‘The Natural’ gets an extra inning on DVD

For most of us, misplacing an important item amounts to absent-mindedly leaving the car keys behind the Velveeta in the fridge. But if you’re Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson, the stakes can get considerably higher: Somehow, someway, the first 15 minutes of his 1984 hit “The Natural” -- which didn’t make the final cut -- vanished after the film’s release.

“These pieces of film were part of an opening we didn’t do, and I thought they were gone,” Levinson says. “I had called around 15 years ago to try and find the footage, and they weren’t able to find it. And that was it.”

In the baseball epic, based on the novel by Bernard Malamud, Levinson envisioned main character Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford) going back to his decaying boyhood home to fetch his bat, nicknamed “Wonderboy,” while on his way to the major leagues.

Then came news roughly a year ago that most of the footage had turned up in storage. And so, Levinson got a long-delayed second at-bat with his beloved film, reshaping the opening as he envisioned it.

“Like an archeological dig, we tried to put it together into an opening that I always wanted to see,” Levinson says. “I was able to get very close to, if not exactly, what we were trying to achieve. A couple of [shots] weren’t around, so we had to compensate. But it was a real kick, because this was the second movie I ever made, and I got a chance to do it again. It was a real effort to do that.”

Now, the results (which create a darker resonance) are there for all to see on “The Natural Director’s Cut” DVD (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment). And if Levinson sounds nostalgic about going back to the movie, part of the reason is he feels that the motion picture industry has changed drastically over the last 23 years. And not for the better.

“There’s still some room for creativity, but it’s much worse than it’s ever been,” Levinson says. “It’s a difficult time. The corporations exert a lot of power in terms of the movies that are done: It’s much, much rougher than before in terms of initiating ideas.”

Even 25 years ago, Levinson faced resistance trying to get Malamud’s book filmed; the narrative takes the form of a medieval “knight-errant” quest transposed to the early-20th century baseball world.

“There was never a mythological baseball film, and I thought that was something really exciting and challenging to do,” Levinson says. “It seems odd now, because we were warned of the dangers of doing a sports movie: ‘It’s the kiss of death at the box office.’ ... But we said, ‘Why not? It’s a good story.’ ”

As for how he survives Tinseltown today, Levinson does everything he can to make films that will turn a profit, which in turn allows him to pursue the ideas that fascinate him. Though his recent “Man of the Year” garnered mixed reviews, it was made for a fraction of the typical Hollywood budget -- largely because Levinson and star Robin Williams worked for free.