exposing a viewer to a fictional bigot is actually about the same as exposing them to strobe lighting, which is to say it has the potential to do very real harm to a significant percentage of people, they deserve to be warned beforehand, and we should be able to leave it at that.
We deserve to think as deeply as we want about whatever interests us. Here, we care about movies, and I could not give less of a crap what people who don’t notice or wouldn’t care think about TFC. I think it’s inarguable that this change damages the movie. It’s the one and only instance where Doyle’s racism can be unambiguously pinned to his slime-slicked ass.
It's really stunning how we've gotten here -- and which such radio silence on the who and why that makes this so mysterious and chilling. The fact that Gene Hackman was so deeply uncomfortable playing Popeye Doyle because he was being asked to say these racist things ... and that director William Friedkin had to cajole him to play this part that he ultimately won a Best Actor Oscar for is stunning. It would have been so much easier to cut these lines out decades ago to make this part more palatable for Hackman. But these lines were important elements of this complicated, deeply flawed character -- who, of course, was based on a real NYPD detective (who Hackman was also repelled by after spending time with him). I thought it was odd that Friedkin was quiet on this matter so far -- since he's typically not shy about sharing his ...feedback. His Twitter posts have been nearly nonexistent lately, but I came across this: https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/friedkin-probably-did-it-but-inferring-this-would-be-impolite/
Great piece. Have seen it twice on different streaming platforms (though it’s been a while) and, man, did all the social commentary completely fly under the radar for me, even with (iirc) the slur included in the cuts I saw. I kind of just chalked up his character to New Hollywood anti-heroism, but the social ramifications of Popeye’s actions really adds a new layer to his eventual downfall... at least for this flick, as I haven’t seen the sequel...
It was interesting to see how quick people were to assert that Criterion itself made that edit, when it was first noticed. Assuming Disney did it makes a little more sense, given their reputation, but again folks want to assign blame before figuring out what's actually going on.
I’d be greatly relieved if this was just archival mismanagement on the part of a corporate monolith that doesn’t give a shit about the precious acre of our cultural commons that it has plopped itself down on. Darkest timeline, indeed.
This is very “plate of shrimp” to me bc the night before the news was on twitter I had watched “The Italian Connection” on Criterion and at one point when a lady is talking about liking the black gangster more than the white one the subtitles use the n word and I was shocked bc it was like “why use that word?” and I spent 15 minutes ignoring the movie thinking about it
This is where I get to brag that the one time I saw TFC, it was at the Chinese Theatre during the TCM Classic Film Festival, with Friedkin doing a Q&A afterward (moderated by Alec Baldwin, lol). Great movie, but my friends and I were a bit perturbed by the racism (especially since the other screening we had caught that day was MALCOLM X). Still, pretty shitty for Disney to do this.
It’s funny that we find that word marks him as a worse person than the fact that he violates people physically. Remember when the original moral majority thought sex and bad words were worse than violence, and we laughed and laughed?
The article isn't saying that a racial slur is worse than violence, that's a pretty bad reading of intent here, and some real Twitter-style postulating.
TBC, the point here is that this scene underscores for us that the guy is not only a shitbag, he's a racist shitbag. He's not 100% evil but he sucks in a lot of ways and the way he sees the world is fundamentally wrong.
Advantage: Real-medium pack rat. Long live old DVDs and their brethren...
THIS is why buy physical media, or at least one of the primary reasons to...
Unfortunately, it has to *be* available on physical media first - the merger probably means the Fox archive is off-limits for who knows how long. (For example, here in the UK, Indicator have had to delete their Fox titles, and cancel the upcoming standard release of another, with seemingly little notice.) And if and when they do licence titles out again, this might be the only cut they offer.
Yeah, after I posted that, someone else linked the Glen Kenny article addressing this same issue of the cut, and Kenny pointed to the 2011 Blu Ray release that is going for $150 on Ebay right now (!). That's admittedly hard to justify for a great movie that I don't need to rewatch that many times. It sucks, but it indicates that apparently these days we need foresight to know which titles will be chopped and butchered in the future.
Ironically the Blu-Ray transfer for this is color graded completely differently (it's bluer or cooler looking) and Friedkin said he was trying to adjust the visual tone and whiffed it.
