Movies with long-buried alternate or extended cuts

Night of Dark Shadows

Dan Curtis had created a 129-minute cut but apparently MGM felt it was too long so they forced him to edit out 35 minutes overnight. Many fans feel these edirs turned the movie into a jumbled, incoherent mess. Much of the cut footage was found, but unfortunately it was without sound. Word is that most of the original cast was able to dub in the missing audio, but they could not find anyone whose voice sounds like Grayson Hall. As of today, Dan Curtis's original version is still yet to be seen.

*edits

Well, the most famous (infamous?) example is Erich von Stroheim's "Greed." Originally eight hours long, but before it was released MGM bought the studio and Thalberg cut it down to 2.5 hours. More about it is at the link below. There are all sorts of rumors as to what the missing footage contained (including the filming of an actal orgy).

Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" was to suffer a similar fate but Gilliam showed his version to influential L.A. critics who then "shamed" the studio to release the original version. One of the most egregious cuts was the final scene which completely changed the ending of the movie.

And then there's Heaven's Gate, which destroyed a studio.

I actually saw the original “Heaven’s Gate” during its only 6-day run in Manhattan. .(It had received such negative press that United Artists pulled it, so as not to qualify for the Oscars, in hopes it could be re-edited.)

It wasn’t bad, but it was very long, and seemed to be a lot of fuss over not very much. Though it was fun to see a hunky, young Jeff Bridges on roller skates.

TCM has shown an extended cut of “Greed,” using rediscovered photos from cut scenes.

Though cut footage from “The Magnificent Ambersons” has never been found, the version on Criterion had a supplement, with photos, of deleted sequences.

Ridley Scott showed a “Director’s Cut” of his “Kingdom of Heaven,” which I actually drove to L.A. to see, About 30 mins. longer, it was much better, and more coherent, and was later released on video.

The 1937 “Lost Horizon” continues to undergo restoration, including the recent addition of 1 min. of previously lost footage to the Blu-Ray release.

The 1963 “Cleopatra” is still unrestored to its reported original some 6-hour length, which I would love to see.

Likewise, despite a report some years ago that some 30 mins. of deleted scenes were found from the 1964 “Fall of the Roman Empire,” there has been enough contention a out that to reduce it to the status of rumor only.

And, of course, Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” has been restored to several lengths, most recently to pretty much its original running time of about 2 1/2 hrs., after a 16 mm print of the original version was found in , of all places, Buenos Aires.

And it’s available on video.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks was famously cut, but the original footage that was restored stills pales in comparison to the final edit so much so that the restored footage was taken out of the Blu-Ray edition.

Death Becomes Her had entire scenes cut but still exist in the trailer.

Leelee Sobieski classic "The Glass House" originally ran for 3 hours and was then cut down to 105 minutes. Kip Pardue was originally in the film too but all of his scenes were left out in the end.

There used to be several cuts of Scott's True Romance online. One was a cut with an alternative ending. One was a complete recut of Tarantino's script in chronological order, which I actually preferred to Tarantino's/Scott's non-linear original.

There are so many different cuts, Directors cuts and extended cuts of Blade Runner that have popped up over the years that I no longer remember what the original was like.

The Blair Witch Project. They reportedly filmed about 20 hours worth of footage, which they were able to trim to just 2.5 hours. The 2 and a half hour version was screened at Sundance, but was later trimmed even more to the 81 minute version we all know now.

I've got a 4.5 hour version of Greed, and it is actually pretty great. ZaSu Pitts in her best role, and use of colorization in a B & W film very early.

Wow, I've never heard there extended cuts of The Glass House or The Blair Witch Project; it's been years since I've seen the former, which I remember being a bit campy. I'd love to see a 2.5 hour cut of The Blair Witch Project though.

Speaking of The Blair Witch Project, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 was supposed to be very different than what we got. The studio and director Joe Berlinger didn't see eye to eye, and they forced him to change certain elements to make it more of a traditional horror movie (including flashes of violent murder inserted at various moments throughout the film). To this day, his original cut has never been seen and most people despise the theatrical version.

