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- Feb 8, 2002
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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.
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.