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Warner had been a big Nixon fan and campaign supporter, and the two had become friends over the years. (By this time in his career, Warner had retired as studio chief at Warner Bros. and had become an independent producer.) Also, when Warner was summoned before HUAC back in ‘47, he readily named a dozen screenwriters as Communists. (“Ideological termites,” he called them.) Finally, like the Nixon White House, Warner wanted cuts in “1776.”

Things went smoothly during filming, but it’s clear that Warner had problems with “Considerate Men” from the start. Hunt and Stone resisted the requests for cuts, and Warner initially backed down. Once the movie was finished shooting and was in post-production, director Hunt took his wife to Europe for a long-overdue honeymoon, confident that his film was safely on its way to the lab for printing; “1776” was Hunt’s first film, but it was Warner’s last, and he was about to give the novice helmer a doctoral degree in Hollywood politics.

According to Joe Caporiccio, producer of a 1990 laserdisc restoration of the film, editor Florence Williamson said that Warner told her he wanted “Cool, Cool, Considerate Men” cut out, claiming he had screened the film for the president, who asked that the number be excised.

When Hunt got back to the U.S. and found the number had been cut, he stormed into Warner’s office. “I asked him, ‘Jack, how could you do this?’ and he said, ‘With a pair of scissors.”’

Warner also told Hunt that he had ordered the negative of the cuts shredded, saying, “I don’t want history second-guessing me on this.” Meanwhile, editor Williamson showed less allegiance to Warner and more to film history by quietly putting all the negatives into storage, and there they remained until the Sony team working on the current restoration uncovered them.