Looking Back at Year’s Unkindest Cuts

Nearly everyone involved in the making of a film bemoans a favorite scene that ends up on the cutting-room floor. We asked some filmmakers associated with a handful of 1990 movies to tell us about the outtakes they most remember--or regret.

The rough cut of Orion Pictures’ “Dances With Wolves”--the story of a U.S. soldier befriended by a tribe of Sioux Indians fighting for survival against invading whites--came in at over five hours, and two hours had to be chopped. Film editor Neil Travis had no trouble picking the scene he and director-producer-star Kevin Costner would have most liked to save.

“It’s the scene we call the Broken Forest scene,” Travis says of footage shot in the Grand Tetons of Wyoming. “Kicking Bird (Graham Greene) takes Dunbar (Costner) to a sacred place in the hills. They ride through this beautiful mountain meadow, full of aspens--it’s an absolutely gorgeous scene.

“And when they come to the middle of it, it’s been despoiled by (white) trappers--an acre or two right in the middle of sacred grounds, dead trees, animal carcasses, litter . . . both men are in tears.

“It hurt us to take it out. But it was just something that had to go.”

The good news: A four-hour version of “Dances” is planned either for videocassette or a network miniseries, Travis says, and the Broken Forest scene “will definitely make it in.”

Did you wonder why Julia Roberts, playing a hooker in Touchstone Pictures’ “Pretty Woman,” climbed so quickly into the car of a passing executive (Richard Gere), thus setting up the Pygmalion-like love story?

You wouldn’t if you’d seen an earlier sequence in which Roberts is chased by some drug dealers she’s just told off. Gere pulls up . . . thereby providing her a getaway car.

But during audience testing, says director Garry Marshall, the sequence proved unnecessary: “It turned out nobody cared why she got in the car. They were already locked into the characters.”

So the footage was cut--along with an ensuing sequence in which Roberts and Gere encounter the drug dealers in a sleazy bar, leading to a brief chase and a confrontation in an alley.

“The film played fine without those moments,” says Marshall, for whom the sacrifice was personal: His son, Scott, 21, played one of the drug dealers.

Norman Rene directed the “American Playhouse” production of “Longtime Companion,” released theatrically by the Samuel Goldwyn Co. Spanning the ‘80s, it chronicles the impact of AIDS on the lives of a group of gay men in New York.

“The scene I hated cutting was Willy (Campbell Scott) waking up and going outside and seeing a deer on the porch of the Fire Island house,” Rene says. “It was an image that he had once shared with his friend John (Dermot Mulroney) earlier in the film, but who had subsequently died.”

Although the scene “sort of helped clarify certain things about Willy’s subconscious,” Rene says, it couldn’t be saved.

“We ended up cutting a whole lot of sequences between Willy and John, because it confused audiences about their relationship. It made them seem as lovers, when they were only friends.

“I look back and regret that.”

Warren Beatty reflected for a few moments about the editing of Touchstone’s “Dick Tracy.”

Then the taciturn director and star recalled: “There was no one big scene that we had to cut. But there were moments, many moments, that we cut. I would like to have kept more scenes of Madonna singing and more of Mandy Patinkin singing, and a lot more moments of Al (Pacino) and Dustin (Hoffman).

“But you realize, as you put the film together, the story has to go along.”

During the editing of Warner Bros.’ “Gremlins 2: The New Batch,” director Joe Dante fought for a sequence in which the Gremlins invade a horror-flick TV show hosted by Grandpa Fred--played by Robert Prosky. The footage not only expanded Prosky’s character, but helped explain a later scene in which the nasty creatures treat Fred nicely.

Dante was also in the scene--playing a TV director--and says with a laugh, “So you can see, it was very close to my heart.”

But Dante admits that the scene slowed the movie down--preview audiences got restless--and it was finally cut.

“It was particularly unfortunate for Robert Prosky, because he’s such a good actor. He had a larger part in the movie and it kept getting whittled down, frankly because the studio didn’t like his character. They kept asking, ‘What’s this old guy doing in this young-people’s movie?’

“I tried to save as much (of him) as I could.”

Director Richard Benjamin sounds positively anguished when he discusses a trim he was forced to make in Orion Pictures’ “Mermaids.” The scene had Winona Ryder, as an Angst -ridden teen-ager with a fixation on Catholicism, visiting a nun to seek advice.

Jan Miner--perhaps best known as the manicurist Madge in Palmolive commercials--played the nun, who ends up spilling out her painful life story, with Ryder never getting a word in edgewise.

