Sunday, December 5, 2010

Deleted Scenes from The Town

According to the always reliable IMDB, the original cut of Ben Affleck's The Town was four-hours long. Clearly, this wasn't going to be workable, so the movie was trimmed to a more accessible 125 minutes. Given the movie's faithful rendition of Boston and the overall tone, I think we can easily imagine what those extra 115 minutes may be:
  • Four separate scenes totaling 20 minutes of the gang cursing the ineptitude of the Red Sox bullpen and its use by manager Terry Francona. In one of the intermediate cuts, these scenes were edited down to a montage of Affleck repeatedly saying "re-tah-ded" for a full minute.
  • A fifteen minute scene of Affleck driving his enormous Avalanche SUV around Charlestown trying to find street parking in the evening. Sample dialogue: "Another fucking hydrant! Motherfucker!"
  • A ten-minute wordless and completely unexplained scene of Jon Hamm thougtfully sipping scotch and smoking a cigarette in his FBI office scored to a medley of 1964 pop hits.
  • A five-minute sequence of the Rebecca Hall yuppie character walking with Affleck's townie character in Whole Foods. Affleck continuously asks what things are and whether people really pay so much for that shit.
  • A ten-minute montage sequence showing Chris Cooper's participation in the annual Mooks vs. Micks softball game at MDC-Walpole.
  • Fifteen different scenes totaling five minutes of cops either going in or hanging out at Dunkin' Donuts that were to be used as bumpers between scenes. Once the film was cut down to two hours, they went with only the aerial shots instead.
  • A rambling ten minute barroom discussion where the gang agrees that, while they are not at all gay, they totally would blow Tom Brady.
  • Ten more minutes of Affleck working out to show how buff he got for this film.
  • Fifteen minutes of the gang stuck in traffic on Memorial Drive coming back from a job in Cambridge. Luckily for them, the cops are stuck as well.
  • Fifteen minutes of Ben Affleck running down Lou Merloni's career in front of the gang, just to be a dick.
Clearly, the movie benefited from deleting this scenes. I'm sure we can look forward to seeing them eventually on the director's cut DVD.