Famously Lost Footage

[DisneyBoy]

I thought it might be interesting to have a thread that chronicles famous lost footage from movies.

There's the Jitterbug scene from The Wizard of Oz that doesn't seem to exist anymore. I don't particularly think the movie is worse off without it though.

Lon Chaney's black and white Phantom of the Opera movie has been missing its original ending for decades, in which the Phantom dies of a broken heart at his organ the exact same way he did in the original book. Apparently test screenings went badly because the audiences were so angry at the character that they wanted him to suffer for all he had done. That's why the studio brought in another director who filmed Westerns for a living to create the big chase scene that now ends the movie. The original footage of the Phantom dying at his organ after being kissed by Christine has never been found.

There's also some footage from Ridley Scott's Legend that went missing. Apparently it's a dance sequence involving the Gump character right after he meets Tom Cruise's Jack.

I'm so relieved the original ending to Frank Oz's Little Shop of Horrors was found and restored to the movie. It's a fantastic elaborate destruction scene and musical number exactly in the style of the original Broadway show (the theatrical cut neutered the original message of the show by giving the heroes an easy victory, which is apparently what audiences wanted in early test screenings). I like both versions of the movie but I think I'm partial to the grittier destructive ending.

[HoboClayton]

The tragedy on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie. The footage is on YouTube, I am amazed that even in 1982, this was allowed. 

[Sandman87]

Possibly a related different topic, but there are a depressing number of movies, especially from the silent film era, that only still exist in partial form or for which there are no known copies whatsoever.

Among the completely "lost" films:

• The Promise (1969), Starring Ian McKellen
• The Oregon Trail (1936), starring John Wayne
• Murder at Monte Carlo (1934), Errol Flynn's first starring role
• Jail Birds of Paradise (1934), starring the Three Stooges, among others

[DisneyBoy]

London After Midnight is another famously lost movie starring Lon Chaney.

[Epeolatrix]

Another famously lost film isn't technically lost — but thanks to embarrassment and rights issues it might not be seen for decades — is The Day The Clown Cried. It stars Jerry Lewis as a German clown named Helmut Doork who mocks Hitler and gets put in a concentration camp. He becomes an entertainer to the Jewish children of the camp right up to the point where he accompanies them into the gas chamber and the door closes behind them. Lewis believes it's a horrible movie that no one should see, but he is said to have given a copy to the Library of Congress with permission for them to screen it in about ten years (presumably after his death). However, since the rights issues are a mess, that might not happen.

[starri]

I think the lost reel of The Magnificent Ambersons owns this.  One of cinema's great directors at his prime, and it's just...gone.

5 hours ago, Violet Impulse said:

Lewis believes it's a horrible movie that no one should see

Does he though?  It didn't suddenly become a bad idea ten years after he'd filmed it.  He just saw something that was by all accounts a decent script, if difficult to execute, thought "I'm obviously getting an Oscar" and then Jerry Lewis-ing the fuck out of it.

There's an alternate version of "If I Only Had a Brain" with an elaborate Busby Berkeley choreographed dance number, which I thought had been lost like the Jitterbug scene, but apparently the full thing is still out there.  They just cut it out for no reason I can determine.

As I understand it, there are no copies of the un-Specialized Star Wars OT any more.  At the time, Lucas said part of his impetus for redoing them was because the original masters were starting to degrade.  But I guess in his infinite wisdom, he forgot to keep a copy that was just a straight remaster.  When Paramount decided to remaster Star Trek: TOS for HD, and add some CGI elements (they wisely took the tack of making it look like CGI might have looked in the 60s), they released the unaltered originals in HD as well.

[DisneyBoy]

Paramount did that? Weird.

This is more TV-related, but the original NTSC (North American broadcast) versions of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and She-Ra: Princess of Power possibly no longer exist. The company Hallmark bought the Filmation animation library a bunch of years ago and then apparently decided they only wanted to keep the PAL (UK broadcast) versions of these shows...so the official DVDs that currently exist have the PAL versions, which run faster, meaning the episodes are shorter, the framing is zoomed in a bit and all the characters voices are higher pitched.

According to one fan there are some episodes that still exist in NTSC format but we've yet to get any details on whether or not it's the complete run of either show. All these years, we have been under the impression that the originals were destroyed by Hallmark and the only ones that were kept were the PAL versions.

Because why bother keeping the original version of something?*facepalm*

Edited April 8, 2017 by DisneyBoy

[starri]

18 minutes ago, DisneyBoy said:

Paramount did that? Weird.

Honestly, they pulled it off beautifully.  They learned from Lucas' mistakes and made it look like the visuals had a fresh coat of paint.  And wisely didn't replace everything.  

I don't have the hatred for the Special Edition that the majority of SW fans seem to.  I don't think it so much improves the story, and some of the stuff was unnecessary, but as I was in college at the time, it was a really awesome experience to see them on the big screen.

The opposite of lost footage, ABC's airing of certain movies in primetime in the late 70s and early 80s.  They wanted to pad the running time to at least three hours, so they would have the studios throw in extra scenes that didn't make it into the theatrical cut.  I imagine that saved a lot of footage that would otherwise have landed in the dustbin.  The Director's Cut of Star Trek II and the impossibly slow cut of Star Trek: The Motion Picture exist because of that.  Some of the footage in Superman and the Richard Donner cut of Superman II as well, I think.

[Lugal]

7 hours ago, starri said:

There's an alternate version of "If I Only Had a Brain" with an elaborate Busby Berkeley choreographed dance number, which I thought had been lost like the Jitterbug scene, but apparently the full thing is still out there.  They just cut it out for no reason I can determine.

As I understand it, a lot of scenes were cut from that movie because they lose too much detail on (pre-HD) TV, which is where most people these days see The Wizard of Oz.

I know the original cut of the Blues Brothers was over three hours long and it would have been shown with an intermission.  But test audiences didn't like it, so the movie was cut down and all the other footage was lost.

[Dejana]

The 1920s adaptation of The Great Gatsby is presumed a lost film, with footage from the trailer being all that remains (so spoilery, I guess that's not a modern phenomenon then?):

Edited April 8, 2017 by Dejana

[starri]

57 minutes ago, Lugal said:

As I understand it, a lot of scenes were cut from that movie because they lose too much detail on (pre-HD) TV, which is where most people these days see The Wizard of Oz.

But the Berkeley number was cut before the film was originally released.  I think, although I'm not 100% sure, that it was shot during Richard Thorpe's time as the film's director (before he was replaced first by George Cukor and then by Victor Fleming).  I don't know if any of Thorpe's footage is in the released film.  A lot of what he shot involved Buddy Ebsen's Tin Man.  Ebsen ended up leaving the film after the aluminum dust from the Tin Man makeup put him into respiratory failure and he wound up in an iron lung.  As far as I know, that footage doesn't exist any more either.