The A.I. DVD needed some DELETED SCENES!

[Monterey Jack]

As much as I enjoyed this movie, I still felt that Spielberg sacrificed a lot of character moments either to keep the running time down (Monica's turn-on-a-dime decision to activate David's "love" simulator comes out of nowhere) or to insure a PG-13 rating (the whole Gigalo Joe murder subplot makes little sense in the final cut). I would have gladly sacrificed seeing Stan Winston fawning over his neato-keen animatronic gimmickry (yet again) in order to include some extra footage. Anyone else agree with me?

[DimWit]

The chances of seeing that are remote. Speilberg is god in H'wood and nobody can tell him what to cut and what to keep. I betcha that the MPAA even treads lightly around him. Any movie you see IS the director's cut and he won't want you to see any other variation.

[markedouglas]

Deleted scenes???? Looking at the FINAL running time, i'd say he didnt leave a damn thing out! I bloody wish he had!

[Volcane666]

I wish the final 20 minutes was a deleted scene!

And, as mentioned before, the murder subplot involving Joe should have been expanded on or cut out completely, as it is I do not feel satisfied with it!

I agree with you the murder and code activation seem to come out of nowhere. And that 2nd disk is pretty sparse .....should have had deleted scenes.

[black__omega]

I'm pretty sure there is little to no major cut footage. Both the Murder and Activation exist only to further the plot. The murder is sparse because it is only there to force Joe to run away, I was perfectly happy with it.

As for the activation, it does what it's supposed to: make David love his mommy. We see that he changes and hugs her and calls her mommy. I didn't find this too lacking either. We would you have instead a long sequence of scenes where David says "I love you' over and over again.

[Porkchop]

I'm curious--why do you feel the murder subplot makes no sense? It seemed pretty clear to me. Some guy found out his wife was "seeing" Joe, followed her to the meeting place and killed her, knowing it would be pinned on Joe. Therefore Joe has to run.

What's missing?

[Monterey Jack]

Originally posted by Porkchop
I'm curious--why do you feel the murder subplot makes no sense? It seemed pretty clear to me. Some guy found out his wife was "seeing" Joe, followed her to the meeting place and killed her, knowing it would be pinned on Joe. Therefore Joe has to run.

What's missing?

Is that what that scene was all about? I thought that the guy who enters the room when Joe discovers his "client" is dead was the hotel manager. Spielberg could have made that a bit clearer with only a few more minutes of exposition, which, considering the already lengthy running time of the film, wouldn't have made much difference.

[pdjennings]

Originally posted by Monterey Jack
Is that what that scene was all about? I thought that the guy who enters the room when Joe discovers his "client" is dead was the hotel manager. Spielberg could have made that a bit clearer with only a few more minutes of exposition, which, considering the already lengthy running time of the film, wouldn't have made much difference.

Why would the hotel manager lean over the dead women, stroke her face .... and say "Remember, you killed me first".... ?

I thought it was marvelously done in it's brevity.... All that was needed was a reason for Joe to have to 'go on the run'.... and it did the trick.

[Prospero]

An article in Entertainment Weekly that came out around the time of the theatrical release of A.I. stated that Spielberg's first cut of the film was almost four hours, and that most of what he sliced out to get the running time down was material from the first act developing the character of David's mother, and material from the second act developing Gigolo Joe. Jude Law and Frances O'Connor didn't seem to be terribly pleased about it in their interviews.

I hope that eventually Spielberg will go back and recut it, but since he seems to be going on to other things now, and A.I. didn't make a ton of money, the chances are slim.

hee hee I thought it was the hotel manager too. untill i recognized him as the guy from 'Just Shoot Me' and 'Galaxy Quest'.

[Porkchop]

Originally posted by Prospero
An article in Entertainment Weekly that came out around the time of the theatrical release of A.I. stated that Spielberg's first cut of the film was almost four hours

Oh man, is there any movie where they DON'T claim this?

It's very difficult to believe. To get a four-hour cut of a film you need a four hour script. That's 240 pages. Nobody in Hollywood, particularly not somebody as experienced as Spielberg, would start shooting a movie with a 240 page script and plan to cut it down in post production. It just doesn't make economic or creative sense.

I'm sure there were some bits cut from A.I., but I seriously doubt they were even close to being that extensive.

