Prime Cuts: Movie Scenes Left on the Cutting Room Floor

 

As was widely reported last week, real estate mogul and reality show star Donald J. Trump had a brief scene in Oliver Stone’s new box office smash “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,", but as luck would have it-The Donald’s vignette was mercilessly left on the cutting room floor. Stone told the N.Y Post the reason he cut Trump’s cameo was because  he found it “distracting’’;  and structurally out of place since it came near the tail end of the movie.

The deleted scene involved Trump  and Michael Douglas (Gordon Gekko) sitting in barber chairs in which Trump suggests to Gekko that he drop his gel look and get his hair done like his.

But all is not lost. Stone said Trump’s expunged scene will resurface in the DVD version of the movie.

The hair-challenged Trump shouldn’t take the deleted scene to heart. After all, even the mayor of New York City, Michael R. Bloomberg had his cameo cut from the motion picture “Sex and the City’’ when the final version hit the theaters.

“It turned out that they wanted more sex and less city. That’s fine. Their loss.’’ Bloomberg joked with a crowd during a speech delivered at the World Science Summit at Columbia University in 2008.

So as I took a quick dip into the archives, I pulled out some other scenes over the years which also were found on the cutting room floor, including

  ·  In King Kong (1933) one deleted scene which was never to be found again involved Kong shaking four sailors off a log bridge, where they fall to their death after being eaten alive in a ravine by giant spiders. The movie was previewed in San Bernardino, Calif., where viewers either walked out or talked about the gruesome scene for the remainder of the movie.
 
·    In the Seven Year Itch (1955) the movie originally included a scene of Marilyn Monroe in the bathtub getting her toe stuck in the faucet. Although the blond bombshell remained covered by bubbles, the scene was rejected by the Hollywood censors, and had to be cut by director Billy Wilder.

 ·    In the first James Bond film, Dr. No (1962) the film ended with Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress) being attacked by crabs before being  rescued by Bond, played by Sean Connery. The crabs moved too slowly to look threatening, so the director reshot the ending without them.

 ·   In Woody Allen’s “Every Thing You Always Wanted to Know about Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask’’ there is a segment of the film “What makes a man a homosexual?  which stars Allen as a common spider eager to date a black widow (Louise Lasser) in which he does a mating dance on Lasser’s web.  Allen ends up making love to the widow, only to be devoured by her afterward. The scene was deleted because Allen couldn't come up with an appropriate ending for the vignette.

 ·   In The Big Chill (1983) a film directed by Lawrence Kasdan, there was a scene with Kevin Costner (playing Alex) that was shown at the first screening, but ended up being deleted from the final version. The scene was a flashback. Directors described it as embarrassing, made worse by bad wigs and makeup. Even in the DVD version of the film, released in 1999, which included deleted scenes, Costner’s flashback scene was nowhere to be found.

  ·   After a third of “Back to the Future’’ (1985) had already been filmed, Director Robert Zemeckis and his team of writers realized that actor Eric Stoltz, who had been cast in the lead role playing Marty McFly wasn’t working out and had to be replaced by Family Ties mega-star Michael J. Fox.  Zemeckis had the painful task of informing Stoltz he was being dropped from the film, but he reportedly accepted it like a real trooper.

·  In another film directed by Zemeckis, Death Becomes Her (1992); scenes filmed with television actress and comedienne Tracey Ullman in which she played Toni the bartender were removed completely before the final version was released. In addition, after the film was sneak-previewed in Phoenix-the entire ending of the movie had to be reshot.  Zemeckis told Cinefex Magazine that Ullman’s scenes appeared to slow down the picture; and that fact she was known for her signature outrageousness and had to play a restrained level-headed character “sent the story in a whole different direction. ‘’

 ·  In Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995) there was a scene in which Nixon (played by Anthony Hopkins) is talking with businessman Jack Jones (played by Larry Hagman) who are looking at a bull and talking privately outside his Texas ranch.  The scene, Hagman’s only appearance, was sliced from the final version.
 
-Bill Lucey
WPLucey@gmail.com
 
Source: “The New Book of Lists: The Original Compendium of Curious Information’’ By David Wallechinsky, Amy Wallace; “Cutting Room Floor: Movie Scenes Which Never Made It To The Screen’’ By Laurent Bouzereau