Lucille Ball had fifteen more solos in Mame.

I saw the almost 3-hour uncut Pia Zadora classic, Butterfly, which was only screened for a week in Montreal and Paris in 1982. This masterpiece included long flashbacks staring a cold, pulpy and desperate Catherine Deneuve and the young beautiful Liu Xiaoqing, often speaking French and Mandarine respectively, and effectively counterbalancing Orson Welles riveting yet hambone performance. Both parts were entirely cut from the American release, upon the insistence of Pia Zadora, whose husband had produced the movie. Apparently a print had been sent to Monte Carlo for the private viewing of Princess Grace and family, however the Princess died and the print was never projected and forgotten in the commotion of that tragic even. It is rumoured it survives in the Grimaldi family vault.

Terrence Malick owns his thread. All of his films run absurdly long in their infancy, until subject to the man’s own ruthless edit after which entire performances and plots succumb to the cutting room floor.

My favorite of his films THE THIN RED LINE originally ran to five hours after the first edit by editors Leslie Jones & Billy Weber, a process that took several months of twelve-hour working days (bear in mind it took Malick just five months to adapt Jones’ book to a script). Jones once remarked in an interview that, “the final film [varies] greatly from the original concept”. The achingly beautiful deleted scenes (about 20-30 minutes worth, to date) are all that remains to show us what could have been...

After that initial edit Malick himself undertook the main cuts, removing most of the dialogue and several action sequences (that were expensive and time-consuming to shoot) as well as half the characters. He did all this reel-by-reel with the sound off, while listening to Green Day CDs. Director of Photography John Toll saw this rough-cut as did Jones & Weber, but it is unknown whether anyone else saw this version. Malick then enlisted the help of Sean Penn to finish it, refusing producer’s wishes to to test-screen this final product after they showed an unfinished cut (not sure which one?) to critics, allegedly without Malick’s knowledge or express permission.

The first & second cut notoriously starred Adrien Brody as the lead; by the time of theater release he was playing an extra with two lines in an ensemble picture. He wasn’t alone, as by the final cut all footage of performances by Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Sheen, Gary Oldman, Bill Pullman, Lukas Haas, Jason Patric, Viggo Mortensen & Mickey Rourke had been removed (with half of these actors having agreed to work for little-to-no pay on account of the project’s prestige). Thornton even recorded a three-hour narration that was also completely scrapped. If you read the end credits you will notice Sheen & Mortensen, who led pre-production readthroughs of the script, are personally thanked. Conversely John Travolta and George Clooney's appearances in the final picture are little more than one-scene cameos, yet Clooney's name & image appeared prominently in the marketing (apparently because of an agreement made between the studio & Malick that he cast five big-name stars from a list of ten interested).

I also find it hilarious that Malick barred producers & execs from 20th Century Fox from visiting the set, thanks to a clause in his contract that gave him authority so to do from the studio. I admire the clout he garnered to do that.

^^20th C. Fox blocked the clip I posted, because of course they did.

Here’s ten minutes of deleted scenes brought to you by a Dailymotion user who ripped it from the DVD extras. If nothing else watch the soul-ripping couple of minutes in the middle, where Nick Stahl’s teenaged soldier character tries to cope with his first solo hand-to-hand combat kill. Why this beautiful sequence was scrapped is less obvious compared to the others.

When I saw New York, New York (Scorsese - De Niro - Minnelli) originally, it ran 4 hours. Went with a girl and her parents when I was maybe 17. It seemed endless. There were long, pointless, improvised scenes. But there were some numbers in it by Liza that I've never seen again. Maybe there's a DVD with these scenes, idk, I'm a film fan but not an expert on director's cuts and that stuff. They gave away or sold programs with this original release (like they did with old movies at Radio City) and I have one.

A Star Is Born (1954) was of course famously cut by almost half an hour soon after its release, then restored (as much as possible, with actual cut scenes, alternate footage and stills, ) in the 1980s. Ronald Haver who was behind the search for missing footage and the restoration wrote a great book about it all.

