deleted scenes

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

*The previous scene that never was: I must have dreamt that just before Bond (Roger Moore) discovers his contact (Maud Adams) is already dead, I had seen the story of her demise at the hands of* The Man With The Golden Gun.

Just like Alan described in last week’s post, there are movies I first saw long ago that I could swear turn out differently than on recent rewatches. At times, no matter how much research you do, the misremembered version cannot be unearthed: no Director’s Cut has since been released, nor have deleted scenes been found, nor is there footage of such scenes to be found in any image galleries. Nevertheless, I’m certain I’ve seen the scene. Or was it just in my head after all?

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Our recent podcast episode on David Lynch, marking the start of our 2025 series Lost Summer, prompted us to pick up where that episode left of: for two of the films we discussed earlier this month, Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, there are extensive sets of deleted scenes that, if they had not ended up on the cutting room floor, would have made both films into something very different. Sam and Matt watched these scenes – 51 minutes for Blue Velvet, a whopping 91 minutes for Fire Walk With Me – and talk about these and the notion of deleted scenes in general. Would Fire Walk With Me have been a better film if it had included all that material about the town of Twin Peaks, as fans and critics had hoped for when it was released? What can deleted scenes say about the virtues of leaving some things out? How do fan edits, a practice which has become highly accomplished in many cases, figure into this, and into the question of which version of a film is the real deal?

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