The ‘Dirtier Cut’ of Norm Macdonald’s ‘Dirty Work’ Has Been Painstakingly Restored

Good news for cinephiles: Film archivists have been hard at work restoring a famous director’s original vision for a movie that many of us thought had been lost forever. No, it’s not Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, or Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, or even the version of Batman Forever where Bruce Wayne stares down a giant bat puppet. We’re talking about the 1998 Norm Macdonald vehicle Dirty Work.

Directed by Bob Saget, Dirty Work tells the story of two buddies/secret brothers who start a “revenge for hire” business in order to pay for their dad’s heart surgery. The movie, as it was released, was still pretty crude. Like, it literally opens with a kid pranking a child molester with Krazy Glue.

And then there’s this scene, presented without comment:

But the original cut of the film was far more vulgar. The studio insisted on removing any R-rated material from Dirty Work in order to secure a more box office-friendly PG-13 rating. Unfortunately, the movie bombed anyway, and according to co-star Chevy Chase, “all the great stuff” from the script was left on the cutting room floor.

In 2021, hundreds of fans signed a Change.org petition calling for the release of the fabled lost edit of Dirty Work. And prior to his death, Saget claimed that he was attempting to put together an R-rated cut of Dirty Work in Macdonald’s honor, restoring seven minutes of footage, including a scene involving donuts and genitals. But obviously that never happened. 

Well, now the folks at Vinegar Syndrome, the “film restoration and distribution company” that previously went to great lengths to revitalize Trey Parker’s Cannibal! The Musical, have just announced that they have achieved the near-impossible, and pieced together the original “Dirtier Cut” of Dirty Work, which will be released on Blu-ray and 4K UHD this June. 

This was no small feat, either. Although the Dirty Work footage still existed in MGM’s vast archives, there were no intermediate film elements. Meaning that in order to track down the exact takes from Saget’s first cut, they had to use a video workprint of the film, determine the timecode for each missing scene, pull the corresponding film footage from the studio vaults, and edit it all into the existing theatrical cut.

“Seven or eight minutes of footage doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s hundreds of feet of film,” Vinegar Syndrome archivist Oscar Becher told IndieWire. “We had to find those hundreds in what would essentially be hundreds of thousands of feet.”

While just having the footage wouldn’t allow the team to perfectly recreate the timing of the “Dirtier” cut, luckily co-writer Frank Sebastiano stumbled upon an old VHS tape containing a recording of a theatrical preview screening of the R-rated version “This was from a preview in a mall or something. It was basically for George Folsey, the editor, to have a reference point for how things played at the screening,” Sebastiano explained. This served as an “important guide” for the restoration.

It seems doubtful that Screwed will get the same level of care and attention.