I read a 1950s review recently of the original release. The reviewer mentioned that after Judy gets sick and throws up (off camera) before her film debut/premiere, when she gets back in the car, "brother, you can tell she's been sick." None of that is in the restoration because there's only a long shot and still from an earlier scene that have been inserted. There's also a scene on the rooftop of a Bunker Hill (LA) boarding house that goes on a few minutes; the audio exists (and includes some supporting players not seen in the current film), but the scene wasn't restored to the film because there are no visuals to match it. People who saw the film before it was cut say this scene has panoramic views of 1950s LA.

So there is still a lot that still could be restored/unearthed. There are always rumors that a full version of the film exists and people have seen it.

Among many other things they do wrong, Disney should be forcibly dissolved for taking [italic]Bedknobs and Broomsticks[/italic] apart after all it took to put it back together. You can still find the 139-minute restored cut, assembled in 1996 for the film’s 25th anniversary, on DVD, but not Blu-Ray or Disney+ which only has the inferior and obviously edited short version only because it came out first.

How ironic that both versions of [italic]Lost Horizon[/italic] got cut by Columbia.

[quote]How ironic that both versions of Lost Horizon got cut by Columbia.

With a CEO named Harry Cohn, you have to ask?

Thank you R18. It's $5.50 with tax on Amazon and will be here tomorrow.

Do you suppose Tommy Wiseau could put together an extended version of "The Room"?

R21 Is that the version that has the Angela Lansbury nudes restored?

r18 is Matt Anscher, the Bedknobs and Broomsticks lover.

R24 is an incel.

[quote]How ironic that both versions of Lost Horizon got cut by Columbia. With a CEO named Harry Cohn, you have to ask?

If I recall correctly, Lost Horizon (1937) was only cut later when it was re-released as the bottom half of double features, in the 40s and 50s. The second film in a double feature usually was shorter than the feature. This was a stupid thing to do but kind of common, then.

I'd like to see the original version of They Won't Believe Me (1947), a film noir from RKO with Robert Young, Susan Hayward, Jane Greer and Rita Johnson. I think it's missing over 15 minutes. (Cut for re-release.) It still works but it's not the original and probably not as good. The 1930s version of The Call Of The Wild (with Clark Gable) was cut for re-release and the missing footage still never restored. The current version is the cut version.

[italic]Kingdom of Heaven[/italic] does make much more sense in the director's cut, r4. In the theatrical release, I had enjoyed the demonstration of the siege machines and Brendan Gleeson's performance. I recently watched the director's cut on Amazon Prime and finally understood the story. I was also pleased to see not only Nikolaj Coster-Waldau but Bronson Webb. He's the Night's Watch ranger you see at the beginning of [italic]the Game of Thrones[/italic] who comes back muttering about white walkers.

So many films.

Once Upon a Time in America. The movie has many different versions. Apparently it was supposed to be two films but Sergio Leone was convinced to release it as one film. It was eventually brought down to 227 minutes but then the American studio butchered it to 139 mins. Thankfully the 227 minute version exists on DVD and Blu-Ray. A few years ago a longer version was issued with added footage (although that footage is not in good footage). Apparently there is more footage waiting to be released as Leone shot many hours of film.

9 1/2 Weeks: Apparently there is a different, more disturbing cut that was filmed but it's never seen the light of day. Apparently Kim Basinger owns the footage (not sure how true that is).

The Abyss: In 1992, The Abyss was released on LaserDisc as a special edition. The film had been released in cinemas three years before at 139 mins. The LD release added unseen footage - and this is one of the most interesting Director's Cuts I have seen. The new footage makes it seem like a completely different movie. It includes a whole subplot of the aliens threatening to destroy the earth.

54: A few years ago a Director's Cut played gay film festivals. It really is worth seeing. The original 1998 film is a pretty dull look at Studio 54, but the DC is much sexier and more exciting.

