The 3-Hour Version of ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles,’ Explained

Planes, Trains and Automobiles may be the most beloved Thanksgiving film of all time, pitting the comedy stylings of Steve Martin and John Candy against one another in a true odyssey of misadventures for an hour and 33 minutes. But did you know there was originally a version of the 1987 film that measured in at more than three hours?

Due to extensive rewrites from writer-director John Hughes throughout the 85 days of filming, the shooting draft of the script, which is available online, grew to a whopping 165 pages long.

In a 2019 interview with Pro Video Coalition, editor Paul Hirsch revealed how he and Hughes cut film down to size.

“So we actually took out more than we left in,” Hirsch revealed at the time, explaining that Hughes would rewrite scenes the night before they were shot, resulting in them getting “longer and longer.”

“They shot for 85 days,” Hirsch continued, explaining that due to a threatened directors’ strike that same year, there was a tight deadline for the principal photography of the project. “We’d go to dailies each day for 4 months and often we’d see three hours of dailies. One day I turned to the crew and said, ‘We just watched more dailies in one day than the whole film can run.’ And that went on for 17 weeks!” he recalled.

In order to cut the film down, there were entire subplots that had to be dropped, Hirsch went on, including one about Neal’s (Martin) wife not believing that he really was with Del (Candy), suspecting that he was out with other women.

“There were scenes of [Neal’s wife Susan (Laila Robins)] and her mother talking about the marriage. I went through this with John and he was like, ‘Take it out. Take it out. Take it out,’” Hirsch recalled, adding that in one pass of the movie, they took out a third of what they had shot.

Getting the film down to about two hours, Hirsch said he was confident that it was “one of the funniest movies ever made” going into the first preview, until he saw people walking out of the screening. “I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. I was completely blindsided and I thought, ‘How could this be?’” he recalled.

Ultimately, after previewing the film several more times, they figured out that because the subplot of Neal and Del mixing up their credit cards had been cut for seeming “too complicated,” audiences thought Del was a “freeloader” and started to dislike both his character and Neal’s for “being so easily manipulated.”

“So we found a moment at one of the train stations where Candy tells Steve, ‘Give me your address and I’ll send you some money,’” the editor recalled. “When we put that back in, that was it. It just turned everything around. They stopped hating Candy and they stopped hating Steve.”

While fans of Planes, Trains and Automobiles might hope to see the original three-hour version of the film somewhere, Paramount Pictures’ Bob Buchi told Vanity Fair that the footage has unfortunately been lost to time.

“In that era when the film was made, it was really commonplace within the industry to discard all the trims and outs—which is so unfortunate, but it was just the common practice,” Buchi admitted.