Collider The Original 2 1/2 Hour Long Version Of The First Wives Club Tested Poorly By Rance Collins Jan. 3, 2025
Every movie fan has their lost ark. Part of the joy of being a film buff, after all, is discovery. The movie fans that were raised in the ’00s had the unique pleasure of DVD special features, where they could stumble upon audio commentaries, documentaries and — if lucky — deleted scenes. But in 1996, the movie aficionado’s ultimate home video format had not yet been established, and while cumbersome laser discs offered something a little more exclusive, movie-only VHS tapes were the truth, the light, and the way. All of this is to say that one of that year’s most popular films has never had its cut scenes released, even as anniversaries have come and gone. Had it hit retail shelves just a couple of years later, its deleted scenes might have all made it to YouTube by now. But alas, the sequences are a mystery. Which means that the footage cut from The First Wives Club is a true Ark of the Covenant, especially considering that somewhere buried within the scenes is a performance by none other than Jon Stewart. Yes, that, Jon Stewart, who was a fairly prolific actor long before he landed The Daily Show.
The First Wives Club already has one of the starriest cast of the ’90s. Beyond its above-the-title leads — the legendary Diane Keaton, Bette Midler and Goldie Hawn — it has appearances by Maggie Smith, Sarah Jessica Parker, Stockard Channing, Victor Garber, Marcia Gay Harden, Elizabeth Berkley, Eileen Heckart, and Rob Reiner. Heather Locklear and Gloria Steinem have cameos. J.K. Simmons and Timothy Olyphant are along for the ride before they were famous. This is a film packed with star power. It also clocks in at a tight 103 minutes, piling on comedic sequences with heavy doses of female empowerment, and sends audiences off with one of the great musical numbers of all time, as Keaton, Midler and Hawn defiantly declare, “You Don’t Own Me.” The concoction lit the box office on fire upon its September 1996 release, becoming the sleeper hit of the year with over $180 million at the box office. The road to becoming a certified hit, however, was bumpy.
Jon Stewart’s Scenes in ‘The First Wives Club’ “Stopped the Movie”
The First Wives Club is chock-full of now-iconic moments. There is hardly a more meme-able line, for instance, than when Goldie Hawn waves a champagne glass and spits out, “I do have feelings. I’m an actress. I have all of them.” Hawn’s character Elise Eliot might have shown a few more emotions in the original cut of the film. In the released cut, Elise simply deals with her ex-husband (Garber), who has left her for the much younger Phoebe (Berkley). Originally, Elise was also finagling with a foxy box toy. In an interview with Vogue, director Hugh Wilson explained that Jon Stewart had been cast in what Wilson described as “a pretty big part.”
“He shot for weeks,” Wilson explained. “But we kept shortening it and shortening it, and one day, John Bloom [the editor] called me and said, ‘We have to cut 40 minutes out of this, and we have to lose the whole Jon Stewart thing.’ And Jon was good, quite good, but it was a B story that might have well been a C story. It just stopped the movie. So I have to say that after John Bloom made the cut, we took the movie out to L.A. and screened it, and everyone loved it.”
Stewart had been a steady presence on screens at this point, even having recently hosted his own late-night talk series, The Jon Stewart Show, on MTV. As an actor, he had recently appeared in the movie Mixed Nuts, and he would soon make guest appearances on sitcoms such as The Nanny, NewsRadio, and Spin City. In 1999, he’d land The Daily Show on Comedy Central and be cemented as a household name with a diverse variety of screen credits to follow.
Test Screenings for ‘First Wives Club’ Went Poorly
The original two-and-a-half-hour version of The First Wives Club certainly sounds enticing for movie fans who have made power suits an essential component of their personality, but Wilson said that cutting 40 minutes did the movie a lot of favors. He explained that the movie was initially a hodgepodge, crafted from a script that “was a conglomerate of a whole bunch of people’s work.” And this Frankenstein-style writing process did not give the creatives behind the scenes much faith in the project.
“I think a friend of [producer] Scott Rudin’s, who was a comedy writer in New York, did the final script, and he had so much confidence in the film that he demanded his name not be in the credits!” Wilson said. “The script was also so long that after we shot it and put it all together, the movie was longer than Gandhi. We started screening it, and I would just have chats with the audience, mostly women, and they said they didn’t think the movie worked, but they wanted it to work. I actually saw the first screening with a friend of mine, [actor] Sam Shepard, and Sam patted me on the back and said, ‘Good luck with that; I’ll see you later.'”
The Musical Ending of ‘The First Wives Club’ That Almost Wasn’t
That classic “You Don’t Own Me” ending almost wasn’t even a part of the movie. Wilson said that the team “never had an ending.” It was Rudin who decided they needed “a good musical number,” and Wilson suggested the Lesley Gore hit. “It’s a great song and the take we used was the last one, just as the sun was coming up out of the river. Goldie was coming down with the flu. And I think Bette broke two heels while shooting that scene.”
The resulting movie, of course, has endured as one of the most popular comedies of all time, and Keaton’s recent passing has seen its legacy revived. Perhaps with its 30th anniversary on the horizon, Paramount will see fit to open up those vaults and finally release the deleted scenes, at least on their own, fans have been itching to see for decades. Until that day, this cinematic Ark of the Covenant remains illusive.
