robert zemeckis – Dirty Feed

Downtown Toontown

Published 16th January 2024

MAROON: Look, Valiant. His wife’s poison, but he thinks she’s Betty Crocker. I want you to follow her. Get me a couple of nice juicy pictures I can wise the rabbit up with.
VALIANT: Forget it. I don’t work Toontown.
MAROON: What’s wrong with Toontown? Every Joe loves Toontown.
VALIANT: Then get Joe to do the job, ’cause I ain’t going.
MAROON: Whoa, feller. You don’t wanna go to Toontown, you don’t have to go to Toontown. Nobody said you had to go to Toontown anyway.

– Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

It’s odd how some deleted scenes seem to take on a life of their own. Some are happily released on DVD and/or Blu-ray, but never end up being discussed much, no matter how interesting. The really obscure ones never even made the leap from LaserDisc. And yet other examples become… is “well-known” an exaggeration? Maybe. But if you’re the kind of person who does more than scrape the surface of a film, you’ll learn about them fairly quickly.

I fancy that Who Framed Roger Rabbit‘s “Pig Head” sequence is more well-known than the average deleted scene. Here’s the short version. After Valiant has hidden Roger at the Terminal Bar, the deleted section has him going back to the Ink and Paint Club to go snooping for Marvin Acme’s will. Here, he’s knocked out by Bongo the Gorilla (in a return appearance), and menaced by Judge Doom and the Weasels. They eventually dump him in Toontown, he gets a pig’s head tooned onto his own in a nasty bit of gang violence, and he ends up washing it off in the shower.¹

Here we rejoin the theatrical cut, with Eddie back at his office, and Jessica’s famous “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way” scene. Originally, Eddie was meant to be stepping out the shower having just washed his toon head off; instead, the filmmakers dub the sound of a flushing toilet to hide the cut scene. It mostly works, although if you stop and think about it for a moment, you might wonder why Eddie takes his shirt off to go for a dump.

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This, at least, is what was shot. As scripted, there was even more missing at this point, including the funeral of Marvin Acme, and a deleted scene with Eddie wearing the pig’s head on the Red Car. This stuff is interesting and well worthy of discussion, but outside the scope of this post. ↩

“The Most Disgusting Thing I’ve Ever Seen”

Published 23rd November 2023

Film

“The finished movie we see on the screen is often far different from the director’s original conception. The Cutting Room Floor is the intriguing study of the wounds, bruises, Band-Aids, and sometimes miracle remedies that can often improve a film… or destroy it.”

— Back page blurb for The Cutting Room Floor

“Trust me!”

— Rudy Russo, Used Cars

Determining cause and effect when it comes to teenage reading is a tricky thing. Did Laurent Bouzereau’s The Cutting Room Floor (Citadel Press, 1994) inspire my interest in deleted and alternate scenes in film and television? Or was I obsessed with them before picking up the book, which is why I grabbed it from the shelf in the first place?

I think there is a healthy dose of the former in this case, which makes it a very special book for me. Regardless, it’s a wonderful piece of work, and one which I find myself returning to again and again every few years. These days, with a combination of DVD extras and the right websites, much of this information is easier to access than it used to be. But back in 1994, especially for poor sods like me who hadn’t got a hope of getting a LaserDisc player, books like this were how you found out about this stuff.

There are so many tales of cut material which I first read about in that book, and stuck in my head immediately. The different edits of Basic Instinct for one; the attempted rescue of Exorcist II: The Heretic for another. But for sheer childish fun, you can’t beat the following tale about Used Cars, Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale’s satirical black comedy.¹

Bob Gale: “The only thing that got cut out of Used Cars never got to preview. It was something that the studio insisted that we change in the scene when the car salesmen do a commercial at a football game wearing Groucho Marx glasses. The propman on the film had found these glasses that instead of having a fake nose had a penis for it. We thought that was one of the funniest things we’d ever seen, and we thought to ourselves, you know, these car salesmen, that’s exactly the kind of things they would do. So we shot the scene with these glasses. When we sent the dailies to Columbia Pictures, I got this call from the head of production just ripping me apart for putting these pornographic images in the movie. How could we possibly do this? Had we lost our minds? This has gone beyond the grounds of taste. I got my head handed to me on a platter about this.

Columbia was outraged about this scene. I kept telling them to wait until they saw the scene cut together. I got on an airplane [the movie was shot in Phoenix] and screened the scene for Columbia. Frank Price [the head of the studio at the time], who by the way I have absolute admiration and respect for, turned around and said, ‘It’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. You have to redo this.’ And so we reshot the scene with normal Groucho glasses. However, if you have access to the videotape or the laserdisc and you single-frame through the sequence, you’ll see there is still one shot in that sequence where one of the guys is wearing a set of dick-nose glasses. In fact, an actual image of that was in one of the TV spots. It was one of the laughs that we had on the TV censors! It was only a few frames, but it was on national television.”

This tale stuck in my head, long before I ever watched Used Cars. And when did I finally get round to watching Used Cars? Erm, last month. Hey, it only took nearly two decades. There are other films listed in that book that I still haven’t got round to yet.

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Although with character names like “Roy L. Fuchs”, it’s as much Carry On as anything else. ↩

Who Framed Michael Eisner

Published 2nd June 2016

Film / TV Comedy

When it comes to rumours and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, you all know the drill. Eddie Valiant and Jessica chase Judge Doom out of Toontown, they crash spectacularly, sail through the air, Jessica’s dress hitches up, and you may or may not be able to see her hairy minge. The whole thing has been investigated in great detail, although frankly not quite enough detail for my taste.

Still, that’s not what this piece is about. No, my query is about another rumour associated with the film – and specifically, about this scene in Toontown with Eddie:

allyson

We’ll let the previously linked to Snopes article give us the basics (emphasis mine):

“In another scene, Bob Hoskins steps into a Toon Town men’s room. Graffiti on the wall reads “For a good time, call Allyson Wonderland”, with the phrase “The Best Is Yet to Be” appearing underneath it. Allegedly, Disney chairman Michael Eisner’s phone number replaces the latter phrase for one frame. Although the “Allyson Wonderland” graffiti is clearly visible on laserdisc, Eisner’s phone number is not. If the phone number was in the film originally (as rumor has it was), it was removed before the home versions of the movie were made available.”

The removal of this phone number seems to apply to every single home version of the film I – or seemingly anyone – has ever come across. LaserDisc, VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, the lot. If Eisner’s phone number was ever there in the film’s theatrical release, it’s gone from the retail versions. If is was ever there, of course. Because without evidence, this really starts to take on the feeling of an urban legend. Notably, Snopes has no actual evidence to offer, and the article goes out its way to label the phone number story as a rumour.

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