• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Unreleased And/Or Unfinished Films, TV Shows, Games & Music

river_styx

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
Joined
Feb 8, 2002
Messages
1,814
I have a recent obsession with things that have never been completed, or that have been completed and for some reason never released.

It usually turns out that the completed things were never released because they were mostly just so terrible the people involved thought it too embarrassing to admit to.

Such is the rumour surrounding Jerry Lewis's last film, The Day The Clown Cried

According to the few who’ve seen it this comedy about a concentration camp clown is every bit as fascinatingly terrible as anyone could hope.

The movie began life as a somewhat serious screenplay about a failed circus clown imprisoned by the Nazis. Shunned by his fellow inmates, he sates his ego by entertaining the imprisoned Jewish children, and, at the film’s end, he’s coerced into leading his young audience into an Auschwitz gas chamber. Envisioning it as his leap from buffoonish comedy to scathing drama, Lewis directed and starred in the movie, seeing it through to rough-cut completion despite health problems, actor walkoffs, vanishing funds, and legal threats from the production company.




But then you also have the opposite. Something that promises a departure from the studio's normal output that it frightens them into locking it away.

Supposedly this is what's covered in the documentary The Sweatbox. A film that has been buried in the vaults by Disney because it tells the story of one of their greatest might've beens and how it was scuppered by the giant's own executive interference.

The film was called, Kingdom in the Sun and promised to feature a sun swallowing demon as mentioned in this breif synopsis of the aforementioned documentary.

Disney’s often mocked in ways both clever and lazy, but it’s rarely done with The Mouse’s own blessing. A documentary called The Sweatbox might come the closest. When Sting was tapped to write songs for an in-progress Disney film called Kingdom of the Sun, his wife, director Trudie Styler, came along to film a behind-the-scenes special about the movie. That was 1997. In the years that followed, the film’s story was shredded, director Roger Allers quit, Sting’s songs were dumped, and a fairly dark film about prince-and-pauper switcheroos and a sun-devouring demon became the goofy road movie we know as 2002’s The Emperor’s New Groove. And Styler captured all of it in The Sweatbox, itself named after the room where in-progress Disney films are reviewed and “re-tooled” by executives


There's a more detailed list of other unreleased projects on this website here:-

http://www.toplessrobot.com/2008/08/the ... php?page=2

If anybody knows of any other unfinished or unreleased works of any kind then please feel free to share.
 
Ever heard of a guy called Orson Welles?!
 
The Black Album by Prince. Recalled by the Artist himself for being 'too evil' and having been made on the sly by 'Spooky Electric', one of the Alter Egos Prince shares his body with.
 
gncxx said:
Ever heard of a guy called Orson Welles?!

Yep. His final film was on the list and apparently would have been one of the great american classics. Along with being highly autobiographical.

I'm sure it was him who was supposed to have been attached to a project which eventually became Dead Calm. He was also rumoured to have been interested in making a Batman movie in the forties or fifties featuring a stellar cast. Although I'm fairly sure that's now been debunked as an urban legend.


On the subject of Batman, I'm quite interested in the supposed existence of a version of Batman Returns starring one of the Wayans brothers as Robin. Apparently a large amount of footage was shot and then canned for some reason. I'd still like to see it though.
 
Let's hope this one makes it....

Jane Austen's Bennet girls go zombie slaying

IT is a truth commercially acknowledged that Jane Austen’s high-spirited heroines can be recast as Hollywood brats or Bollywood sirens, wittily navigating the eternal perils of class, romance and unworthy men.

Few challenges, however, are as unusual as the latest foe facing Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice – a plague of the undead sent to reduce the picturesque villages of Longbourn and Meryton to smouldering ruins.

Hollywood studios are bidding to turn a radical reworking of Austen’s most popular book, now called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a parody to be published in April, into a blockbuster movie.

Desperate for new ideas, studio chiefs hope “P&P&Z” will mark the bloody birth of a feral offspring of classic British literature: “monster-lit.

etc...

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/ ... 683554.ece
 
Pink Floyd attempted to follow up the mega-selling Dark Side of the Moon in a unique way...

Following the success of Dark Side of the Moon, the Floyd were in something of a quandary as to what to do next. One idea they had was to try to create an entire album using only sounds produced by common household objects. The Floyd used a number of recording sessions in the latter months of 1973 to experiment with such unconventional instruments as wine bottles, aerosol spray cans, rubber bands, tape, and others.

The Pink Floyd encyclopedia lists 1-4, 8-10 and 22-31 October; 12-14,19-21 and 26-28 November; 3-5 December 1973 as the recording dates.