Huh. I just watched this film on the Criterion Channel for the first time, basically not aware of Friedkin's work besides the Exorcist. It did indeed seem like a vaguely racist film to me, with the ending's sudden bleakness and social commentary coming as a complete surprise that didn't totally work. Not to say I didn't enjoy it, I just took it mostly as an extremely taut thriller outside of the ending.
Would I have felt differently with the excised footage present? I don't know... I think I would have just thought the movie was more racist. With the additional context you've presented I can see what Friedkin was going for but I'm so used to cop narratives before 2020 being all about that thin blue line. Any time a film follows a "bad cop" protagonist I assume the creators intend him to be sympathetic and in the right unless he's literally shown snorting and distributing cocaine.
I would levy that it is extremely uncharitable, and even blinkered, to imagine that you the viewer are aware of the ills of the US police state while no other filmmaker creating something about police is aware of the same. It takes a certain amount of superiority and ignorance of history to think many people 10, 20, 50 years ago weren’t having similar conversations about police violence and racism, and I think that’s worth investigating in yourself.
Uh, that's not what I said. I'm very aware of the fallacy of thinking that people were "just racist" in the past and that there wasn't outrage to racist entertainment.
But there are SO MANY cop narratives that ask us to side with racist cops that I naively assumed this was one of them as well.
"Any time a film follows a "bad cop" protagonist I assume the creators intend him to be sympathetic and in the right unless he's literally shown snorting and distributing cocaine."
I'm having trouble what this means otherwise, but alright.
You get to decide if you “side” with any character in any film. The film’s putative endorsement of its characters is a separate issue and a second, discrete moment when a film opens itself up to your judgment. Popeye Doyle is a thug and a bigot, and when it comes time to decide what you as a viewer make of him, well, it’s all on the screen. Or, at least, it used to be.
If you're just discovering Friedkin, try to seek out Sorcerer. You're in for a treat as only the 70s can deliver
Oh yeah I've heard that one's awesome, I'll definitely be watching it in the near future. New Hollywood is quickly becoming my favourite era of American filmmaking!
Right on! It's fantastic. And oh yeah the 1970s is amazing. Just look at the Best Picture winners. A better run America may never have had
I like Sorceror even more than The French Connection, and I think TFC is one of the greatest movies ever made. You’re in for a treat.
Surprised that Friedkin hasn’t weighed in on this yet.
I’ve been reading unconfirmed but persuasive chatter that he’s not in good health. If this happened a year ago, I have to believe Friedkin would be outside Disney HQ with a flamethrower. o
Is (presumably) Disney going through the whole Fox catalog and making cuts like this? Have any other examples been spotted? I’d like to see an investigative piece about it all.
The kind of people who made that cut are the reason why Substack flourished. I would posit that not many critics would’ve dared to write this piece from 2017 to 2021. “You just want to hear the N-word” is much quieter and more easily dismissed now than it was a few years ago.
Maybe nuance will make it all the way back, and we’ll start seeing French Connection levels of artistry again. Everyone in your art (or your politics, for that matter) isn’t supposed to be a Hero or a Villain. Humans haven’t generally been built that way.
Anytime I see the name "Thomas Chatterton Williams", I know to steer clear.
That’s fair, but this is the sort of situation that adds enormous ballast to his position.
Well, I would say he co-opts the ballast rather than it is given to him. Because his thing is sort of reverse-engineering a contrarian screed against whatever he'd like to shoehorn his opinions into. Making targeted assumptions that these changes are a result of "too-PC Police" from "The Left" while ignoring that Disney*, a major global corporation, is the likely guilty party, just bolsters the notion that he is a fraud peddler of the first order.
*and no, Disney is not "liberal" just because Ron DeSantis picked a fight with them
I love this piece, Keith, I really do. But it's worth pointing out that the same attitude that presumably motivated Disney is the one that makes you feel you can't even write the word in quotation marks. Because somewhere along the line we decided that the word was so heinous it couldn't even be referenced, let alone used. If Disney feels it, so do you.
*Note that if anyone is attempting to accuse me of hypocrisy because I didn't write it out either, I just kind of assumed my post would be auto-blocked if I did
we're not reading a Keith piece from the early 70s. he's writing it today.
