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sherbetbizarre Great Old One Joined: 04 Sep 2004 Total posts: 1344 Gender: Male |
 Posted: 24-02-2012 00:26 Post subject: |
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Updated book out this week -
| Quote: | Tales from Development Hell (New Updated Edition): The Greatest Movies Never Made?
A compulsively readable journey into the area of movie-making where all writers, directors and stars fear to tread: Development Hell, the place where scripts are written, actors hired and sets designed... but the movies rarely actually get made!
Whatever happened to Darren Aronofsky's Batman movie starring Clint Eastwood? Why were there so many scripts written over the years for Steven Spielberg and George Lucas's fourth Indiana Jones movie? Why was Lara Croft's journey to the big screen so tortuous, and what prevented Paul Verhoeven from filming what he calls "one of the greatest scripts ever written"? Why did Ridley Scott's Crisis in the Hot Zone collapse days away from filming, and were the Beatles really set to star in Lord of the Rings? What does Neil Gaiman think of the attempts to adapt his comic book series The Sandman?
All these lost projects, and more, are covered in this major book, which features many exclusive interviews with the writers and directors involved. |
Amazon.co.uk |
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| sherbetbizarre Great Old One Joined: 04 Sep 2004 Total posts: 1344 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 11-08-2013 22:32 Post subject: |
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To follow on from the original post in this thread...
| Quote: | Watch: Amazing Footage Of The Day The Clown Cried, Jerry Lewis’ Unreleased, Controversial Holocaust Film
Perhaps the lost film of the last 50 years, The Day The Clown Cried was directed by its star, Jerry Lewis, way back in 1972. It’s the story of a clown in a Nazi concentration camp and is most notorious for the last scene of its screenplay, and presumably of the film as shot.
At risk of spoiling a movie you will most likely never, ever get to see, I can tell you that the climax takes place in a gas chamber, with the clown going in to face his death with a group of scared children, trying to make them laugh in order take away their fear. It ends with them all locked in, the kids laughing as the clown juggles stale bread, just about holding it together.
Some footage from behind the scenes of the film, and possibly including a take or two from the production, has now been posted to YouTube. It’s an incredible find.
Now, the screenplay for the film seems very sincere to me, and I would anticipate that it could have made for a powerful, remarkable film. A famous quote from Harry Shearer, however, suggests that this was not the case:
With most of these kinds of things, you find that the anticipation, or the concept, is better than the thing itself. But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. 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. “Oh My God!” – that’s all you can say… if you flew down to Tijuana and suddenly saw a painting on black velvet of Auschwitz. You’d just think ‘My God, wait a minute! It’s not funny, and it’s not good, and somebody’s trying too hard in the wrong direction to convey this strongly-held feeling.
That comes from a 1979 issue of Spy magazine, which apparently also quoted screenwriter Joan O’Brien in saying that she’d never allow for the film to be released. On the screenplay page, she says, the story was about the redemption of a selfish man, but in the film, Lewis lightened the tone and tried to make the clown more appealing, and this undermined the film significantly.
Without seeing the movie myself I’m curious how much people’s vested interests and relationships with Lewis clouded their perception, but it does seem like the director may well have judged this one very, very badly indeed. He even seems to think so himself, as you’ll see in this clip. |
Bleedingcool.com |
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| gncxx King-Size Canary
Great Old One Joined: 25 Aug 2001 Total posts: 13303 Location: Eh? Gender: Male |
| Posted: 11-08-2013 22:54 Post subject: |
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| I've just been watching it. Jerry in his "I am a very serious filmmaker" mode, as usual in his interviews, but just to get a tiny glimpse of what this film is like is tantalising. Just release it Jerry, I know you say it's too terrible to be unleashed every time you're asked, but it's like THE movie Holy Grail now, mostly because we know it's able to be seen if you let us. |
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| JamesWhitehead Piffle Prospector Joined: 02 Aug 2001 Total posts: 5543 Location: Manchester, UK Gender: Male |
| Posted: 11-08-2013 22:55 Post subject: |
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I never expected to see anything of that film!
Not that I was looking forward to it. I've managed to see nothing of Life is Beautiful, despite its general availability. |
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| WhistlingJack Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Total posts: 4296 Location: The Sewers of The Strand Age: 9 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 12-08-2013 12:05 Post subject: |
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At the risk of sounding like one of those who swears blind they've seen THAT Thunderbird photograph, I'm positive I found clips of this online a year or so ago...  |
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| sherbetbizarre Great Old One Joined: 04 Sep 2004 Total posts: 1344 Gender: Male |
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