In the end, they managed to get three songs recorded before giving up on the project as “a bit daft.” However, some bits and pieces (the wine glass sounds) were used in the beginning of SOYCD.

http://www.pinkfloydonline.com/faq/question44/
 
That sounds pretty funky. Not sure it would have been good on the ears.


I read in this months SFX that an unpublished John Wyndham novel called A Plan for Chaos is finally to be published. It's something to do with cloned Nazis trying to make a comeback after WW2
 
Good stuff. John Wyndham was a good writer.
 
I recall reading back in the 1970's that Brian Jones had been working on some new songs / music after leaving the Rolling Stones and prior to his death. Supposedly he was jamming and / or recording on his own project with other rock artists of the period, of whom I only remember Jack Bruce being mentioned.

I've always wondered what sort of songs / music Jones was doing during that brief period of 'solo work'.
 
jimv1 said:
Let's hope this one makes it....

Jane Austen's Bennet girls go zombie slaying..
Well, the book has :).
pride-prejudice-zombies.jpg

From Auntie Beeb:
It's... Darcy of the Dead

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains."

It's an opening line that might make Jane Austen turn in her grave - or rise from it with her arms out-stretched.

For writer Seth Grahame-Smith has taken Austen's Regency classic and turned it into Pride and Prejudice with Zombies.

The novel, which uses the the vast majority of Austen's original text, is being touted as the first mainstream literary "mash-up".

It's a bizarre mix of genres which sees Elizabeth Bennet as a kung-fu expert dedicated to wiping out the zombie menace in the quiet village of Meryton.
I do appreciate Austen's skill, but several years of enforced study led me to assassinate my copies of P&P, S&S and Mansfield Park with an air-rifle as soon as I'd finished my final exams. But this... oh yeah!
 
Speaking of games, I remember that in the mid 1980s, a super-game called 'Psyclapse & Bandersnatch' was winging its way towards the 8-bit wonders we knew and loved, and that it was so good, all other games paled by comparison. I distinctly recall the teaser ads in Your Computer - a group of programmers huddled round a glowing screen, working their way deep into the night, the desktop and monitor bestrewn with empty takeaway cartons.

But it never happened, of course - the company producing it (Imagine) went bust, and it was later revealed that P&B was little more than vapourware - existing only as a couple of sketches on paper. A potted history of the super-game that never was can be found at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandersnatch_(video_game)
 
What a great topic!

It is weird when projects sound good, but just mysteriously disappear.

One I've wondered about is (a short film) Psychotica - a nicely Fortean theme, with a great (and topical) cast (Simon Pegg, Jack Davenport, Helen Baxendale and supposed to be released in 2007. So far, nowt...

http://www.inkdigital.co.uk/seyret/film/psychotica-trailer.html

weird
 
I write music every now and then and two years ago, my friend and I were commissioned to write a piece for a soft-porn film. A classy production, very Eyes Wide Shut. We produced a great piece of music, got handsomely paid and then the film was never released, much to my disgust.

I still think it would have been excellent to see somebodies hairy little arse bobbing up and down while my silky smooth tones serenade the lovers.


And another...I've mentioned before here that Alistair Macleans HMS Ulysses has never materialised even though the film rights were snatched up when the book became a huge success.
 
You have to ask yourself what kind of troubles stop a soft-porn film from being released. Even if it's just straight onto Channel Five.


On another note I've just read about Nick Cave's rejected script for Gladiator 2 being released onto the interweb. Apparently it deals with the death of Maximus at the end of the last film by having him meet the roman gods, being reunited with his murdered son and then being granted eternal life. The character then appears, Highlander-esque, throughout such historical events as WW2 and Vietnam, finally ending with him working at the modern day Pentagon.

Given the poetic pretentions and hammy seriousness of the first film it's not surprising that the high fantasy of this script, co-written with Russel Crowe, wasn't optioned. Although some might say that it has found its way onto the web as a means of testing its reception...
 
I don't know if this really counts but production had started and seems to have stopped on a fourth Re-Animator film called House of Re-Animator. There is some debate but it seems to be due to lack of funds.
It was to star the excellent Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West called into the White House to "re-animate" a recently dead American president. It's on IMDB here. What a swizz.
P.S. Who would have known that writing about this subject would be such a minefield of choice of tense!
 
That's a shame. The original Re-Animator is one of my favourite films and the third one was so gloriously over the top that I was quite looking forward to the fourth. Hopefully they'll find the funding from somewhere and complete the project.

I wonder if anyone remembers a film project called Legionairres?

