"BY ITSELF, THE CUT SCENE WAS A GOOD SCENE, BUT IT DID NOT BELONG IN THE FILM"
Fiona Apple would have been about two years old at the time that her father, Brandon Maggart, filmed a couple of scenes as "Cleveland Sam" in Brian De Palma's Dressed To Kill. Maggart had been in the midst of filming his leading role in Lewis Jackson's You Better Watch Out, an Edward R. Pressman production. According to Wikipedia, the toy factory featured in that film "was a real toy factory in New Brunswick owned by Lynn Pressman, mother of the film's executive producer, Edward R. Pressman." Much to Jackson's chagrin, that film was retitled, and now is usually known as "Christmas Evil."
In his 2015 memoir Behind These Eyes Such Sweet Madness Lies (My Life On and Off the Stage), Maggart recalls taking a break from that film to work on Dressed To Kill:
I worked six weeks straight on Christmas Evil, six days a week. During that time, I had a two-day window that I used to work on the film, Dressed To Kill starring Michael Caine, Nancy Allen, and Angie Dickinson, directed by Brian De Palma. I was not in great shape for those two days, but we filmed one short scene and a second long scene with me and Nancy Allen in a hotel room. In the scene, Nancy was playing the hooker, and I was her John… a John who only wanted to talk. I wasn’t aware that the scene had not made the cut until I saw it in a theater. I had nice billing, but my on-screen time was about ten seconds. By itself, the cut scene was a good scene, but it did not belong in the film. Most of the scenes in the film were short and well-paced. Nancy lobbied to have it put back in for the European market but lost to her husband, her director, Brian De Palma.
