“The Day The Clown Cried”
Who Made It? Comedy legend/philanthropist/filmmaker/sexist Jerry Lewis. It would have been his eleventh feature as a director, but when it failed to be completed, Lewis wouldn’t direct again for another eight years.
What Was It About? An adaptation of a novel by Joan O’Brien, it saw Lewis play Helmut, a German circus clown, who is arrested and sent to a prison camp after mocking Hitler. He begins performing for the Jewish prisoners on the other side of the fence, and is coerced by the authorities to help lead the children into the gas chambers. Distraught, he eventually accompanies them into the chamber and dies with them.
How Far Did It Get? Lewis did shoot the entire film, although he had to dig into his own pocket to see it through the final stages.
What Happened? Lewis had been approached by Belgian-born producer Nathan Wachsberger in 1971 about directing and starring in the project, and though he was initially resistant, eventually committed to the film, with shooting getting underway in April 1972 in Sweden. However, although Wachsberger had promised that the film was fully financed, he seemed to have been not entirely telling the truth, as film equipment failed to turn up, and money proved tight on set, with cast and crew allegedly going unpaid. Lewis did manage to complete the film after putting up some of the money himself, but once it wrapped, the actor/director and the producer continued to feud, with Wachsberger threatening a lawsuit, and retaining control of the negative. Lewis kept a rough cut, and announced publicly in January 1973 that the film would premiere at Cannes that May, but it never materialized, presumably because of the ongoing legal issues. In 1992, actor/comic/”The Simpsons” voice Harry Shearer wrote an article for Spy Magazine in which he claimed to have seen a rough cut of the film in 1979, writing of it, “This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is.” He also quoted original author Joan O’Brien as saying that the film was a “disaster,” and that she’d never allow it to be released. Lewis appears to agree, saying at a Q&A last year that, “I was ashamed of the work, and I was grateful that I had the power to contain it all, and never let anyone see it. It was bad, bad, bad.” And in Cannes a few months later, he doubled-down, saying “It was bad work. You’ll never see it and neither will anyone else.” But a few months later, while reiterating that he’d never release the picture, Lewis told Entertainment Weekly that he was proud of the film, or at least aspects of it. Interestingly, the same year saw some behind-the-scenes footage of the movie leak out: if Lewis is to be believed, the only chance we’ll have to see anything of the film for a long time to come.
“Who Killed Bambi?”
Who Made It? The script was penned by Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren and legendary film critic Roger Ebert, curiously. Softcore supremo Russ Meyer was at the helm, though strangely, “The Accused and “Over The Edge” filmmaker Jonathan Kaplan claimed that he was director of the project in Vice a few years back.
What Was It About? A punk-rock version of “A Hard Day’s Night,” it starred the Sex Pistols, who set out to bring down British society.
How Far Did It Get? Ebert says that a day of filming (involving the shooting of a deer) took place before the film was shut down. The footage was later reused by McLaren for Julien Temple‘s “The Great Rock and Roll Swindle.”
What Happened? In a 2010 blog post commemorating McLaren, who passed away that year, Ebert wrote that he received a phone call from Meyer telling him that 20th Century Fox were looking to make a movie starring the Sex Pistols, who’d recently exploded into fame, and that Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious had demanded the men behind their favorite film “Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls” — namely, Meyer and Ebert, who directed and wrote it, respectively. McLaren flew out to Los Angeles to meet with the pair, who agreed to work on the project, and Ebert stayed in the city to bash out a screenplay. Once completed, Meyer flew to London to prep the film, with Marianne Faithful among those to sign up to the movie, and shooting began, only to grind to a halt almost immediately (Meyer suggested on “The Incredibly Strange Film Show” in the 1980s that he shot four days of the film). McLaren would claim that Fox finally got around to reading the script, and pulled the plug, but as Ebert says, “this seems unlikely because the studio would not have greenlighted the film without reading the script.” Meyer seems to have suggested that McLaren misrepresented the financing, and the involvement of Fox (and successfully sued him for libel when he claimed that Meyer had personally shot the deer in the scene), while Meyer biographer Jimmy McDonough claims that the film was shut down when 20th Century Fox board member Princess Grace Kelly objected to another X-rated film from the director, despite the immense success of “Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls.” With all three principals behind the project now sadly passed, it’s unlikely we’ll ever know the real story behind this one. But you can read Ebert’s script, which the critic published a few years back on his websiteand watch “The Incredibly Strange Film Show” excerpt below.
“Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales”
Who Made It? The film was a collaboration between legendary comic Richard Pryor, in what would have been his first major film role, and then film-student Penelope Spheeris, who’d go on to direct legendary documenatries “The Decline Of Western Civilization (Parts I, II and III)” and, most famously, the original “Wayne’s World.”
What Was It About? It’s still somewhat unclear. David and Joe Henry‘s recent biography of Pryor, “Furious Cool,” says that the film was about a group of Black Panthers who abduct a wealthy white man and put him on trial for all racial crimes in the history of America.
How Far Did It Get? Shot in 1968 or early 1969, the film appears to have been completed, and Spheeris edited the film at the end of ’69, except for a short break in order to give birth to her daughter.
What Happened? According to “Furious Cool,” Spheeris had apparently assembled about 45/50 minutes of the movie — they were working towards a cut that they would show Bill Cosby, who it was hoped would attach his name to the project, presumably as a producer. She screened it to Pryor in the basement of his house, with the film then collecting in a bin under the Moviola, when Pryor’s second wife Shelley Bonis stormed in, furious with her husband. According to Spheeris, Pryor and Shelley fought until the comic, screaming “You think I love this film more than you? Watch this?,” picked up the negative and tore it into pieces. Spheeris spliced the fragments back together as best she could, and they screened the results to Cosby, who may or may not have bought the negative (Pryor’s memoirs says that Cosby agreed to pay for a final edit, then commented “Hey, this shit is weird,” convincing Pryor to shelve the film, only for the negative to be stolen from his house, while Spheeris speculates that Cosby buried the movie to hurt Pryor, his main competition). A brief clip of the film, from dailies Spheeris says she found years later, was screened at a tribute to the comedian shortly before his death in 2005, which caused Pryor’s wife Jennifer Lee to sue both the director and Shelley’s daughter Rain, claiming that they must have been behind the theft of the print in the 1980s. The suit is apparently still pending.