Swing Shift: Goldie Hawn didn't like Jonathan Demme's cut so, as producer, she had scenes reshot to make her character more sympathetic. Demme's version apparently exists somewhere out there but it's never been screened in cinemas.

Superman II: Richard Donner was fired from Superman II and replaced, but he did shoot a lot of footage for it. Some years back he was able to piece together footage of how his version would have looked. It's called The Donner Cut. Quite interesting to watch.

I'll do Anything: James L. Brooks' 1994 film was originally a musical. Test audiences responded so negatively to the musical numbers, they were dropped and new scenes were shot to replace them. The Director's Cut has never been released on DVD or Blu-Ray.

Ken Russell's The Devils (1971) which had footage removed that found decades later and some if reinserted and shown on TV in the UK. However, Warners has so far been unwillingly to allow a US DVD/Blu Ray release of the film in any form, though the BFI released a DVD of the International cut.

It always left me so conflicted that they got cool sexy likeable Michael Gothard to play the world’s most despicable unattractive torturing witch-hunter in THE DEVILS. He gave an excellent performance, enough that he almost became a turn-off in the role. Poor Oliver Reed..

I have a shitty bootleg DVD of the extended cut of "The Devils," and am still patiently awaiting Criterion to put out a Blu-ray (they've been streaming it on their channel lately, so I'm hoping this is an indicator of a forthcoming release). I saw the extended cut on the big screen several years ago in Portland, OR, and it was truly a sight to behold. It's an insane film, but a great one. I absolutely love Vanessa Redgrave's depraved performance in it.

James Van Der Beek had graphic gay sex with a black guy in some indie film. The director says the film is gone

Barbra”s preferred cut of The Way We were I. Which she leaves Hubble because of Hollywood blacklisting not Lois Chile’s.

[quote] James Van Der Beek had graphic gay sex with a black guy in some indie film.

Wasn’t that THE RULES OF ATTRACTION? A gay kiss with James & Ian Somerhalder was left in the studio version, and still Dawson bitched about that to kingdom come.

House of 1000 Corpses

There is supposedly lots of footage which had to be cut in order for the film to get an R-rating. The original cut ran at 105 minutes (as compared to the 88 minute version we have now). Rob Zombie claims the footage is lost and no one knows where it is. It may never see the light of day.

And similar to that, I also remember Rob Zombie complaining that his movie, 31, had to be cut 3 times before the MPAA would give it an R-rating, and claimed the unrated version would be released on DVD/Blu-Ray. But that never happened. The R-rated version still remains the only version.

I heard there’s a version of the Wizard of Oz when she doesn’t get home and has to turn tricks in Emerald City and ends up dead in the gutter, but test audiences found it to dark.

The [italic]Funny Lady[/italic] hate thread suggested Roddy McDowall's part was supposed to be larger. Cutting him out of any movie is a hate crime.

Famed horror director Tod Browning's original cut of the classic Freaks was around 90 minutes. But the test audiences were so repulsed, including MGM head of production Irving Thalberg, that over 30 minutes were cut before release. The footage has never been found and probably no loner exists.

No one has mentioned the now legendary Spider Pit sequence from King Kong, cut after the first preview. That footage is also considered lost and probably no longer extant.

R36: A laserdisc box set from the 1990s has a continuity script of the preview cut with the deleted scenes indicated in bold and italics. Only the Scarecrow's extended dance scene seems to have survived among the film outtakes, but there has been plenty of unused music released over the years.

The original 1973 film "The Wicker Man" has been released in several different editions with various scenes cut or added and if you're going to see it I recommend you make sure it's the restored version described in this piece. It's a real object lesson in how seemingly small editorial choices can turn a well-made film into a crappy one and vice versa.

I ONLY saw the Sundance version of [italic]The Blair Witch Project,[/italic] so I hope I haven’t been talking about a different movie with people for all these years!

The Sundance/ festival cut of [italic]The Descent[/italic] was better than the theatrical cut, too. But you can watch both on DVD.

[quote]Bedknobs and Broomsticks was famously cut, but the original footage that was restored stills pales in comparison to the final edit so much so that the restored footage was taken out of the Blu-Ray edition.

