Editor's Note: This is the third of three stories on how TV shows are selected for DVD release.
Are those racy "extras" that end up on the DVD releases really just outtakes? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
When the first season of "Desperate Housewives" is released on DVD (on Sept. 20), it will include a scene of Edie (Nicollette Sheridan) coming out of a bathroom after a rendezvous with the hit man (Richard Roundtree) who, at one point, meant to kill her.
It's a scene creator/executive producer Marc Cherry told the director not to bother shooting because the episode was already too long. But the director thought it was funny and Cherry acquiesced.
He got a call from the set telling him that while Edie was supposed to be wrapped in a towel, "Nicollette wants to wear underwear." Cherry hesitated, then said OK. "I didn't realize just how skimpy her underwear was until I saw the scene. It was a real easy call for me to make because we didn't need it for the plot and it was a little too skimpy, and we were long. I censored that one."
Which is just the sort of thing we see on DVD releases, although that wasn't Cherry's intention. "I literally hadn't thought about it until you said that, but it's probably worth a couple of extra DVDs — sure."
At the other end of the spectrum is "Las Vegas." The DVD release of its first season was loaded with "stuff that we weren't allowed to show on network TV," said creator/executive producer Gary Scott Thompson. "I mean, we have strip clubs. We have wet T-shirt contests. We have a lot of stuff like that. And most of it was just things that Standards and Practices would not allow us to air. And I think we put about five or six minutes worth back in that I personally thought helped the show."
So, did Thompson intentionally film material he knew would never make it on NBC — racy footage intended for the DVD release? "Yes," he admitted.
That's not the only difference in the thought process of the two show runners. For Cherry, DVDs are an afterthought. "I'm not working hard on it, but, yes, it's coming out. They're going to come and get me at some point, and I have to, like, do narration or something," he said. "Since I own a part of the DVD, you know, I will make time. Certainly, the focus of my day-to-day job is just trying to get the script out for my actors so that they have good words to say."
Thompson, on the other hand, was not only thinking DVD from day one, but he personally called studio executives to push for the "Las Vegas" release. "It takes someone like me who comes from features — I did this little movie called 'The Fast and the Furious' that was huge on DVD," Thompson said. "And so I knew that there was a huge market out there for this. I knew I had extra footage. I knew my cast was willing to do extras. I knew we could do a lot, so I made the initial phone call and said, 'Hey, let's do this.'
But do the outtakes and extras and commentaries help sell DVDs? Maybe . . . maybe not. 'The Simpsons' . . . was a tremendous creative investment on the part of Matt Groening. He wanted to put a commentary on every single episode," said David Naylor, president of The DVD Group. "And it just went through the roof."
"We've all done a lot of research on that . . . and we all come away with different opinions," said Marc Rashba, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment's vice president of catalog marketing. "In the end, we sort of come from a position now that you really have to get it right the first time out and really deliver to fans what they sort of would expect."
But providing or producing extra segments can be cost-prohibitive. It isn't always easy to provide those extras for older shows — stars, writers and producers may have passed away and outtakes and other material may have been lost or destroyed. "You do get into an issue where it's very costly," Rashba said. "Actually, it's a lot more expensive to go back into an older show and dig this stuff up . . . "
"If it's a new show, it's a much easier proposition. If it's an older show, you have to do a lot more digging."
And sometimes finding unexpected stuff in unexpected places. "Typically, all that exists is the finished program," Brownstein said. "Now, in the case of 'The Richard Pryor Show,' from '78, we found three-quarter-inch outtakes in the director's garage. He had saved them in a box."
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com