Originally posted at moveablefest.com/cut-characters
The Mentaculist December 25, 2011
Extremely Reduced & Incredibly Diminished: Movie Characters Who Were Cut Out of the Final Film
By not making the final cut of “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” James Gandolfini joins a fairly illustrious club of actors who have seen major roles cut down to size.
Stephen SaitoWhile audiences will have the chance to see “Extremely Loud
and Incredibly Close” beginning this week, there's one actor whose been part of
the film's IMDb page for months that they won't see. While James Gandolfini’s
good name was used for both the film’s poster and its first trailer for the
adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, his character saw the cutting room
floor after test audiences didn’t respond to him as a love interest for Sandra
Bullock who she meets at a 9/11 victims’ support group, according to the Los Angeles Times. Still, he's hardly the first famous
thespian to learn they've been trimmed from the final film.
After beating out throngs of big name actors for the part
and filming for four months in Queensland, Australia with 6 a.m. call times
every day, Adrien Brody thought he was sitting pretty when he attended a press
screening for Terrence Malick's "The Thin Red Line" in 1998. Yet 170
minutes later, Brody felt more like a soldier than ever as he saw his
performance as Corporal Fife winnowed down to a supporting and largely silent
role. As he recalled to The New York Press' Matt Zoller Seitz, "You
spend all this time in an unfamiliar place, you experience incredible things,
and then you come home, you're wounded psychologically, and you have nothing to
show for it."
At least Brody made the cut. Here are a few who weren't as
lucky.
Jon Stewart
— "The First Wives Club"
Imagine, if you will, the future host of "The Daily
Show" sitting by his TV watching "Laugh-In" and wishing for the
day he could play boy toy to Goldie Hawn in a big motion picture. You can't?
Neither could Hawn, who told USA Today in 1996, "As much as I love
Jon, before it was even cast I said to Scott [Rudin, the film's producer],
'Let's get rid of this. It's not pertinent to the plot. You are going to cut
this.' And sure enough it was the first to go." So much for the vote of
confidence, but the film was supposed to be Stewart's big break into movies
after his first talk show on MTV came to an end in 1995. Still, as he said to
the Calgary Sun, "My butt stayed in the previews. There's this
great moment with Goldie kicking me out of the apartment. I guess they loved
the look on her face."
Chris Cooper – "The Ring"
Considering "The Ring" became a sleeper hit
largely thanks to teenagers, DreamWorks execs probably made the right call when
they decided to open the film with a perky Amber Tamblyn than a dour Chris
Cooper. Yet Cooper, who would earn an Oscar nomination for
"Adaptation" the same year, found his portrayal of an imprisoned
serial killer of children left on the cutting room floor, including an opening
sequence where the character attempts to persuade Naomi Watts' journalist
that's he's rehabilitated in his bid for parole. The kicker was that Watts
would deliver the killer videotape to his cell at the end of the film as a
bookend.
Janeane Garofalo — "Southland Tales"
And to think Mandy Moore was worried she might not make the
final cut. After the disastrous premiere of Richard Kelly's sophomore film at
Cannes, no one was safe from the chopping block as Kelly tried to appease
potential distributors with a shorter running time. Eventually, Garofalo's
militant General Teena MacArthur who operated out of a Venice Beach storefront
was excised. All that remains of Garofalo's performance is a shot of the
General celebrating the end of the world at the film's conclusion.
Michelle
Monaghan — "Unfaithful," "Syriana," and
"Constantine"
Three strikes usually means you're out, but Monaghan appears
to have beat the odds. Before landing leads in "Gone Baby Gone" and
the upcoming indie "Trucker," the actress was trimmed from a bit part
as Richard Gere's secretary in "Unfaithful" before being poised for a
banner year in 2005 with roles as a demon-human hybrid in
"Constantine" and a beauty pageant queen who travels to the Middle
East in "Syriana." The only problem was her subplots in both films
were dropped from the final product. Fortunately for Monaghan, she still
appeared in meaty roles in "North Country" and "Kiss Kiss Bang
Bang" and even her turn in "Constantine" wasn't for naught —
J.J. Abrams brought the actress on "Mission: Impossible III" after seeing
her audition tape from the Keanu Reeves thriller.