The poignant, eight-minute scene, says Benjamin, had “some of the crew in tears.” But in editing the film, he found it derailed the storyline.

“It stopped the movie and seemed to be about Jan,” he says. “We kept shortening it, trying to save it, but finally my editor and I decided it had to go. It was heartbreaking, because it was so good.”

The hardest part, Benjamin recalls, was having to call Miner and tell her. As consolation, he sent her a tape of the scene the public will probably never see.

With “Jacob’s Ladder,” Bruce Joel Rubin wrote one of the year’s more unusually structured screenplays, a metaphysical thriller about a young man (Tim Robbins) caught between heaven and hell. During the final month of editing, a fifth of the rough cut was trimmed.

The toughest loss for the screenwriter: a scene involving a professor, who was Jacob’s mentor.

“It established the whole aspect of Jacob’s background as a doctor of philosophy,” says Rubin of the Tri-Star film. “It really centered the movie for me. Adrian (Lyne, who directed) loved it too and we talked about it a lot, but it had to go. It’s a shame, because the audience will never see some masterful filmwork . . . but the excision helped the movie.”

Tom Savini--whose special effects have earned him a reputation as the “king of splatter”--groans when he recounts the cuts he made in the remake of Columbia Pictures’ “Night of the Living Dead”--his directorial debut.

“It’s become a given that you kill a zombie by shooting it in the head,” he says. “It’s like killing vampires with a stake in the heart. That’s just the way you do it.”

But when the MPAA balked at certain scenes involving those shootings, Savini had to snip some 15 seconds of zombie-killing to avoid an X rating.

The unkindest cut: a scene in which a zombie--already torched by a main character--has its smoldering head blown away. “The way it’s cut,” he laments, “you see someone raise a rifle and shoot, but you don’t see the impact.”

He feels the film works despite the trims, but adds, “I feel there were certain expectations audiences had that we didn’t meet.”

If you saw New Line Cinema’s “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” you know that the four reptilian wonders and their mentor, Splinter the Rat, prove victorious over the bad guys. After the turtles shout “Cowabunga!,” Splinter confesses that he’s always liked that word.

Well, audiences liked it too.

Originally, an epilogue followed in which newscaster April O’Neil (Judith Hoag) takes sketches of the quartet to a publisher, pitching a turtle comic book. While the foursome eavesdrop, the publisher nixes her TMNJ concept as too far-fetched.

“But as we showed the film, we could tell that we didn’t need that epilogue,” says producer David Chan. “Audiences seemed to want the movie to end with ‘Cowabunga!’--we found the emotion for the movie kind of ended with that moment.”

Columbia’s “Awakenings” stars Robin Williams as a neurologist who discovers a “miracle” treatment for post-encephalitic patients, and Robert De Niro as the patient revived from a near-catatonic state after 30 silent years.

But one of the extras was an unheralded star of the picture--Lillian T., the last survivor of the real-life group “awakened” in 1969 by Dr. Oliver Sacks, whose work inspired the film.

Now a grandmother in her 70s who still relies on the drug L-Dopa to stay intermittently in touch with the world, Lillian T. was a background actor in a complex subplot in which the patients build a hospital library. A rough cut of the film ran five hours, Sacks says, and during editing the library-building sequences were scrapped.

“Alas, Lillian is completely cut,” Sacks says. “I regretted that--it would have been so nice to have her in the film.”

Her name appears among the screen credits, he adds, but her face is never seen.

Director Fred Schepisi is philosophical about “a rather sad, poetic and beautiful” speech made by Sean Connery that didn’t make the final cut of MGM/UA’s “The Russia House.”

As written by Tom Stoppard, who adapted John le Carre’s espionage novel, Connery’s character, a British publisher, expounds on his love for the Soviet Union. The monologue ran nearly two minutes.

“We hated to lose it--Sean performed it beautifully,” says Schepisi. “But we realized that we’d already shown what Sean was saying. We’d done it cumulatively throughout the picture.”

Apparently not all movies have outtakes.

Paul Verhoeven, director of Tri-Star Pictures’ “Total Recall,” tells us unabashedly that the completed film “is basically the same movie I wrote.”

With the exception of “about two seconds” of violence--to satisfy the MPAA and get the film an R rating--no scenes or characters were cut, he says.

“What you’re talking about has never applied to my movies at all. I try to avoid--in the writing--anything that I’m doubtful about.”