Not sure why that's relevant - the same crazy world which tells Keith that he can't even write out a word in quotation marks is the one that convinced Disney (or whoever) to be censorious
If we were getting an article about how the only version of Bad Lieutenant you can get streaming is the one that censors out, amongst other things, sad, sobbing, full-frontal Harvey Keitel*, I would not expect it to include images of the scene - or if it did, I'd expect his genitals to be either cropped out or at least blurred. And while I guess doing so, technically, contributes to the world where that is the only version you can get streaming (as much as the rest of the article pushes back against that being the only streaming version available, even more forcefully), somehow I wouldn't describe the world as crazy or mad, for not having a screencap of Harvey Keitel's flaccid cock in such a context.
*: And for the record, it is the only version you can get streaming.
That’s fair, but I wouldn’t object in the slightest if thats what the Reveal boys wanted to serve up. Maybe we aren’t all adults, who’s to say, but if you’ve found this space you’re mature enough to handle it.
I didn’t know the Blockbuster version was the only one streaming--that’s actually another argument in favor of more liberal standards of speech. It’s a shame that we don’t have access to Ferrera’s vision in its fullest scope because 30 years ago Wayne Huizenga thought that penises are too sinful to contemplate.
In my high school days of Blockbuster Blue I once advised a customer who was trying to rent Bad Lieutenant to go down the street and get the real version from the mom n pop. I can’t imagine that came across as normal, but I stand by it.
I demand all articles, regardless of subject, feature Harvey Keitel's flaccid cock.
I came to make the Sam demand, but it would also be ok if every once in a while Harvey showed up looking ready to perform as a duellist.
Great idea, if it doesn’t get traction here maybe Nathan Rabin will go for it.
100%. Keith’s piece is wonderful, as his pieces absolutely always are, and I generally and enthusiastically support proscriptions against white people using that word. I’m a progressive that moves in progressive circles, but assuming what happened to TFC was deliberate bowdlerization, it’s indicative of a troubling swing towards illiberalism among my cohort finding purchase in the greater culture. I have no idea what to do about it because there doesn’t seem to be a third position between outright censor and “white guy who needs to use the n word” that’s recognized as valid. Things like this look, at least to me, as a win for the corrosive forces of piracy, which is now what you have to participate in if you want to watch one of the greatest films ever made, and anti-woke crusaders, who now have one more damn thing to sneer at.
Also, is this not the most Substacky thing that’s happened on The Reveal to date??
It's the most Substacky thing for now. But I leave for France for 10 days tonight and I'm sure that will change when special guest Revealer Matthew Yglesias starts writing about movies in my stead. (This is not going to happen. I banked some stuff.)
LOL. Say hi to Thomas Chatteron Williams while you’re in France!
OMG, I just looked up where TCW lives out of curiosity and it's the 10th arrondissement, which happens to be where our hotel is located. I will definitely say "hi" if I see him!
Looking forward to pieces on how we should turn movie theaters into apartments
Heh, I'm writing this from the 5th arrondissement right now. Have a great time
Glenn Kenny kind of got an answer to the "why" of this: https://decider.com/2023/06/20/who-censored-the-french-connection/amp/
I don't think this is uniquely a streaming issue. Distributors, as they swell and acquire and fire essential staff, very quickly stop caring about maintenance. It's nice to think this is a malicious plot about rewriting history but even worse it's the fact we're losing history due to shitty version control maintenance at a server farm somewhere in Burbank.
“Disney is evil. Disney is only interested in corrupting the innocence of your children.”
by..... removing offensive language from award-winning films
from Criterion: "This is the only version that has ever been available to us for streaming."
I simply do not believe this is accurate. I streamed this in Feb 2021 on Criterion (Thanks, letterboxed!), and I 100% believe this scene was intact. It's pretty blatant.
Meant to write this earlier but this is very common. MGM kept the French version of Swamp Thing in streaming circulation for almost six years (all credits, on screen signs, etc. were in French with English language track) across Netflix, Prime and Hulu. It only got updated once the licenses ran out and they put up the latest version from a DVD transfer.
edit: so yes, the version you saw from 2/2021 could've been the normal file. This seems like it was either a TV edit or, like Hulu does now, an "All Ages" edit so it could be shown if some user profile is set to all ages.