Andy Garcia — "Dangerous Minds"
If 2007's Hilary Swank drama "Freedom Writers" was
an update of the Michelle Pfeiffer inner city school drama "Dangerous
Minds," then Patrick Dempsey was the modern version of the crusading
teacher's nag of a love interest as Garcia was in the 1995 film. Except
Garcia's turn was even more thankless than Dempsey's turn since it never saw
the light of day. And it couldn't have come at a worse time for Garcia, whose
days as a leading man were numbered with the release of his next film, "Steal
Big Steal Little." Pfeiffer claimed to have fought for the actor in a 1995
interview with the Sunday Mail…to a point. "I argued against
cutting him out," said Pfeiffer. "In the end, I can't really say
whether or not it was the right choice. People seem to like (the movie)."
Tobey Maguire — "Empire Records"
Like "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" or "Dazed
and Confused," "Empire Records" seemed to have one of those
casts — a quirky quorum of young actors who were destined to become movie stars
out of this low budget comedy about the closure of an indie record store. Some,
including Liv Tyler and Renee Zellweger, did, while some, including Brendan
Sexton III and Rory Cochrane found steady work as character actors. But Maguire
said that he felt like an "extreme outsider" on the North Carolina
set of the film and suffered what he called a "kind of
semi-breakdown" before asking director Allan Moyle if he could fly home to
Los Angeles. Moyle agreed to cut Maguire and his character loose, though not
before the actor went skinny dipping with the cast one night and wound up
throwing up in the ocean in close proximity of Tyler.
Liv Tyler — "Everyone Says I Love You"
Speaking of Tyler, she spent a few days on the set of Woody
Allen's musical, "Everyone Says I Love You" with nothing on celluloid
to show for it. Even though the role didn't call for Tyler to use her
genetically sound set of pipes, the actress was to have played what Allen
called "a sexy, sensuous, hot right wing Republican" to woo Lukas
Haas' lone conservative from a family of liberals. Tyler later told The
Times of London, "He wrote me a letter, which I keep on my desk and
look at occasionally, saying that he was really sorry and it was nice to work
with me and we would work again. But he's never asked me again. And he wouldn't
even hear me sing, and I love to sing. So I guess maybe he doesn't like me so
much."
James Van Der Beek — "Storytelling"
Itching to break away from the clean cut image he cultivated
on "Dawson's Creek," Van Der Beek didn’t blink when he signed on to
star in the "Fiction" segment of Todd Solondz's fourth film as a
sexually confused high school jock in the 1980s who, according to those who saw
the original NC-17 cut, was a little less confused after an explicit
"Brown Bunny"-esque scene with another man. Heather Matarazzo and
Emmanuelle Chriqui were also casualties of editing down the two and a half hour
film to the 87 minute, R-rated affair it became. When Van Der Beek made the
rounds with "The Rules of Attraction, " which finally did earn him
some indie cred, he ended his self-imposed gag order about
"Storytelling" on Moviehole, saying, "I remember saying
to Todd [Solondz] the director, when I was doing ADR, that 'even if I get cut
from this movie, I just want to say what a fabulous time I've had on this.' I
will never say that to a director again!"
Orlando
Jones — "Magnolia"
Obsessive fans of Paul Thomas Anderson already know they can
find the ill-fated storyline of The Worm in the published shooting script of
"Magnolia," but oddly The Worm's alter ego Jones logs more time on
the making of documentary than he does in the film. Although as part of the
"Magnolia" production diaries, there is a tantalizing scene in a
diner featuring The Worm, the desperate-for-cash father of Dixon, the young boy
John C. Reilly's cop meets in the first act, Jones is nowhere to be found in
the final cut. As Jones told the Sunday Express in 2001, "Paul called me
and said: "You're great in the movie but we're four hours."
Apparently, Tom Cruise wasn't as expendable.
Terrence Stamp & Jacqueline Bisset and Keith David
& Angela Bassett — "Mr. & Mrs. Smith"
Jennifer Aniston wasn't the only collateral damage from the
chemistry between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. As a positively flummoxed Doug
Liman explains on the "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" special edition DVD,
test screening audiences were so caught up with Brangelina as dueling assassins
that the film's main villains, which were the two bosses behind Mr. and Mrs.
Smith named only Mother and Father, simply weren't necessary. Still, Liman went
through two quarreling killer couples in Stamp and Bisset and David and Bassett
before eliminating their performances from the film completely — well, David
and Bassett's voices made it in. As did William Fichtner, who is never seen as
the Smiths' marriage therapist.
