Deleted Movie Scenes

Kill your darlings … spare the dog.

In a recent installment of The Town, podcaster Matthew Belloni shares a list of deleted or added scenes that would have dramatically changed some popular films.

In Pretty in Pink, Molly Ringwald originally ended up with John Cryer, not Andrew McCarthy. Loki initially died in Thor: The Dark World. And in Back to the Future, a scene was added so audiences didn’t think Doc Brown’s dog died when it was sent to the future.

Clearly, those beloved films would have been notably different had those changes never been made.

Deleted Darling Challenge

My previous post (as well as the June 8 installment of the Minute-Men Newsletter) centered on the writerly advice: You must be prepared to kill your darlings. In other words, sometimes a favorite scene needs to be deleted in the service of the whole.

The challenge featured the following images.

Each photo represents a deleted scene from a well-known film. And since the original post didn’t include titles, the challenge was to identify one or more of the films and describe what is taking place in the scene.

Responses were submitted via the newsletter’s comment section, email, and social media.

Bruce Wayne’s Giant Bat

Among the Facebook responses was this one from writer and critic Benjamin Kurt Unsworth, who wrote:

I know the three Kubrick ones, as well as the Schumacher one. The top left is the deleted ending from THE SHINING, the top middle is 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, bottom right is a War Room scene from DR. STRANGELOVE, and the bottom middle is the infamous man-bat scene from BATMAN FOREVER.

Ben isn’t the only respondent to correctly identify the giant bat scene from Batman Forever. That surprised me, since I figured most folks wouldn’t get that one.

Nevertheless, also correctly identifying Batman Forever was T. J. Turnet, who posted the following summary in the newsletter’s comment section:

Bruce (suffering from amnesia) is in a sub-cave of the Batcave, where he learns he isn’t responsible for his parents’ deaths. Then, the giant bat flies up to him, and he re-embraces his identity as Batman.

The scene is available on YouTube. Click the player below to watch it in its entirety.

Karloff Kills a Darling

The first respondent to take a crack at identifying all of the films was Justin Richards, who submitted the following via email:

I’d say that the films in question might be: The Shining,  2001: A Space Odyssey, and King Kong. And then on the lower row, might be: Frankenstein (1931), a publicity still from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Dr Strangelove. 

That’s five out of six. Quite impressive. And despite misidentifying Batman Forever, Justin nevertheless correctly identified the image as a publicity still and not an actual frame from a deleted scene.

Justin also went on to provide the following summary for the scene from Frankenstein:

Frankenstein’s monster (played by Boris Karloff – aka William Pratt) meets with a small girl picking flowers. He joins her, but later gets overexcited when she starts throwing daisies and the like into the nearby stream/river and throws her into the water along with the flowers, accidentally drowning her. If I recall, the MPAA weren’t happy with this scene and ordered it either truncated or completely cut, sadly.

Fortunately, the scene was saved and has since been put back into the film. You can view it by clicking the player below … if you dare.

Arachnophobia.

Props also go to Jon Freeze, who (like Justin) recognized the spider-pit scene from King Kong (upper right).

Never released, and apparently lost forever, the spider-pit scene was removed by director Merian C. Cooper because he felt it broke the forward momentum of the film’s chase-through-the-jungle action.

Interestingly, although only two photographs remain of the spider-pit sequence, director Peter Jackson recreated it using replicas of some of the original models. The reenactment was included on the Blu-ray of his King Kong remake. Don’t have the disk? No problem. You can view the reenactment here.

Kubrick Goes Three Stooges

Additional shout-outs go to Chris Moore and David Pascale, both of whom identified the pie-fighting scene from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (lower right). Though cut from the film before its initial release, the scene still exists. It’s stored in the archives of the British Film Institute, where it can only be viewed with special permission from the Kubrick estate.

Don’t have permission? Then the clips included in the following mini-documentary will have to suffice.

Lost Forever?

The deleted scenes from the challenge’s two other Kubrick films are evidently lost. But readers of this blog will recall some wonderfully detailed recollections and comments about the lost scene from The Shining that Nick Schwartz and Brian de Castro posted to a previous blog entry.

You can find that discussion here.

And the Winner is!

Thanks to all of the folks mentioned above and to everyone who responded. There were too many to mention here, but since Justin Richards was the first to respond, he’ll be getting a copy of the science fiction adventure novel Minute-Men: Execute & Run when it comes out in October.

Ready for a New Challenge?

You’ll find it in the June 24th installment of The Minute-Men: Execute & Run Newsletter.

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As a subscriber, you’ll get first look at videos, excerpts, and merch relating to the novel Minute-Men: Execute & Run.

You also get first crack at future newsletter challenges like the one covered in this post.

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