Last night The Missus and I watched 1408 on DVD. If you’re not familiar with the film’s plot — or that of the Stephen King story on which it’s based — and don’t want to follow that link to the corresponding IMDB page, here are the tagline and plot summary from there:

Tagline: The Dolphin Hotel invites you to stay in any of its stunning rooms. Except one.
Plot: A man who specializes in debunking paranormal occurrences checks into the fabled room 1408 in the Dolphin Hotel. Soon after settling in, he confronts genuine terror.

The man in question, one Michael Enslin, played by John Cusack, is determined to stay in the room over the objections of the hotel manager, Gerald Olin — played by Samuel L. Jackson. Olin says although he does a good job as a hotel manager, he has no training as a coroner and is tired of cleaning up the “mess” which inevitably results when people stay in 1408. So he no longer books people into that room.

Enslin doesn’t get it and requests more details. What sort of spook, spirit, ghost, long-legged beastie is supposed to be responsible for all the death and destruction?

“You misunderstand me,” says Olin, “I didn’t say there was a spirit or ghost.” It’s the room itself, he insists. And then, in classic Samuel L. Jackson form, he sums up: “It’s an evil f*cking room.”

I noted the line at the time but didn’t think much more about it until watching a couple of the “special features,” which in this case were mini-documentaries (“webisodes,” for cripe’s sake) on the making of the movie. The scene is excerpted in both of these featurettes…

…but in both, what Jackson says is, “It’s an evil room.” No F-word at all.

It does make one wonder if the scene was re-shot in neutered form for release in the mini-docs. That wasn’t my first thought, though. I actually prefer to think that the re-shooting took place for the scene as it appeared in the final version. I picture a handful of screenwriters sitting around in a bar, congratulating one another on the great job they did with the script. (They didn’t do a great job, but in the post-production afterglow, it’s easy to imagine, they may have.) Suddenly one of them stops in mid-sentence and slaps himself in the forehead.

“What?” they all ask him.

“I just realized,” he says, “we’ve got Samuel L. Jackson in a key role… and he never once says ‘f*ck’! We can’t do that!”