Katherine Towne — "Sweet Home Alabama"
The daughter of "Chinatown" scribe Robert Towne
probably knew the Hollywood maxim that a film gets written three times: first
on the page, then on the set and finally in the editing room — Katherine just
probably assumed that her role as Erin, the personal assistant to Reese
Witherspoon's fashion designer would make it after the second draft.
Unfortunately, test screening audiences were troubled by her crush on
Witherspoon’s fiancé, played by Patrick Dempsey and director Andy Tennant 86'ed
the character without hesitation, though not completely without regret. As
Tennant cops to on the DVD, Erin provided a happy ending to the film and a
punchline when Dempsey's onscreen mother discovers that her jilted son's
ex-fiancé's personal assistant is a Vanderbilt.
Ronee Blakely — "Hammett"
Actors marry their directors all the time, but Blakely is a
cautionary tale for any thespian who wants to untie the knot too soon. After
close to 90 percent of the revisionist detective tale "Hammett" was
in the can, the "Nashville" star filed for divorce from director Wim
Wenders, which when coupled with studio dissatisfaction with the movie in
general, prompted Wenders to change up the role and cast Marilu Henner instead
as the detective's confidante.
Kevin Costner — "The Big Chill"
Perhaps the most famous character to be left on the cutting
room floor, Costner's Alex commits suicide before "The Big Chill"
begins, but appeared in a series of flashbacks throughout the film after his
friends from college reunite for his funeral. Audiences had their best chance
at seeing the performance in 1998 when Columbia wanted to re-release the film
with the Costner scenes as a selling point, but director Lawrence Kasdan was
"very adamant" about keeping the film the way it was, according to
the studio's Michael Schlesinger, who spoke to USA Today at the time.
Still, there was no harm done between Costner and Kasdan, who made amends by
casting Costner in his next film, "Silverado."
Harold
Ramis — "High Fidelity"
Seth Rogen may have been a handful in "Knocked
Up," but Ramis perfected his fatherly advice as the sweatsuit clad old man
to John Cusack's introspective record clerk in the 2000 adaptation of Nick
Hornby's novel. In an exchange between the two Chicago natives, Cusack's Rob
asks for advice about sex from his dad, who bluntly explains how his experience
is limited to one woman and to "just go out and do it." The scene
didn't make the final cut, nor did a cameo by Beverly D'Angelo as an angry wife
who is eager to sell her husband's record collection, but both can be found in
the deleted scenes on the film's DVD. And thanks to Ramis' quality time with
Cusack on the set, the two worked together again with Ramis as director on the
2006 crime caper "The Ice Harvest."
Harrison Ford — "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial"
Since Ford's pal Steven Spielberg was directing the alien
tale from a script by Melissa Mathison, Ford's wife at the time, it only made
sense that the actor would show his face during the production. Actually, it
was only his back, which was turned to the camera, for his cameo as the
principal at Elliot's school who gives a stern talk to the boy. Spielberg
ultimately decided to scrap the scene in favor of an ending that didn't leave
audiences wondering whether or not Indiana Jones had taken an acting gig in
between "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "Temple of Doom."
Are there more examples that we might've missed? Feel
free to let us know in the comments below.
