In 1998, “Saturday Night Live” colleagues Norm Macdonald, Frank Sebastiano, and Fred Wolf teamed up to write “Dirty Work,” a vehicle for Macdonald in which he played a prankster who put his talents to professional use by opening up a revenge-for-hire business. The comedy, directed by comedian Bob Saget, quickly came and went from theaters but found its audience on home video, where it became a beloved cult classic with famous fans like Kevin Hart, who declared it one of his favorite movies of all time on his “Comedy Gold Minds” podcast.
Yet for the filmmakers, “Dirty Work” always felt like a compromise, because commercial considerations dictated that it be released with a PG-13 rating even though it was written as an R movie. “When we wrote the movie, they told us not to worry about the rating,” Sebastiano told IndieWire. “If we had been a little more experienced, maybe we would have shot some coverage for a TV version or something, but we didn’t do a lot of that.”
When it became clear that the studio wanted “Dirty Work” to go out with a PG-13, the filmmakers voiced their concerns. “During filming, we actually brought it up to one of the executives that it seemed like an R-rated movie, and he said they were going to figure it out later,” Sebastiano said. “He said, ‘Don’t worry about it, we’ll just lock and loop it.’ And that’s what ended up happening.”
Macdonald was never happy that cutting the movie not only lost some of the jokes but also interfered with the comic rhythm. Over the years, he gave interviews alluding to a mythical “dirtier” cut of “Dirty Work” that existed before the version released in theaters. One of the fans who became obsessed with this dirtier version was Oscar Becher, an archivist at physical media label Vinegar Syndrome who counts “Dirty Work” among his favorite films alongside “The Third Man” and Charles Laughton’s “The Night of the Hunter.”
“There were weird moments in the theatrical cut of ‘Dirty Work’ where you could tell that a lot was taken out of it,” Becher told IndieWire. “When I found out there was an earlier cut, it was really a revelation — I realized that even as recently as the 1990s, there are lost films.” Becher convinced the powers that be at Vinegar Syndrome that “Dirty Work” was worthy of a reconstruction and restoration, provided the original elements could be found.
The good news was that rights-holder MGM not only had the original camera negative for “Dirty Work” but also the negatives of the dailies, meaning all the lost footage still existed somewhere in the vaults. The bad news was that there were limited elements when it came to any actual preview or workprint cuts. Becher explained that, ironically, films of that era are sometimes harder to restore lost footage to than older films. While earlier movies typically had film elements for everything, by the late 1990s, workprints were created on video, with time code matched to the negative to produce film prints only very late in the process.
MGM did have a video workprint with timecode that provided a road map to where excised footage would exist in the original negative, and when Vinegar Syndrome reached out to Sebastiano to see if he had anything they could use for extra features he made a crucial discovery: a VHS tape of a preview cut from before the studio and MPAA took their scissors to the movie. “This was from a preview in a mall or something,” Sebastiano said. “It’s shot by a camera in the corner. It was basically for George Folsey, the editor, to have a reference point for how things played at the screening.”
The VHS copy provided an important guide for the restoration team, but it almost didn’t get to them. “I put it into the VCR, and it immediately got stuck,” Sebastiano said. “I got a screwdriver and took the VCR apart, and luckily it didn’t suck the tape up. I threw the VCR out and put it in another machine, a VHS/DVD combo player, and the thing played.”
Using the preview cut, the workprint tape, and a two-hour assembly video they found, Becher and restoration artist Kurtis Spieler began the arduous task of comparing the various versions to the theatrical cut and providing time code to MGM, so that they could retrieve the needed shots from the negative. “Seven or eight minutes of footage doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s thousands of feet of film,” Becher said. “We had to find those thousands in what would essentially be hundreds of thousands of feet.”
“Because the tape versions were works in progress, we could only use them as road maps,” Spieler told IndieWire. “We had to determine what was edited due to content versus what was edited in order to make a tighter movie. This became difficult when narratively things were changed or moved. For example, in the ‘dirtier version,’ the opening sequence is edited differently in order to include a particularly raunchy joke involving donuts. So, I had to figure out how to make those edits while adding the ‘dirtier’ footage and have it all blend seamlessly.”
While reassembling the picture was one task, the sound was a whole other challenge. “I only really had two sound sources to work with, the full 5.1 theatrical mix and the unfinished sound from the ‘dirtier’ rough cut tape,” Spieler said. “We didn’t have access to stems or splits, so there wasn’t really a way to separate anything in the theatrical cut. I had to figure out how to blend unfinished sound from a tape into a full sound mix without it standing out too much.”
Spieler accomplished this through some creative editing and looping sounds from other parts of the movie when needed. “One sequence that I think worked well was during the opera sequence when one of Norm’s audio recordings is played over the speakers in the theatre,” Spieler said. “What was said in the theatrical version was different from what was intended to be said in the ‘dirtier version.’ So, I had to figure out how to blend that line into the theatrical sound and give it the right effects to make it sound like it was coming through the speakers in the theatre.”
The end result of all this work is an extraordinary new physical release that gives “Dirty Work” the deluxe treatment its fans have been waiting for — and then some. The generously appointed package includes both the theatrical and “dirtier” cuts on both 4K UHD and Blu-ray, along with a video-sourced assembly cut featuring an additional half-hour of never-before-seen footage. There are also hours of newly created extra features, from commentary tracks and interviews to a feature-length making-of documentary. It’s one of the most comprehensive special editions Vinegar Syndrome — or any other label — has ever released.
For Sebastiano, the release is a long-delayed validation of his and his partners’ efforts. “At the test screenings, they tested both an R and a PG-13 version, and the R-rated cut did better,” he said. “The studio just determined that it didn’t do better enough to justify releasing it from a business point of view. It was crushing to us at the time because it wasn’t the funniest version of the movie. And Chevy Chase was bummed because he did the movie for a fraction of his asking price just because he liked the script — he did it for the same amount he got paid for his first movie, ‘Foul Play.’ He said, ‘Don’t let them do that to your movie,’ and he was right, but there was nothing we could do.”
The Vinegar Syndrome release stands not only as a vindication for the creators of “Dirty Work,” who are still with us, but as a tribute to those like Macdonald, Saget, and costar Chris Farley, who have passed away since the film’s release.
“I know Norm and Bob both wanted to see the ‘dirtier version’ released for audiences, and it’s an honor to be able to bring this to the public for the first time,” Spieler said. “Even though this was one of the harder projects I personally had to work on, I’m hoping that my work goes unnoticed. I just want the audience to appreciate this version of the film for what it is.”
The 4K UHD special edition of “Dirty Work” is now available on Vinegar Syndrome’s website.
