In 1986, Sam Kinison was riding high. Years after trying to make it in the comedy world, he’d received exposure a year earlier from his appearance in The 9th Annual Young Comedians Special, hosted by Rodney Dangerfield, which led to a memorable cameo alongside the comedy legend in the movie Back to School. Kinison seemed to do no wrong and even appeared six times on Saturday Night Live in just 2 years.
But 1986 may also have been the year his thoughts about being an actor began to change. That year, he was cast in Three Amigos, John Landis’s cult classic Western comedy starring Chevy Chase, Steve Martin, and Martin Short. The trio played unemployed silent-film cowboys who are mistakenly hired by a Mexican woman seeking to rid her village of an actual villain. If you don’t remember the scene Kinison was in, that’s because you never saw it—and you likely never will.
Not only was Kinison’s one scene cut, but it was apparently lost after Orion Pictures, which distributed the film, went bankrupt. Kinison played a cannibalistic mountain man, decked out in chicken bones, feathers, and blood. He giddily enters the scene with an axe in each hand after catching Martin and Short in a booby trap. And according to Martin, who referred to Kinison as “a madman,” he kept the two of them strung up in a very uncomfortable position while the crew went to lunch.
Chase eventually shows up and is instructed by his fellow amigos to shoot Kinison (in the scene, of course). “I don’t even know him,” Chase says, before covering his eyes and taking the fatal shot. What followed was a drawn-out death sequence in which Kinison takes pictures out of his wallet and says to Chase, “These are my children, how could you do this?” The whole thing apparently kept the entire crew laughing.
So why didn’t it end up in the movie? Director John Landis called it “very funny and insane,” and couldn’t remember why it was cut, but said that he wasn’t happy about losing it. Kinison’s brother Bill had a different story, however. As Bill tells it, there was bad blood between his brother and Chase. Sam supposedly hated Chase and suspected that Chase was afraid he would steal the spotlight, leading Chase to refuse to finish shooting if the scene wasn’t cut.
Whatever the real story is, Kinison didn’t do a ton of acting after his Three Amigos experience. He seemed to think that Whoopi Goldberg prevented him from being in Jumpin’ Jack Flash that same year due to his feud with Bobcat Goldthwait. A couple of years later, he failed to appear in the unfilmed movie Atuk and in Caddyshack II, stepping away from the latter after Dangerfield dropped out. He never made another movie and didn’t have nice things to say about one of the “amigos” he’d previously worked with come 1989.
Just three years after Three Amigos, Kinison told Rolling Stone that he used to want to work with Chevy Chase and company, but that they “fucking do slop. Caddyshack II? Dan Aykroyd’s got an arrow on his ass, going, ‘Will you please suck out the poison?’” He went on to say, “I defy Aykroyd or Chase or John Candy to come forward and tell me about any commitment to art. If the yardwork paid what they get for a movie, they’d show up and do it.”
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