Blue Velvet: The Lost Footage

Not a standalone film but a fifty-one-minute assembly of the lost scenes from Blue Velvet. Lynch first cut the film together at three hours and twenty-eight minutes; his contract required two hours, so everything else came out and the excised material disappeared. After Dino De Laurentiis died and his companies were sold, its trail went cold entirely. The material turned up in a Seattle warehouse in 2010. Lynch went over it and finished it, and the fifty-one minutes and forty-two seconds went onto Blu-ray in 2011, later carried over to the Criterion edition. It contains Jeffrey's college life, a longer version of Dorothy's stage career, and supporting characters who vanished from the film altogether. Mostly the scenes explain why the film got shorter: the dread comes apart as it lengthens. Who it is for: viewers who have watched Blue Velvet many times and want to see how the cutting decisions were made. Who it is not for: anyone who has not seen the film. This is supplementary material, not a film; watched alone it has no story and the scenes do not connect.