BLUE VELVET’S BLU-RAY RELEASE TO INCLUDE 50 MINUTES OF DELETED SCENES AND BLOOPER REEL
Blue Velvet … 50 minutes of never-before-seen footage have been re-edited, supervised by David Lynch, into an extra on a new DVD
“I’ve got to find the flaming nipple!” No, it’s not a line from a David Lynch script. That’s the man himself, reacting to the news last year that missing footage from Blue Velvet had been rediscovered. For years, Lynch-heads and film historians had speculated about the whereabouts of the deleted scenes: footage left on the cutting room floor after Lynch snipped his three-and-a-half-hour rough cut into a two-hour movie. Time passed and everyone – director included – figured it was lost for ever. As for the flaming nipple (nipples, in fact), they belong to a dropped scene. “That’s one of my favourite scenes,” Lynch said in an interview for the book Lynch on Lynch. Why cut it and (metaphorically speaking) kill his baby? “It was too much of a good thing.”
The man who found the deleted scenes is movie sleuth and champion of lost causes, Darren Gross, who works in MGM’s technical services department (which archives, preserves, restores and remasters the studio’s movies). The detective work is a labour of love, “a side-project”, says Gross on the phone from his office in LA. For a couple of years he chased down Blue Velvet leads, trawling inventories of companies that had owned the film before MGM. He was close to abandoning the mission when, last September, he located all the missing material (including “pretty much pristine” negatives) gathering dust in a warehouse in Seattle. “For an independent producer, it’s unusual that all of this stuff has survived,” he explains. “Why keep hundreds of boxes and pay the storage? So, often they just throw them away. That happens a lot.”
Perhaps producer Dino de Laurentiis had an idea someone would come looking for Blue Velvet. It was the most talked-about, most polarising movie of 1986. Some critics were appalled by Dennis Hopper’s freakishly sadistic nitrous-oxide huffing psychopath Frank and his relationship with Isabella Rossellini’s masochistic sex slave. JG Ballard considered it the best movie of the 80s – “without a doubt”. There’s a clip on YouTube of a TV interview with Lynch at the time, the presenter trying to engage him on the controversy: “Do you think you are a genius or a really sick person?” That really tickles him. “Well Valerie I don’t know,” he answers, all wholesome aw-shucks-ness.
Altogether, 50 minutes of never-before-seen footage have been re-edited – supervised by Lynch – into an extra on a new DVD celebrating the film’s 25th anniversary (available early next year in the UK).
The flaming nipple scene will open the new footage on the DVD, giving audiences more of Hopper in what is possibly his scariest performance – in a career of scary performances. (He phoned Lynch, not long out of rehab: “David, I love this script. I am Frank.”) The action unfolds in a bar where Frank threatens a man who has been hanging out with a posse of naked women. On set, one of the actresses happened to show Lynch a trick she had for setting her nipples on fire with a match. He liked it so much he filmed it and gave her the closing line: “Motherfucker, you’re really going up in flames this time!” Clearly it’s Blue Velvet: The Director’s Cut that the diehards want to see. But Lynch never revises his work. What’s more, unlike, say, Ridley Scott on Blade Runner, he had the final cut on Blue Velvet (in return for halving his salary and the budget). So Lynch politely declined the opportunity re-edit the movie with the new footage: “I think he thinks of it like sculpture,” explains Gross. “You have to chisel away at it. And it’s heartbreaking to see some of the little pieces go. But the final form is ultimately what he wants to express.” Nor should we expect Blue Velvet: The (Even) Bluer Bits. Flaming nipples aside, the deleted scenes mostly expand on the characters. What surprised Gross were the inclusion of a few bloopers: “There are a couple of really funny outtakes. Only a couple of minutes, but I never thought I’d see a David Lynch outtakes reel.”
As for Lynch, he couldn’t be happier: “It’s like the song Amazing Grace. The footage was lost but now it’s found.”
(via jollyeasyzebra)
