3 weeks ago
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Thanks to the magic of independent movie theaters devoted to revival screenings and the like, it’s possible to see some real rarities on the big screen here in Los Angeles. This includes the long-fabled R-rated version of Dirty Work, the 1998 comedy starring Norm Macdonald and directed by Bob Saget, which played at Brain Dead Studios on Sunday, June 22nd — the L.A. premiere of The Dirtier Cut.
Dirty Work was Macdonald’s ill-fated effort to become an Adam Sandler-esque comedy star in the aftermath of being fired from Saturday Night Live — in the movie, he plays a down-on-his-luck guy named Mitch, who creates a revenge-for-hire business with his best friend Sam (Artie Lange), after the two of them suddenly need a large chunk of cash to get Sam’s dad Pops (Jack Warden) a heart transplant.
tThe screening, organized by local nonprofit Hollywood Entertainment, featured some introductory remarks from Dirty Work co-writer Frank Sebastiano, who opened by noting that “there’s way too many women here for this to seem like a Dirty Work screening.” (I was not the sole member of my gender represented, it’s true, though there weren’t quite enough of us for there to be anything close to a line for the restroom.)
The original Dirty Work was released as a PG-13 movie, only earning $10 million at the box office off a $13 million budget — the kind of performance that makes you a cult favorite to the right person, but an unlikely candidate for this sort of restoration. “Because the movie bombed, I didn’t think there would ever be any reason that anybody would go to all the trouble that they did to to put this thing back together like this,” Sebastiano said.
The Dirtier Cut, Sebastiano made clear to the crowd, is not a director’s cut or “the exact cut that the writers wanted.” What happened was that the filmmakers submitted the original cut to the MPAA in the hopes of getting a PG-13, and were told “we have no notes for you, because this is so far from getting a PG-13 — you have to cut it.” After that, a PG-13 cut and an R-rated cut were screened separately for test audiences, and years later, Sebastiano happened to rediscover a VHS tape of the R-rated version, which the restoration team was able to use as a guide for their work.
On a technical level, The Dirtier Cut is close to seamless in its integration of new material with the original: Producer Justin LaLiberty of Vinegar Syndrome, which oversaw the restoration, told the crowd before Sebastiano spoke that the challenge with this project had nothing to do with “the integrity of the archival materials. It was that the material didn’t really exist in the way that we would expect it to, because this version was never commercially released.”
Because there wasn’t an uncut negative of this version, they were consulting with Sebastiano’s VHS tape and requesting the negative dailies of different dialogue takes of “people talking about cocks and stuff,” LaLiberty said. “It is probably the most amount of time and effort two companies have ever put into bringing back dick jokes, and I’m so proud of that.”
What’s striking about The Dirtier Cut is that as Sebastiano promised in his introduction, “we really worked hard to get an R with no nudity. We didn’t say ‘fuck’ once. It was really just about imagery. The language was not that bad. Jack Warden did say ‘cock’ and maybe he said ‘dyke,’ so there were a couple of things, but it was mostly just imagery. There were some visuals that are coming back to me, but they weren’t overtly sexual. They were weirdly sexual.”
Beyond the slightly spicier language, some of the new material added includes:
- When Mitch tells the frat guys “Now you go back to doing something latently homoerotic!”, the movie cuts to the two frat guys exchanging a (vaguely) homoerotic handshake/arm bump, as it does in the original. Then, the camera pulls out further to reveal a bunch of frat pledges in their underwear, passing a carrot back and forth using their mouths.
- Rather than being just a little bit oblique about why Mitch is afraid of being in prison, you get to hear Macdonald repeat the phrase “anal rape” more than once before being taken away by his fellow prisoners.
- He also is a lot more blunt in the aftermath of that scene. As Sebastiano said in his introduction, “You’re going to get to see it without some of the awkward dubbing when Norm’s in jail. Maybe you didn’t even realize how that scene supposed to play.”
- Before settling on their revenge business, one of the jobs that Mitch and Sam try out involves working at a 1-900 number…*
- *Okay, kids, in the days before OnlyFans, if you wanted to give a human being some money so that you could hear them say sexy stuff to you, you could use your telephone to call a special phone number where sex workers would say sexy stuff to you. It’d cost a few bucks a minute.
- The phone sex line Mitch and Sam end up working at is for gay men. Mitch doesn’t prove to be a success at the gig.
- The movie’s big reveal — that Pops is also Mitch’s father — leads to some additional jokes about the relationship between Mitch’s mom and Pops… But honestly nothing quite as filthy as Pops telling Sam that it wasn’t adultery, because Sam’s mom took the picture.
The original theatrical version of Dirty Work had a runtime of 82 minutes — The Dirtier Cut is 83 minutes long, despite adding seven extra minutes of footage. The discrepancy in runtime comes from the fact that for the theatrical release, they had to add in alternative takes and other cut material to pad the original version out enough. This includes the sequence involving Arturo Gil from The Man Show and Rebecca Romijn as two circus performers (Romijn as the circus’s resident bearded lady), which does not exist in The Dirtier Cut. It was something the writers originally dropped “for taste,” according to Sebastiano: “It was my scene. It just didn’t work.” And without question, you don’t miss it.
By avoiding F-bombs and gags that would without question catapult the movie into R-rated territory, it’s pretty remarkable how much of The Dirtier Cut really is just dirty in the mind: a testament to how much stricter the MPAA was about comedies in the 1990s than they are today — there’s a lot in the new version that probably would squeak by the MPAA in 2025.
Personally, I feel like the filthiest joke in the entire movie is Mitch and Sam reflecting on their newly-revealed status as half-brothers: Mitch laughing about how in the 5th grade, he snuck a peek at Sam’s sister’s underwear, and “Hey, no no! I was sneaking a peek at my own sister’s underwear!” and Sam pointing out “And then remember in the 12th grade, you had sex with her?” That joke, of course, is in the theatrical version. As Sebastiano said, “there’s a crazy amount of stuff they let go through when I think about it, actually.”
According to Sebastiano, the creative aim with Dirty Work was to make a mainstream hit, something closer to the Happy Madison school of comedy that was just taking off at that point in time. (Adam Sandler’s cameo as Satan remains a highlight of the film, in either version.) “That was the model we were following,” he said. “We just did not have it figured out quite as well as Adam and Tim Hurley did. We didn’t want it to be some cult thing. But I’m so glad that people are seeing it now.”
Look for more information about Dirty Work: The Dirtier Cut on the Vinegar Syndrome website beginning July 1st (when it should once again be available for sale).
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