The Day the Clown Cried

"I had been 113 days on the picture, with only three hours of sleep a night ... I was exhausted, beaten. When I thought of doing that scene, I was paralyzed; I couldn't move. I stood there in my clown's costume, with the cameras ready. Suddenly the children were all around me, unasked, undirected, and they clung to my arms and legs, they looked up at me so trustingly. I felt love pouring out of me. I thought, 'This is what my whole life has been leading up to.' I thought what the clown thought. I forgot about trying to direct. I had the cameras turn and I began to walk, with the children clinging to me, singing, into the gas ovens. And the door closed behind us."

One of the greatest legends of Hollywood Failure is the unfinished, never-released Jerry Lewis magnum opus, "The Day the Clown Cried." The 1972 film would've featured Jerry "Awcmon Dean singus asong an' I'll clown thru it" Lewis as Helmut Doork, a German circus clown in WWII Deutschland who, after getting drunk and impersonating Hitler in front of a few critics disguised as SS Officers, gets thrown into a German prison, mistakenly sent to Auschwitz, and eventually is asked to clown for the little Jewish children as they march their way into the gas chamber.

Lewis had apparently decided, with or without the help of his painkillers, that this movie was going to be his greatest ever and even put up his own money to finish filming after the producer's funds ran dry. See, he was so moved by his first glance at the screenplay, apparently, that this is how he recounted the story in his overwrought 1982 autobiography:

"Why don't you try to get Sir Laurence Olivier? I mean, he doesn't find it too difficult to choke to death playing Hamlet. My bag is comedy, Mr. Wachsberger, and you're asking me if I'm prepared to deliver helpless kids into a gas chamber. Ho-ho. Some laugh -- how do I pull it off?"

He shrugged and sat back.

After a long moment of silence I picked up the script.

"What a horror ... It must be told."

Oh how noble GLAAAVEN

Of course, Lewis shut down production after the aforementioned 113 days, exhausted and broke and beaten by the location shootings. He'd taken on the role of director, lost 40 pounds for the part of Helmut, and he sank into lawsuits involving the producer and the woman who wrote the original book. As a result of the litigation, the film was never finished or released. There was a rough cut made, though, and Lewis has a copy on videotape that he still keeps around. Harry Shearer apparently got to see it one time, and of his experiences he remarked "...the closest I can come to describing the effect is 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."

Well, now. If you haven't wanted to read the script before, I bet you want to now. And now you can. Oh, it's brilliantly awful. The dialogue is terrible, the Nazis are all one-dimensional stooges straight out of Central Casting, and the ending... well. You'll have to read it to believe it. And if you don't want to read it all the way through, just check out the cut. There's a lot to read behind it, but if you have a few minutes, you can marvel at the ( choice snippets here for you to read. )

It's truly one of the greatest and most horrible trainwrecks I've ever read in screenplay form or any other.

THE CAT TOWN STORE IS HERE

HOORAY HOORAY FOR THE CAT TOWN STORE


IT HAS FUN AND T-SHIRTS GALORE


MUGS AND STICKERS AND EVEN SOME BOOKS


EVERYBODY SHOULD TAKE A LOOK


THAT URL AGAIN IS HTTP://WWW.SPATCH.NET/CATTOWN/STORE.PHP


WHAT'S A PHP


BEATS ME, BUT MAYBE ONE OF YOU KNOWS