Be sure to rent it (if possible, European edition, American was considerably watered down).

Well, even the ones you rent are the European editions. The "American" edition you refer to was a re-edit (not by Terry) for broadcast television that had a "happy" ending. That one is actually pretty hard to find (thank goodness).

The best way to see it is via the Criterion Collection DVD release. It's a 3-disc set, and it includes both Terry's original edit, and the broadcast television edit that Terry had nothing to do with.

The hero is a small wheel in some kind of cross botween Kafka's Process, Orwell's 1984 and a satire on contemporary bureaucracy. Due to computer error he becomes prosecuted, and is helped by a guerilla plumber...

... played in a cameo role by Robert DeNiro: "Remember, we're all in this together."

Actually, to clarify, the hero is a clerk who discovers the error after the victim of the error is already dead. It turns out that the very person they were trying to prosecute is the guerilla plumber. The error comes up because of a typo: the last name "Buttle" gets swapped for "Tuttle", and a man loses his life because of it. I have a co-worker named Tuttle who's never seen the film, and has been queried by more than one Gilliam fan about it.

There's a neat commentary track by Gilliam on the Criterion DVD. He describes how he originally wanted that "typo" at the beginning of the film to come about. His vision was to have a huge special effects shot of a tiny beetle in the Brazilian rain forest. The beetle is disturbed by these huge machines which gobble up the trees. The camera follows the beetle into the air, while it flies by the factory which processes the trees into paper. Then it follows the paper to where it's turned into a printed newspaper. Then the newspaper is delivered to the office where the teletype machine is running. The beetle flies into the office, where a man kills it with the newspaper, it falls into the teletype machine, and the typo is generated. Only the very last part actually made it into production (they didn't have the budget for that special effects shot).

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Tony Fabris