Are you kidding? A lot of that restored footage makes the difference between making sense and not making sense. For Disney to cut them out at all was a mistake, one Walt would not have made.

1967 was the year the Russians gave us eight hours of [italic]War and Peace[/italic] and the Americans gave us three hours of Tommy Steele as a singing, dancing butler.

Little Shop of Horrors was planning to re-release in theaters with the original ending for its 20th anniversary. Before they did so though, a DVD was released with all the low quality cut footage.

If I recall correctly, the DVD was soon recalled but the re-release never happened either.

Original ending is on youtube, however.

John Huston's [italic]Annie[/italic] got a making-of special that depicts some scenes not in the final cut along with a much bigger version of "Easy Street" that had the inexplicably missing first verse to the song. It also showed there was originally more to the final reprise of "Maybe" than actually got used and extra dancers from "Let's Go to the Movies" in dresses and hats. Some of those missing scenes had stills of them on the home video box back in the 1980s, most notably a scene of Annie fighting with Miss Hannigan in her boudoir, but nobody has bothered to look for corresponding film footage.

r43 it's on the bluray too

The MPAA was notoriously nasty to the Friday the 13th series in the '80s. Almost all of them were forced to trim down graphic death sequences (which is why many people went to see them to begin with).

[quote]It's a real object lesson in how seemingly small editorial choices can turn a well-made film into a crappy one and vice versa

I just re-watched the 1973 theatrical version of The Exorcist for the first time in 20 years, and the original editing decisions from 1973 were all the right ones. It's refreshing to watch and much more compelling. No sonic boom during the Georgetown opening, no Dietz demons in the kitchen, no spider walk, no Damien's mother before he jumps through the window.

The two scenes that actually made sense from the "directors cut": Regan's clinic appointment and the priest's extended talk are gone and the picture is still much better for it. The brisker pace greatly enhances the performances. And the original gloomy ending, ah so much better!

Here's the story of the original ending of Little Shop of Horrors. I copied it directly from Wikipedia because it's accurate and I couldn't summarize it any better:

[quote]Little Shop of Horrors was the first DVD to be recalled for content.[4] In 1998, Warner Bros. released a special edition DVD that contained approximately 23 minutes of unfinished footage from Oz's original ending, although it was in black and white and was missing some sound, visual and special effects.[citation needed] Producer and rights owner David Geffen was not aware of this release until it made it to the stores. Geffen said, "They put out a black-and-white, un-scored, un-dubbed video copy of the original ending that looked like shit." As a result, the studio removed it from shelves in a matter of days and replaced it with a second edition that did not contain the extra material. Geffen wanted to theatrically re-release the film with the original ending intact.[19] Geffen also claimed to have a color copy of the original ending, while the studio had lower quality, black and white duplicates as their own color print was destroyed in a studio fire years earlier. But Geffen had not known, until after the DVD was pulled, that the studio did not know there was a colored copy of the original ending in existence.[3]

[quote]In November 2011, Oz held a Q&A session at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens during a Henson-themed exhibit. During the talk, he announced that the film would be released as a new special edition with the original ending restored.[20] Warner Bros. reconstructed and restored the ending in an alternate edit, with re-discovered color negatives of the sequence and the help of production notes from Oz and others on the film's creative team. It was released on DVD and Blu-ray on October 9, 2012 with features returning from the original DVD.[21] It was initially subtitled as "The Intended Cut",[22] but changed to "The Director's Cut" once Oz began to support the release. The new edit was screened at the 50th New York Film Festival in the "Masterwork" line-up on September 29, 2012, alongside titles such as Laurence Olivier's Richard III and Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate.[23] Oz worried that the audience would react negatively at the 2012 screening; however, "the audience accepted Audrey and Seymour's deaths with applause and roared in glee during the plant rampage," says Oz.

R46 The deleted seconds of Friday the 13th Part 2 are the holy grail for slasher fans.

