Here's An Impossibly Stupid Scene That Was Cut From The Concussion Movie

The Hollywood Reporter and found a version of the Concussion script from back in May, before cuts were made to scenes either too much in conflict with a massive business entity like the NFL or too inaccurate, libelous, and badly written to appear in a major motion picture release. (It’s both, obviously.) Anyway, THR published an “explosive” scene that was removed from the movie, and frankly, it’s even dumber than we expected.

Here’s one of the pages THR put up, with the meat of the scene in which Goodell finds out Dave Duerson has killed himself:

Look at that shit! “Good god. Was he symptomatic?” is an AMAZING piece of dialogue. Here’s how Landesman explained the scene to THR:

Landesman says the scene, which was based on a second-hand account, was cut from the shooting script because he “didn’t want to be defamatory.”

Well that’s just good practice. Gotta be careful not to get too defamatory when you’re making up dialogue about Roger Goodell being woken up at midnight to enjoy a meditation about the sublime endurance of the human mind and how fucked they all are.

This is expected, of course, since the meat of the behind-the-scenes NFL maneuvering is by definition conjecture, and any attempt to dramatize it opens itself up to obvious (and probably deserved!) libel claims. Also, this scene is unimaginably bad.

[ THR]