This permanent A list mostly movie director who is an Oscar winner/nominee, is wrong.

This movie studio/television company never throws away old film.

They just don’t keep it close at hand.

Much of it is kept in an old salt mine vault.

Barry Levinson

Good Morning, Vietnam

Barry Levinson reveals that Robin Williams was ‘struggling’ during making of ‘Good Morning, Vietnam’

Earlier this year, the internet’s collective mind was blown by the viral rumor that we were denied an NC-17 rated cut of the 1993 Robin Williams favorite Mrs. Doubtfire. That bubble was inevitably burst by the movie’s director, Chris Columbus, who noted that the comedian’s improvised on-set riffing occasionally got R-rated, but never crossed into NC-17 territory occupied by movies like Showgirls. Likewise, Good Morning, Vietnam director Barry Levinson tells Yahoo Entertainment that there’s only one version of his seminal collaboration with Williams… and it’s the R-rated cut that premiered in theaters on Dec. 23, 1987.

“It’s odd in a way, because Robin could certainly go off on any topic at a moment’s notice,” Levinson says of the late actor, who died in 2014. “Certainly, there was more material than we could have ever possibly have used. But I don’t remember language being an issue at all, to be honest with you.” Much of that extra material comes from the movie’s best-remembered scenes, when Williams — playing real-life Vietnam War-era DJ Adrian Cronauer — is seated in front of a microphone, tossing off one-liners and racing through hilarious impressions while his co-stars, including Forrest Whitaker and Robert Wuhl, repeatedly crack up. “I’d love to see what the heck was in those outtakes,” Levinson says. “I haven’t seen any of them since we made the movie.”

Unfortunately, the director isn’t able to head to the Buena Vista archives to see if there’s any X-rated material: Levinson believes that the defunct distributor — which has since been folded into its parent company, Walt Disney Studios — destroyed the negatives at some point in the recent past. “There was a period where they were getting rid of what you might call the extraneous footage. I think there’s some stuff left from Good Morning, but I know that when I asked about one of my earlier films, Tin Men, they said they had destroyed everything.” – Source


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