It was funded by investors who bought shares in the production and would have been paid back if the film made a profit. Rather obviously the production folded before being completed, but I do remember seeing photos of extras and actors in costume on set.

It's a shame really because it would have been interesting to see the result of such an experiment.
 
I always felt the show Dark Skies had great potential. It was a bit ropey at times, but I liked the idea of chronicling American history - with a Fortean bent - from Roswell to Y2K. I think they got to around the late 60s before the show was canned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Skies
 
McAvennie_ said:
I always felt the show Dark Skies had great potential. It was a bit ropey at times, but I liked the idea of chronicling American history - with a Fortean bent - from Roswell to Y2K. I think they got to around the late 60s before the show was canned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Skies

I remember thinking about that show a lot while watching Taken.

I think Dark Skies would have turned out better than Taken did, I got thoroughly bored by that show, unfortunately DS was up against The X-Files and was rather unfairly compared to it.
 
river_styx said:
McAvennie_ said:
I always felt the show Dark Skies had great potential. It was a bit ropey at times, but I liked the idea of chronicling American history - with a Fortean bent - from Roswell to Y2K. I think they got to around the late 60s before the show was canned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Skies

I remember thinking about that show a lot while watching Taken.

I think Dark Skies would have turned out better than Taken did, I got thoroughly bored by that show, unfortunately DS was up against The X-Files and was rather unfairly compared to it.

Yeah, pity it died. Some interesting stuff, esp Admiral Poindexters involvement when he was a lt Commander.
 
I've been enjoying the TV series Threshold over the past few weeks on Austar's SciFi channel. Only thirteen episodes were produced before the show was cancelled. I watched episode eleven last night - and the stakes got raised hugely! In just two more weeks, it's going to come to such a screaming stop, I'll get whiplash.
 
This documentary plays the London Film Festival in October:

Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno

How one of France's great directors nearly made a visionary masterpiece: a revealing documentary about a legendary catastrophe of French cinema.

In 1964, legendary French director Henri-Georges Clouzot (Les Diaboliques, The Wages of Fear) started work on a much-cherished project, Inferno. A study of jealousy, it was to star Romy Schneider and Serge Reggiani, and Clouzot intended to take the visual and psychological language of film in unprecedented new directions. Influenced by op- art, Clouzot amassed an extraordinary set of test material, creating a dazzling array of proto-psychedelic images of Schneider as demonic dream temptress. Location shooting began, with Clouzot granted an unlimited budget, but all the planning that the perfectionist director had put into his Kubrick-like project started to unravel on set, with catastrophic results. Now directors Bromberg and Medrea have pieced together the remains of Clouzot's material – rushes, test shots and location imagery – and filmed contemporary actors Bejo and Gamblin reading key scenes. The result is a dazzling evocation of one of the great lost films, and a sobering account of what can happen when a visionary project flies too close to the sun. For anyone interested in French cinema – or in the great cautionary tales of filmmaking – this documentary is a must.

http://www.bfi.org.uk/lff/node/408
 
Anyone who has seen Lost in La Mancha is probably itching to see Terry Gilliam's Don Quixote, if, as and when.
 
Does anyone remember a trailer that was linked to a year or so back, with lots of ww2 style german zombie cyborg ubersoldat types coming out of the sea?

I have a vague recollection (perhaps wrongly) if was some project Brian Yuzna was linked to? Or maybe it was someone linked to Yuzna?

Just wondering what happened to it?
 
BlackRiverFalls said:
Does anyone remember a trailer that was linked to a year or so back, with lots of ww2 style german zombie cyborg ubersoldat types coming out of the sea?

I have a vague recollection (perhaps wrongly) if was some project Brian Yuzna was linked to? Or maybe it was someone linked to Yuzna?

Just wondering what happened to it?

Yeah, I don't think it's been made yet, the trailer was shot to drum up funds. Naturally now I can't for the life of me remember what it was called, but it was Dutch and we have a thread on it somewhere...
 
BlackRiverFalls said:
Does anyone remember a trailer that was linked to a year or so back, with lots of ww2 style german zombie cyborg ubersoldat types coming out of the sea?

I have a vague recollection (perhaps wrongly) if was some project Brian Yuzna was linked to? Or maybe it was someone linked to Yuzna?

Just wondering what happened to it?

It was called Worst Case Scenario.
 
Dr_Baltar said:
It was called Worst Case Scenario.

That was it! Just checked the official site and it says the project has been abandoned due to lack of money. Oh well, at least they left us a great trailer.
 
2 great trailers and a short 'making of' the trailer thingy, just had another look on youtube and they're worth a look in.
 
Back
Top