Rachel Ticotin in Natural Born Killers
Ben Affleck in Office Killer (1997)
Danny Aiello in Annie Hall (1976)
Julie Andrews in The Return of the Pink Panther (1973)
Bruce Campbell in The Quick and the Dead (1995)
Anne Bancroft in The Thirteenth Warrior (1999)
Adrienne Barbeau in Halloween (2007)
Brian Benben in Surf’s Up (2006 – voice)
Michael Berryman in The Crow (1994)
Jack Black in True Romance (1993)
Lara Flynn Boyle in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) and Dead Poets Society (1989)
Lorraine Bracco in Sea of Love (1989)
Gary Busey in Grown-Ups (2010)
John Carradine in Young Frankenstein (1974 – voice)
James Caviezel in Any Given Sunday (1999)
Rae Dawn Chong in Rude Awakening (1989)
Joan Crawford in Journy To Midnight (1968)
Jamie Lee Curtis in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (1984)
Tony Curtis in Take One False Step (1949)
Peter Cushing in The Devil’s Agent (1962)
Daniel Dae-Kim in The Adjustment Bureau (2011)
Lolita Davidovich in J.F.K. (1991)
Rosario Dawson in The Devil’s Rejects (2005)
Joaquim De Almeida in The Mask Of Zorro (1998)
Danny De Vito in Car Wash (1976)
Guillermo Del Toro in Torrente 3 (2005)
Illeana Douglas in Jungle Fever (1991) and Cursed (2005)
Colin Farrel in David Copperfield (1999 – TV)
Corey Feldman in Cursed (2005)
Henry Fonda in Main Street To Broadway (1953)
Claire Forlani in Going Greek (2001)
Robert Forster in Cursed (2005)
Danny Glover in How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998)
Luis Guzman in Mystery Men (1999)
Gina Gershon in Jungle Fever (1991)
Philip Baker Hall in Rush Hour 2 (2001)
Laura Elena Harring in Masked and Anonymous (2003)
Holly Hunter in Miller’s Crossing (1990)
Rutger Hauer in Monsieur Hawarden (1969)
Helen Hunt in One Night At McCool’s (2000)
Buster Keaton in Two Girls and a Sailor (1944)
Klaus Kinski in Rocket To the Moon (1967)
Mila Kunis in The Muppets (2011)
John Landis in 2001 Maniacs (2005)
Christopher Lee in My Brother’s Keeper (1948) and Stone of Destiny (2008)
Jared Leto in Phone Booth (2002)
Eugene Levy in Ghostbusters 2 (1989)
John Lithgow in L.A. Story (1991)
Lucy Liu in Jerry Maguire (1996)
Robert Loggia in Amazon Women On the Moon (1987)
Rob Lowe in Austin Powers In Goldmember (2002)
Frank Langella in Red Dragon (2002)
Heather Langenkamp in The Outsiders (1982), RumbleFish (1983) and Cursed (2005)
Virginia Madsen in Amelia (2009)
Joe Mantegna in Xanadu (1980)
Christopher McDonald in Nurse Betty (2000)
Malcolm McDowell in Poor Cow (1967)
Everett McGill in Twin Peaks – Fire Walk With Me (1992)
Rose McGowan in Machete (2010)
Michael McKean in Surf’s Up (2006 – voice)
Dick Miller in Amazon Women On the Moon (1987) and Pulp Fiction (1994)
Matthew Modine in A Prairie Home Companion (2006)
Viggo Mortensen in Swing Shift (1984) and The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)
Liam Neeson in The Hangover, Part 2 (2011)
Frank Oz in Superman 3 (1983)
Charles Napier in Hard Times (1975)
Michael Palin in You’ve Got Mail (1998)
Sarah Jessica Parker in Rich Kids (1979)
Chris Penn in American Pie 2 (2001)
Sean Penn in Crossing Over (2008)
Harold Perrineau in Someone Like You (2001)
Michael Pitt in Wonderland (2003)
Oliver Platt in Strip Search (2003 – TV)
Parker Posey in Sleepless In Seattle (1993)
Bill Pullman in The Thin Red Line (1998)
Kathleen Quinlan in Heaven and Earth (1992)
Charlotte Rampling in Vanishing Point (1971)
Sam Rockwell in Jarhead (2005)
Mickey Rooney in Upperworld (1934) and West Point of the Air (1935)
Stephen Root in White Oleander (2002) and Cook-Off (2006)
Tim Roth in My Blueberry Nights (2006)
Mickey Rourke in The Thin Red Line (1998)
Brandon Routh in The Informers (2008)
Paul Rudd in Bridesmaids (2011)
Greta Scacchi in Syriana (2005)
Michael Shannon in W. (2008)
Paul Sorvino in Family Man (2000)
Harry Dean Stanton in Up in Smoke (1978)
Ben Stiller in Get Shorty (1995) and The Muppets (2011)
Danny Trejo in The Muppets (2011)
Billy Bob Thornton in The Man Who Broke 1,000 Chains (1987 – TV)
Jean-Claude Van Damme in Predator (1987)
Carice Van Houten in Body Of Lies (2008)
J.T. Walsh in Ghosts Of Mississpi (1995)
Sam Waterston in Nixon (1995)
Carl Weathers in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Olivia Williams in A Knight’s Tale (2000)
Michelle Yeoh in Fearless (2005)