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Deleted and moved scenes

The shooting script – which has been published as a book (ISBN 1-55704-610-7) – and early drafts contain a fair amount of material that was either left on the cutting room floor or never shot.

A major change that came in editing was that the sequence of scenes where Joel and Clementine are shown (re)meeting in Montauk and then going to the Charles River got moved from near the end of the movie to the beginning. According to the Kaufman interview published with the shooting script, this was done to make sure the audience liked Clementine, as without it, their initial impression of her, based upon scenes from the end of Joel and Clem's first relationship, might have been too negative.

Dropped scenes included dialogue on the train, dialogue in Clementine's apartment, scenes with Joel and Naomi (the girlfriend he had before Clementine, portrayed by Ellen Pompeo), Joel in the Lacuna office describing his negative feelings about Clementine in more detail, and scenes showing Joel and Clementine on their first "date". The dialogue from the deleted Lacuna office scene is used later, when he is listening to a tape of himself describing Clementine's personality flaws, and brief moments of the cut scene showing their first "date" are mixed in with the jumble of memories Joel sees of Clementine as the erasure process comes to an end. In fact, much of the content of the film was moved around in editing. A fair amount of scenes were changed on-the-spot by director Michel Gondry, including scenes showing the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in the streets of Manhattan. Another dropped scene was one that took place in a bar where a very drunk Clementine tried to make Joel jealous by coming onto another man (which might have prompted Joel's claim in his taped interview with Mierzwiak that Clementine was very promiscuous). Another deleted scene that appears in the special two-disc DVD set is an extended scene in the doctor's office when Mary Svevo is listening to the tape of her file. Mary is saying in the tape why she should have the procedure done, especially after having to get an abortion. Yet another showed Joel and Clementine reading the mystery novel "The Red Right Hand" together on his couch (which is the novel we see Clementine reading in the diner at Montauk where she and Joel (re)meet for the first time.