My first thought was, Would a disclaimer at the start or on the menu screen not suffice? But then, is this cut not so different from the BBFC still refusing to pass animal torture, for example, which I don't have an issue with (the censorship, not the torture)? Does a disclaimer not put racism on the same level as, say, strobe lighting? Keith writes insightfully of the impact this cut has throughout the film, but truthfully how many viewers (many of whom probably watching it for the first time in a long time, if not ever) are going to be thinking that deeply about it? Does it make it any less of a terrific 70s cop thriller? If art should reflect the intent of the artist, should Friedkin have a say in the matter? And how seriously should we take that, given all the shit he pulled on The Exorcist? (Or on this one? Is a fictional character using a racial slur more or less dangerous than actual people nearly killing actual people when filming the car/train chase?)
I think exposing a viewer to a fictional bigot is actually about the same as exposing them to strobe lighting, which is to say it has the potential to do very real harm to a significant percentage of people, they deserve to be warned beforehand, and we should be able to leave it at that.
We deserve to think as deeply as we want about whatever interests us. Here, we care about movies, and I could not give less of a crap what people who don’t notice or wouldn’t care think about TFC. I think it’s inarguable that this change damages the movie. It’s the one and only instance where Doyle’s racism can be unambiguously pinned to his slime-slicked ass.
It's really stunning how we've gotten here -- and which such radio silence on the who and why that makes this so mysterious and chilling. The fact that Gene Hackman was so deeply uncomfortable playing Popeye Doyle because he was being asked to say these racist things ... and that director William Friedkin had to cajole him to play this part that he ultimately won a Best Actor Oscar for is stunning. It would have been so much easier to cut these lines out decades ago to make this part more palatable for Hackman. But these lines were important elements of this complicated, deeply flawed character -- who, of course, was based on a real NYPD detective (who Hackman was also repelled by after spending time with him). I thought it was odd that Friedkin was quiet on this matter so far -- since he's typically not shy about sharing his ...feedback. His Twitter posts have been nearly nonexistent lately, but I came across this: https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/friedkin-probably-did-it-but-inferring-this-would-be-impolite/
Great piece. Have seen it twice on different streaming platforms (though it’s been a while) and, man, did all the social commentary completely fly under the radar for me, even with (iirc) the slur included in the cuts I saw. I kind of just chalked up his character to New Hollywood anti-heroism, but the social ramifications of Popeye’s actions really adds a new layer to his eventual downfall... at least for this flick, as I haven’t seen the sequel...
It was interesting to see how quick people were to assert that Criterion itself made that edit, when it was first noticed. Assuming Disney did it makes a little more sense, given their reputation, but again folks want to assign blame before figuring out what's actually going on.
I’d be greatly relieved if this was just archival mismanagement on the part of a corporate monolith that doesn’t give a shit about the precious acre of our cultural commons that it has plopped itself down on. Darkest timeline, indeed.
This is very “plate of shrimp” to me bc the night before the news was on twitter I had watched “The Italian Connection” on Criterion and at one point when a lady is talking about liking the black gangster more than the white one the subtitles use the n word and I was shocked bc it was like “why use that word?” and I spent 15 minutes ignoring the movie thinking about it
See also: KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS, in which someone uses it in a nursery rhyme near the end. Great movie, but that was pretty jarring
This is where I get to brag that the one time I saw TFC, it was at the Chinese Theatre during the TCM Classic Film Festival, with Friedkin doing a Q&A afterward (moderated by Alec Baldwin, lol). Great movie, but my friends and I were a bit perturbed by the racism (especially since the other screening we had caught that day was MALCOLM X). Still, pretty shitty for Disney to do this.
It’s funny that we find that word marks him as a worse person than the fact that he violates people physically. Remember when the original moral majority thought sex and bad words were worse than violence, and we laughed and laughed?
The article isn't saying that a racial slur is worse than violence, that's a pretty bad reading of intent here, and some real Twitter-style postulating.
TBC, the point here is that this scene underscores for us that the guy is not only a shitbag, he's a racist shitbag. He's not 100% evil but he sucks in a lot of ways and the way he sees the world is fundamentally wrong.
This is a hell of a thoughtful piece - thanks Keith.