These are a couple of quick moments from the film My Favorite Year which used to be included in the syndicated airings of the movie on television. I don't usually see these scenes in most copies of the film shown now or on DVD.
My father, Art Levinson, was the associate producer and production manager on the film. I was 16 when it was being made and came to visit him on the set at MGM a few times. I was there when the scene with the two lawyers on the terrace was shot, and when the Boss Hijack sketch was shot (during which I sat in the theater next to Adolph Green). The original Hijack sketch that I watched was even longer than the one in the deleted segment. Being at an impressionable age and watching the sketch repeatedly that day, I had it memorized by the time I left the MGM lot. More than 40 years later, I still remember the lines that are missing, even from the extended version. When Hijack says, "Somebody parked in my spot," the two thugs in blue suits walk over to the one in the brown suit. There's an edit there, but originally one of the thugs in blue said, "It's the new guy - Harris." THEN Hijack said, "Move your car." Also, the "Order me breakfast" sequence went like this: HIJACK: "Now I got an appetite. Louie, order me breakfast." LOUIE: "The usual, Boss?" HIJACK: "Yeah. And tell ‘em if they substitute a blueberry muffin for my corn muffin, I’m gonna be very angry. You want anything, Dumplin'?" You can see how Richard Chew's skillful editing eliminated those additional lines seamlessly. But Hijack's line about substituting a blueberry muffin for his corn muffin making him angry explains why we see the steam coming out of his ears when the delivery guy shows up with a blueberry muffin.
I love Mark!! He has an adorable voice!!💙😇 He still has that same adorable smile and laugh he had back then. He is 67 years old now. I really wish to meet him someday!!
Typically alternate edits of movies are shown on television that are different from what played in theaters. Usually, this means shooting scenes with different dialogue that would have too much cursing for network television. But sometimes, and this was especially typical in the 1980s and 90s, they would lengthen the runtime of a movie so that it was easier for a network to fit the movie into a time slot that ended at the top of the hour. They would do that by reinserting scenes that the director had originally decided to cut out. Richard Benjamin apparently thought both these scenes went on too long, so he trimmed them down, but the network that aired My Favorite Year lengthened them out again. This famously happened with the first Star Trek movie, where the version shown on TV was a full 15 minutes longer than the edit that ran in theaters.
Hey Moonlight, thanx for those fascinating tidbits there. I'm a movie buff, but I had no idea about these factoids! Now I somehow have to find the TV version of that first "Star Trek" movie, with those extra 15 minutes! Danke again.
I ran a cinema when this movie was in first run, and I watched it several times. The elevator scene and the extended Boss Hijack sketch were not in the original run.
OMG! After seeing these scenes, and then ever seeing them again, I convinced myself I dream-created them and would never find them 'in reality'. Bless you and thank you.
The test audiences so loved O'Toole they wanted to see more of him and less of the others in the film. the deleted scenes with O'Toole ( such as him with the 2 stewardesses) were added in and other scenes without him were deleted.
