Why restore poor quality footage in the DC?

Well, it was really the director that wanted to make the director's cut, not the studio. I don't think they expected it to get the gay cult status it achieved.

I don't think this movie, even the Director's cut, is award worthy, though perhaps Mike Myers is worthy of an Oscar nod. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed the film. But it still could have been better. I feel like Shane's depression at Christmas time kind of came out of nowhere, and it could have been developed a little better. I think Shane's developing attraction to Greg could have been handled better because the kiss almost came out of nowhere. When Shane is watching Greg and Anita have sex, I could just have easily interpreted the scene as Shane feeling bad that Anita is taken by another guy. We get to see Anita through Shane's eyes, but we never really get to see Greg through Shane's eyes. Besides the occasional STD, the movie also never really explores the consequences of an unbridled hedonistic lifestyle. Overall, the movie is still basically fluff, a wet dream starring Ryan Phillippe, it doesn't really go into anything deep or heavy. The movie is not Cabaret, but it could have been.

Interestingly, back in the '70s, male bisexuality was a common theme in Oscar bait movies. Glenda Jackson starred in at least four movies where she played a woman sexually involved with a gay/bisexual man. The bisexual love triangle is so appropriate for 54.

Here's the sad truth of the situation... it was very common-place in the 1990s for studios to just throw out any unused footage from a movie, especially if it didn't do well, because - while you're right that they SHOULD have thought that through - they just didn't.

It's well documented, and this is far from the first time this has happened.

The same thing happened to Event Horizon: when that film had become a bit of a cult classic and Paramount wanted to do a special edition DVD, the director got clearance to assemble a director's cut... only to find that all the footage had been completely destroyed except for a couple scenes that were in terrible condition due to improper storage.

And Miramax did the same thing around the same time as 54 with Hellraiser: Bloodline. The theatrical version is a piece of garbage, but there's a much longer director's cut that was leaked as a bootleg workprint that was actually pretty decent - but again, that footage likely only survives as VHS. Miramax just blatantly didn't care.

So yes, it sucks that 54 only survives with some scenes from tape sources... but this is the best it will ever look. So we have to be thankful that it at least survived to this extent. Don't complain about the quality when it's legitimately a miracle that it even exists in ANY quality.

And as for the remastering question from earlier in the thread... what you're looking at in the director's cut IS the tape source (digibeta, not VHS - a bit higher quality) remastered and up-resed to HD. That's as good as it could possibly look, believe me - I've had to do the same thing for editorial work in the past. You can clean it up as much as possible, but at the end of the day, tape has a very distinct quality that it will always have.