Alternate TV version?


"Buster and Billie" has been on my to-see list for eons, but it's not an easy movie to find (thank you, Sony). Just saw it for the first time last night.

But now that I've seen it, I'm confused about something. Digging around the newspaper archive, I discovered the movie premiered on ABC in March 1976 and topped the Neilsen Ratings for the week, with an estimated 19.5 million viewers. The full-length movie runs just under 100 minutes; 100 mins was also the standard running time for a TV movie in 1976 minus commercials. There was a lot of footage that could not have been included in the TV broadcast, between the nudity, profanity and sexual content. I'm sure profanity was dubbed out (ridiculously, no doubt) and the other sex scenes were dwindled down to nothing but I dunno how they could have possibly cut around Billie's bare breast after she was raped -- that scene was too crucial to the story to be cut unless there was an alternate scene where she was covered or alternate angles on the boys. And furthermore, with all the footage that had to be excised, it would leave the movie running around 10+ minutes short of network running time.

Since the movie itself feels choppy at times (I mean, Whitey practically vanishes mid-movie and some segments don't quite flow), I just wondered if perhaps an alternate version which substituted deleted scenes was recut for TV -- since that was a fairly common practice at the time.

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I have the DVD version now, and yes, I do remember seeing the chopped up version on TV for years!
Dini

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