[Prospero]

Porkchop: if the scenes cut from the screenplay don't involve visual effects shots, then the cost of shooting them and cutting them later isn't nearly as much. So it actually does make creative and economic sense: better safe than sorry; better to shoot too much than too little, and have to go back a couple of months later and shoot additional footage. One might also say that since Spielberg only had two months to write the screenplay before shooting began, and he was working from enormous piles of Kubrick's papers, then he didn't have time to properly edit it beforehand. And if you take into account that the screenplay that exists at the beginning of a film's production is usually nothing like the screenplay that exists at its end--most scenes are shot multiple times, with different dialogue, different character readings and motivations, etcetera--then there's got to be a good deal of footage that's left out, out of necessity.

[Porkchop]

Originally posted by Prospero
Porkchop: if the scenes cut from the screenplay don't involve visual effects shots, then the cost of shooting them and cutting them later isn't nearly as much. So it actually does make creative and economic sense:

No, I still don't think it does. It costs tens of thousands of dollars a day just to shoot a plain dialogue scene with full cast and crew. Producers don't take that lightly. They don't go into a production with a massively bloated script and plan to cut it down in post. And Spielberg, aside from being one of the few Hollywood directors who fairly consistently shoots under budget and ahead of schedule, is also a very economical story-teller. I find it very hard to believe he wrote in and shot 90 minutes worth of extraneous, non-story-driven scenes.

I don't have any idea how much was cut out of A.I., but I can see there being maybe 20-30 minutes of deleted scenes, at the absolute top end. They might start with a 3-hour script and cut a half hour out of it. Scenes that don't work, that break the pace, that end up being unnecessary, or whatever. But not 90 minutes. No way.

[Prospero]

Porkchop: I don't see what your point of contention is.

If it is about the running time of the deleted scenes, we can't know that--I'm just telling you what the article said, and you can take that for what it's worth.

If it is about the content of the deleted scenes, and whether they're necessary: I read at least two articles about the film in which the actors described the scenes they shot that were deleted (Law claimed that Spielberg's final edit focused exclusively on David, at the expense of the development of the other major characters, and O'Connor, especially, repeatedly claimed that her own character was butchered in the final edit). I think they would have helped the film a lot, but that's my opinion.

If you are claiming that films or great directors in Hollywood never go into production with screenplays that are significantly longer and/or different than the film's final cut, then the shooting and editing histories of films such as Das Boot, The Shining, Natural Born Killers, Titanic, Brazil, the Godfather trilogy, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (which exists in five different cuts), The Thin Red Line, and just about anything with a screenplay by Robert Towne would seem to disprove your point.

[Porkchop]

Originally posted by Prospero
Porkchop: I don't see what your point of contention is.

If it is about the running time of the deleted scenes, we can't know that--I'm just telling you what the article said, and you can take that for what it's worth.

Then I guess that's my point of contention--with the article, and with Entertainment weekly. Not with you.

I don't believe for a second that there's a four-hour cut of A.I., any more than I believe that there's a five-hour cut of Lord of the Rings (or however long those frequent rumours claimed it was). These rumours are almost always flying around and they're almost never true.

I'm not debating that there are possibly some deleted scenes that developed Joe, Monica, or whoever. But 90 minutes worth? Not a chance. No way they shot that much extra, knowing full well they'd have to take it out.

If you are claiming that films or great directors in Hollywood never go into production with screenplays that are significantly longer and/or different than the film's final cut, then the shooting and editing histories of films such as Das Boot, The Shining, Natural Born Killers, Titanic, Brazil, the Godfather trilogy, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (which exists in five different cuts), The Thin Red Line, and just about anything with a screenplay by Robert Towne would seem to disprove your point.

I'm not debating that some films get cut in post-production. But the histories of most of these films you mention don't really support the theory that many big productions are begun with bloated scripts and the plan to cut down later. Das Boot, for example, was shot as a multi-part mini-series for German television, so it was always intended to be long. Brazil was cut by the studio and then the cuts were restored by its director. Close Encounters had extra scenes shot and added AFTER the film's original release. Etc. etc.

The only exception may be James Cameron, who seems to shoot far more than he needs on almost every film. Sometimes at very great cost. It's a good thing his movies work so well and turn their studios such a nice profit. But even in his case, the extended cuts never seem to add more than 30 minutes or so.