R33 The name of the movie was Storytelling directed by Todd Solandz. I believe Beek’s entire performance was deleted or there was supposed to be three stories and the gay one was cut for the usual reasons.

John Waters cut an hour out of [italic]Pink Flamingos[/italic]; what was found and added to the end of the film as a supplement in the 1990s was only a fraction of what was intended. His first book [italic]Shock Value[/italic] talks about it and he seems to have no regrets about cutting them from the film. The only things they found that really enhanced the plot were Cookie's death and Channing's complaint about having to fuck women to get them pregnant.

[R26]: “Lost Horizon” was originally released in 1937 as a prestigious, reserved seat roadshow, with two performances a day. Director Capra complained in his autobiography that audiences were laughing at it; so he “burned the first 2 reels,” claiming this made it more coherent.

But he was either mistaken, or lying. The original structure of the film was a flashback, taking place on an ocean liner carrying amnesiac Ronald Colman, whose memory is stimulated by hearing a pianist onboard. He then relates the story in the main body of the film to his accompanying friend. His memory restored, he later jumps ship, in an effort to return to Tibet.

But the scenes leading up to this apparently didn’t work well; so Capra re-edited the whole thing, starting with the thrilling escape from Baskul. Then Colman’s later rediscovery and subsequent escape were combined in re-edited scenes near the end, with all the ocean liner scenes deleted.

I have a an original souvenir program, as well as a promotional book, with two photos from the shipboard scenes. I’d post them here, but I don’t know how.

After its original release, as noted above, over the years, more bits were removed. Though a complete audio was found, some of the visuals have never been found.

Pope Joan (1972) starring Dodo's mama Olivia de Havilland and Liv Ullmann has a curious history:

[quote] The version of the film released in 1972 differed significantly from the version that had originally been filmed. Anderson's original was made with flashbacks and flash-forward sequences about a modern-day evangelical preacher who believes her life parallels that of Pope Joan. In this version psychiatrists try to send her back through her past lives to establish if she is the reincarnation of Pope Joan. However, the distributor decided to have all of the contemporary sequences removed and released the film as a straightforward historical drama. In 2009 the film was re-edited and the previously unreleased footage was re-inserted. It was re-released under the title She… Who Would Be Pope.

But the film is awful in both incarnations. It never ceases to amaze me how awful the English-language projects Liv chose to appear in were; she went straight from her "Utvandrarna" Oscar nomination to making crap like Pope Joan, 40 Carats and DL Classic Lost Horizon.

Scenes from Carrie (1976) with Sissy Spacek playing Carrie as a 6 year old in flashbacks where she is looking through a white picket fence at the neighbour sunbaking topless much to Margaret's dismay (De Palma used a real little girl for the long shot of her running away). Apparently the footage is lost. Here is a still:

The funhouse sequence from The Lady from Shanghai (1947). 20 minutes of footage was cut down to 3 and the rest reportedly destroyed.

Alien3 (which I understand is not a popular movie here but which I love) has a special cut with an additional half hour and overall changes.

Around Halloween in 2017, various theatres across the county held a one-night only screening on the directors cut of Little Shop of Horrors. Since Little Shop is one of my all-time favorite movies, I made a point of going. Had never seen the directors cut, so was especially curious to see Audrey II take over the world.

While the original ending was quite well done, it was a very dark ending. I left the theater rather somber, not happy like I had on the multiple times I saw it in 1986 (I liked it so much, I dragged many of my friends to go see it, so I probably saw it about 8 times in the theatre).

I'm glad to have seen this directors cut, but I have to say the studio made the right choice in doing reshoots where Seymour defeats Audrey II. The happy ending is the right ending for this movie.

Little Shop would not have been the commercial success it was if they had released it with the dark ending. When it came out in 1986, there was a lot of buzz about the quirky movie. It left you feeling good and that's why people were talking about it. The original ending did not leave you feeling good and therefore would not have generated the level of buzz.

If they'd released it with the original dark ending, it might have broke even, but it would not have come close to the $39 million worldwide gross it made with the happy ending.