Get Mean is as notable for its off‑screen squabble as for its oddball plot. Tony Anthony not only starred as his long‑running antihero “The Stranger” but produced the picture, putting up $50,000 of his own money and borrowing another $50,000 from director Ferdinando Baldi to get the film made in the spring of 1975 on location in Spain. When the movie reached theaters the American distributor (Cee Note) and later the U.K. outfit Ember Films issued a theatrical cut that was several minutes shorter — footage cut against Anthony’s explicit wishes. The trimming reportedly altered pacing and removed material Anthony regarded as essential to his reinvention of the character, a version he had conceived specifically to keep the tired Spaghetti Western formula fresh by throwing The Stranger into a bizarre, non‑Western setting (old Spain).
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1970s
Producer-Lead Tony Anthony Had His Version of Get Mean Truncated — A Battle over the 'Stranger' That Wasn’t Settled Until 2015
Get Mean (1975) / Tony Anthony / 1970s
Get Mean is as notable for its off‑screen squabble as for its oddball plot. Tony Anthony not only starred as his long‑running antihero “The Stranger” but produced the picture, putting up $50,000 of his own money and borrowing another $50,000 from director Ferdinando Baldi to get the film made in the spring of 1975 on location in Spain. When the movie reached theaters the American distributor (Cee Note) and later the U.K. outfit Ember Films issued a theatrical cut that was several minutes shorter — footage cut against Anthony’s explicit wishes. The trimming reportedly altered pacing and removed material Anthony regarded as essential to his reinvention of the character, a version he had conceived specifically to keep the tired Spaghetti Western formula fresh by throwing The Stranger into a bizarre, non‑Western setting (old Spain).
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