In the first deleted scene, Lillian and Julia are onboard of the S.S.Majestic in 1923. The ship’s orchestra plays “Over the Waves”. Confetti floats through the air. The main deck filled with departing passengers and their friends. Lillian and Julia spot their socialite friend Anne Marie and her brother Sammy (played by an exaggerated John Glover). They have a quick chat until the siblings move off.

Clover’s character has little do in the film as well, except for a flashback scene in which he meets with Lilian in a bar. Being heavily intoxicated, he defends his sister’s frivolous antics and lets Lilian in on his secret that he slept with his own sister on his graduation day – trying to prove his point that Anne Marie does have feelings. As the conversation quickly moves to Sammy telling Lilian that “everybody knows about her relationship with Julia”, she ends his drunken brawl with a slap to the face before flipping his table. The scene can be watched on Youtube, in case you want to know why I described Clover’s peformance as exaggerated.

The Sardi scene – the first in the film that introduces Anne Marie, features a much longer conversation between her and Lillian. People moving in and out to congratulate her, staying a moment or two, then moving off. But Annie Marie has invaded Lillian and is kneeling at her side and is carrying on conversation, despite interruptions by Lillian’s well-wishers. Part of her conversation was later dubbed into the film’s second scene in the bar, starting with “I tried to see Julia in Vienna, but she wouldn’t see me, can you imagine?” Her scene closes with Anne Marie complimenting Lillian: “I am so happy for you, you look so slim, and now you’re famous, too, Lilly. And to think, you nearly became an architect.”

In the film’s second scene – a small New York hotel cocktail lounge in 1937 – they do not originally talked about Julia being in Vienna, but about Lillian’s second play, which failed to find an audience. The scene is rather short, and depsite dialogue being switched, it remains almost faithful to what we see in the film. Streep herself has later confirmed how her character and dialogue was mangled in the final version, and how disappointed she was left after seeing her motion picture debut: “When I saw myself on screen for the first time, I was horrified. I had a bad wig and they took the words from a scene I shot with Jane and put them in my mouth in a different scene. I thought, I’ve made a terrible mistake, no more movies. I hate this business.”

The first deleted scene that has survived through production stills is Doris’ dramatic entrance in the emergency room after Suzanne’s stomach has been pumped. She announces herself as Suzanne’s mother, making sure everyone knows she is not a bad mother, before starting to reminiscence about previous movie roles. The majority of the scenes cut from the final film take place in the drug clinic that Suzanne enters after her overdose and the bond she makes with fellow inmates Aretha, Sam and Bart (the two men singing a tribute to Doris later) and a couple others. In what would have been a hilarious addition to the film, Suzanne and the patients spend time in the tv room watching “The Outer Limits”, before someone switches the channel to a re-run of an appearance by Suzanne on “Late Night with David Letterman”. Suzanne objects to watching this year-old appearance, but her new friends watch on as Suzanne talks about her first and second husband – which means she came just out of a divorce or separation before her trip to the drug clinic. There’s no picture evidence that Streep and Letterman really filmed this scene, and, to my knowledge, neither of them ever mentioned it.

In the script, the scene with Suzanne’s agent Marty Wiener, played by Gary Morton, doesn’t exist. The scene takes place in the clinic between Doris, Suzanne and Julie Marsden, played by CCH Pounder, Suzanne’s drug counselor, who was in conversation with the production company of her upcoming film. The first act at the drug center ends with a cut scene that featured John Cusack as a new resident in the clinic. He is decribed as an 18-year-old with bad skin and hair who looks “moderately insane”. Mark pushes Suzanne on a swing in the park and tells her that he was in prison with Charles Manson. He swings Suzanne higher into the sky which then descends right down to the first day on the movie set, “L.A. Beat”, which is reminiscent to Carrie Fisher’s 1986 film “Hollywood Vice Squad”. Most of her direct scenes with on-screen partner Robert Munch, played by Michael Ontkean, have been altered. In the script, Suzanne prepares for a scene in a parking lot instead of hanging from a building. A car chase was later reshoot as a boat chase. Between the scene of Suzanne’s first day on set and driving home to her surprise party features a scene with Doris chatting to people on the movie set while waiting to pick up her daughter.

After Doris’ performance at the party, a scene was cut when Suzanne has an unfortunate meeting with her father, Tony Vale, played by Jerry Orbach. Jack climbed a tree and hid in her room to not run into Doris. While Suzanne is happy to see her dad, he turns out to be another unfortunate character in her life, and judging from his dialogue, a rather creepy one as well. Tony only shows up when he needs something from Suzanne, in this instance the keys to her New York apartment because he has lost his place. Once he starts blaming her for believing what her mother told her about him, their conversation runs dry and Tony opts out.

Originally, the conversation about Suzanne’s birthday party and Doris’ twirled up skirt in the kitchen right after Dennis Quaid’s Jack picks up Suzanne at her parent’s house. It can be assumed that the kitchen scene was reshoot to use the dialogue for the later scene, which was quite grim and sobering in the script. The kitchen scene is followed by Jack and Suzanne driving to Jack’s apartment. He mentions that he didn’t know Doris Mann was her mother and how it feels to have a famous mom, to which Suzanne replies: “Compared to what? When I didn’t have a mother that was a movie star – when I had a normal mother and said ‘naw – this is so blah – can’t we go with something that has a little bit more pizzazz?”

Meryl Streep was supposed to sing Carly Simon’s “Have You Seen Me Lately?” over the title credits. One reason the song was not used, Ms. Simon told The New York Times, was that Carrie Fisher, felt it was too soft and emotional to fit the sensibility of the lead character. Another was that Mike Nichols, who directed the film, was unhappy with the front credits and decided to remove them. “The song is about shame, about hiding something and being very self-conscious about it and imagining everyone is noticing,” Ms. Simon said. “In the film, of course, that something was drugs. The two images that I pulled out that I thought were generic enough were dream images of being naked and dancing in a church choir and of being caught with one’s hand in a cookie jar. It’s a dreamy, insecure song.”