“My Best Friend’s Birthday”
Who Made It? Quentin Tarantino, no stranger to lost movies, as the brouhaha over “The Hateful Eight” has proved. He co-wrote the script with video store pal Craig Hamann, expanded from a short script by Hamann, and made his feature directorial debut on the project.
What Was It About?: A low-key black-and-white comedy about Clarence (Tarantino), who tries to surprise his best friend Mickey (Hamann) on his birthday, only for his efforts to backfire.
How Far Did It Get? The film, an out-and-out comedy without the genre elements in Tarantino’s subsequent work, was actually completed, albeit with a shoot that lasted for four years, on-and-off. It was completed by 1987, five years before Tarantino’s “real” directorial debut, “Reservoir Dogs.”
What Happened? A freak accident. It’s probably unlikely that the movie would have become a sensation, even as the early work of the cult filmmaker — it’s very lo-fi and reasonably amateurish in the making, to the extent that it likely wouldn’t have got much play even on the festival circuit. But sadly, it never even had the chance: once it finally wrapped, a fire in the development lab (the movie was shot on 16mm) destroyed almost exactly half of the picture, which was intended to run about 70-80 minutes. A roughly assembled version of what remained was debuted to friends in 1987, and played festivals once Tarantino became famous. The full script, and the surviving footage, made their way onto the internet a few years ago. You can watch the film below: while rough around the edges, it’s a fascinating glimpse of the director’s developing voice, and if nothing else, it should be of interest for fans of Tarantino in terms foreshadowing his later work (even Aldo Raine gets a namecheck, over twenty years before the character would appear in “Inglourious Basterds“).
“Que Viva Mexico”
Who Made It? Soviet silent master Sergei Eisenstein, the pioneering genius behind “Battleship Potemkin,” among others.
What Was It About? A sort of travelogue/tribute to Mexico, traveling from the Mayan civilization to the Spanish colonial era to the revolution to a Day of the Dead celebration in the present day.
How Far Did It Get? Eisenstein shot between 175,000 and 250,000 feet of the film in 1931, roughly equivalent to as much as 50 hours, before the backers, seeing no end in sight, pulled the plug.
What Happened? Eisenstein had been lured to Hollywood in 1930, signing a short-term contract with Paramount Pictures, but couldn’t agree with the studio on a project — the only one that came close, an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” (later filmed as “A Place In The Sun“), was ultimately shut down by campaigning by anti-Communist activists. He was released from his contract by the studio, but pal Charlie Chaplin introduced him to progressive author/novelist Upton Sinclair (whose “Oil!” would nearly seventy years later be the basis of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s “There Will Be Blood“). Together, they cooked up a plan for an apolitical film about Mexico, produced by Sinclair and directed by Eisenstein. The Mexican government insisted that they be given the power to censor the film, but shooting soon began, with the intention that the project would be completed by the April of 1931. But Eisenstein, who was still trying to work out what the project would be, whizzed past that deadline, with more and more film being shot, and with the coffers running dry. Furthermore, having deferred a few times, Stalin had ordered the director to return to the USSR, labeling him a “deserter.” Stalin tried to pit Sinclair against the U.S. authorities, but it backfired, and the producer, furious, shut down production and ordered the film, and Eisenstein, back to the U.S. The director was refused a new visa for the U.S, after customs found caricatures of Jesus and pornography in his baggage, and he was sent to New York to prepare for return to Moscow. He would later say that he had lost interest in the project, while Sinclair and distributor Sol Lesser cut the remaining footage into two features and a short — “Thunder Over Mexico,” “Eisenstein In Mexico” and “Death Day,” which were released in 1933 and 1934. Nevertheless, others over the years attempted to reconstruct Eisenstein’s vision: film critic Marie Seton, who was close to the director, cut a version called “Time In The Sun” in 1939, while Soviet filmmaker Grigori Aleksandrov, who’d collaborated with Eisenstein on the original shoot, produced a cut under the original title in 1979. Eisenstein, meanwhile, restarted his career in the USSR, though was still held under suspicion by Stalin, and had another unfinished project in his future: a third part of his epic “Ivan The Terrible” which started rollinfg in 1946, but when Soviet censors refused to release ‘Part II,’ production was cancelled after the shooting of several scenes, and Eisenstein died two years later.
“The Other Side Of The Wind”
Who Made It? The undisputed king of the unfinished movie, Orson Welles.
What Was It About? Welles himself told fellow master filmmaker John Huston, who took the lead role in the movie that the film was “about a bastard director… full of himself, who catches people and creates and destroys them. It’s about us, John.” Influenced by underground techniques (and foreshadowing the current trend for found-footage pictures), the film detailed the last day in the life of filmmaker Jake Hannaford (based on Ernest Hemingway, and played by Huston), and his competitive relationship with a younger rival (played by Peter Bogdanovich), as filmed by the various hangers-on at his 70th birthday party. The cast also included Susan Strasberg, as a Pauline Kael surrogate, Joseph McBride, Mercedes McCambridge, Dennis Hopper, Paul Mazursky, Claude Chabrol and even a very young Cameron Crowe.
How Far Did It Get? Over the course of five or six years, Welles shot almost everything he needed: about ten hours of negative exist. The major scene not shot was the car crash that kills Hannaford, and Welles never recorded the opening narration, which he intended to perform himself. He even edited about 40-50 minutes worth of film.
What Happened? As ever with the director, the production itself was fairly chaotic. Filming began in 1970, mostly of the film within a film, but at the time, he hadn’t cast the central role, and so was limited in what he could shoot. Furthermore, a 1971 tax bill left Welles heavily in debt, and as such, he had to go and work on other projects, including “F For Fake” and acting in “Waterloo” and “Treasure Island.” Huston was cast in 1973, and filming resumed, but due to some financial difficulties (including alleged embezzlement by a Spanish producer), it came in fits and starts, with shooting not completed until January 1976. But even that wasn’t the end of the road. Welles took three years to cut together forty minutes of film, but some of the funding came from the brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran, and when the Iranian Revolution came about in 1979, the negative was seized by Ayatollah Khomeini’s government as an “asset” of the previous regime. They eventually released it, but with Welles having since died, it caused a number of lawsuits about the ownership of the negative, with his daughter Beatrice Welles, and longtime mistress and collaborator Oja Kodar among those staking a claim. The original negative remained locked in a vault in Paris, though various work prints still existed elsewhere. An end looked to be in sight when cable network Showtime agreed to fund the completion of the project in the 1990s, and in the 2000s, the legal issues looked to come to an end as Beatrice Welles was paid off. But in 2008, another challenge surfaced, from Paul Hunt, who worked on the film, and producer Sanford Horowitz, who claimed that they also owned the movie. In theory, the legal battles have now been resolved, but it’s unclear if Showtime are still backing the project, although twenty minutes of scenes were released on the internet in 2012. We talked to Peter Bogdanovich, who vowed to finish the movie with producer Frank Marshall, late last year, and the director/star told us: “The problem is that a lot of different people own parts of it or claim to own parts of it. And so the chain of title is difficult to establish. But it keeps inching forward and we keep getting closer and closer and things fall apart again. It’s just a very, very difficult situation. I think it will get done some time, but not in the near future.”
