In the mid-1990s, a pre-release version—director Hawks's original cut—was found in the UCLA Film and Television Archive. That version had been released to the military to play to troops in the South Pacific. Benefactors, led by American magazine publisher Hugh Hefner, raised the money to pay for its restoration and the original version of "The Big Sleep" was released in art-house cinemas in 1997 for a short exhibition run, along with a comparative documentary about the cinematic and content differences between Hawks's film noir and the Warner Brothers "movie star" version.