The Day the Clown Cried

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The Day the Clown Cried
Directed by	Jerry Lewis
Produced by	Nat Waschberger
Written by	Joan O'Brien Charles Denton Jerry Lewis
Starring	Jerry Lewis Harriet Andersson
Release date(s)	Unreleased
Running time	Unknown
Language	English
IMDb profile

The Day the Clown Cried is an unfinished and unreleased 1972 film directed by and starring Jerry Lewis. It is based on a scriptment of the same name by Joan O'Brien, who had co-written the original script with Charles Denton ten years prior. Based upon the controversy noted below, it has become somewhat infamous among film historians and movie buffs for a film that has never officially been released.

1 Plot
2 Cast
3 Troubled production
4 Criticism and changes
5 Later events
6 Cultural references
7 See also
8 External links
9 Notes

[edit] Plot

Lewis plays a depressed, formerly great German circus clown named Helmut Dorque (pronounced 'Dork') during the beginning of World War Two and Holocaust. Although he was once a famous performer with the Ringling Brothers, Dorque is now past his prime and has little-to-no respect in the circus. After getting demoted for causing an accidental mishap during one performance, he shares his problems with his wife, who advises him to stand up for himself. Before he can summon the courage to defend himself and confront his antagonists, he overhears the lead clown Gustav telling the ringmaster to fire Helmut, or else he will resign, to which the showman reluctantly agrees. Distraught, Helmut is caught in a bar by the Gestapo for ranting about Germany and drunkenly mocking the Führer. After an interrogation at the Gestapo headquarters, he is imprisoned in a Nazi camp for political prisoners. For the next three to four years, he remains there while hoping for a trial and a chance to plead his case.

He tries to keep his bravado up among the other inmates by bragging what a famous performer he once was. His only friend in prison is a good-hearted German named Johann Keltner, whose reason for being interned is never fully revealed but most likely due to being an outspoken reverend towards the Nazis. The others goad him into performing for them, but he does not, realizing that he is, in fact, terrible. Frustrated, they beat him up and leave him in the courtyard to sulk about his predicament. Suddenly, he sees a group of Jewish children laughing at him from the other side of the camp, where the Jewish prisoners are being kept away from everyone else. Feeling delighted to be appreciated again, Helmut performs for them and gains quite an audience for a while, until the new prison commandant orders that he must be stopped.

After the SS guards break up his latest performance, they knock him out cold and start beating the children away from the barbed-wire fence. Horrified at what they are doing to children, Keltner defeats a guard in a fight, but he is quickly killed by receiving several blows to the head. Helmut, meanwhile, is placed alone in solitary confinement. Seeing a use for him, the commandant assigns him to help load Jewish children on trains leading out of the internment camp with the promise of a review of his case. By a twist of fate, he ends up accidentally accompanying the children on a boxcar train to Auschwitz, and he is eventually used, in almost Pied Piper fashion, to help lead Jewish children to their deaths in the gas chamber.

Offered his freedom if he fulfills this request, Helmut reluctantly obliges to do so. Leading them to the "showers," he becomes increasingly dependent on a miracle, only to learn there is none. After all the children go into the chamber, he is so filled with remorse for what he has done that he goes into the room himself to entertain them. The probable reason why he does this is that he wished to take back all the bad things he had done, but according to one of the few that have seen the film, it may have been for his own ego. As the children laugh while he performs, every one of them dies quietly of the effects of Zyklon B.

[edit] Cast

Jerry Lewis - Helmut Dorque
Harriet Andersson - Ada Dorque
Anton Diffring - Captain Curt Runkel
Ulf Palme - Johann Keltner
Pierre Étaix - Gustav the Great
Tomas Bolme - Adolf
Jonas Bergstrom - Franz
Bo Brudin - Ludwig
Lars Amble - Concentration camp guard

[edit] Troubled production

In 1971, while performing at the Olympia Theatre, Lewis was offered by producer Nathan Wachsberger the chance to star and direct the film with complete financial backing from his production company and Europa Studios. Before he had been given the offer, several stars like Bobby Darin, Milton Berle and Dick Van Dyke were also presented, but declined, the chance to do so. Lewis was initially reluctant to take the role, especially after reading the script, stating in his autobiography Jerry Lewis in Person, "The thought of playing Helmut still scared the hell out of me." In addition, he felt that he was wrong for the part, due to the strong subject matter. He asked Wachsberger:

“

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?

”

After rereading Joan O'Brien and Charles Denton's first draft, Lewis felt that he would be doing something worthwhile and that the horrors of the Holocaust and World War Two must be told. He immediately signed on to the project, but, in order to make it, he first had to arrange to perform at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas for a month, in order to fulfill the four-weeks a year contract. In February 1972, he toured the remains of Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps and shot some exterior shots of buildings in Paris for the film; all the while reworking the script. He reportedly lost forty pounds for the concentration camp scenes. Principal photography began in Sweden on the film in April 1972, but the shoot was beset by numerous problems. Film equipment was either being lost or late in delivering, and the needed money was nowhere in sight. Lewis was repeatedly assured that money was forthcoming by Wachsberger, who did not appear at all on set.

Wachsberger not only ran out of money before completing the film, but his option to produce the film had expired before filming began. He had paid O'Brien the five thousand-dollar initial fee, but he did not send her the fifty thousand due her prior to production. Basically, they were making something that they had no legal right to make. Not wanting to give up on the project, Lewis paid production costs with his own money to finish shooting the film, but the parties involved in its production were never able to come to terms which would allow the film to be released. After shooting wrapped, Lewis announced to the press that Wachsberger had failed to make good on his financial obligations or even commit to producing. Wachsberger retaliated by threatening to file a lawsuit of breach of contract and stated that he had enough to finish and release the film without Lewis. Wanting to ensure the film would not be lost, Lewis took a rough cut of the film, while the studio remained holding the entire film negative.

Lewis reportedly has the only known videocassette copy of the film, which he keeps locked away in his office. The location of the original film negative is unknown. He refuses to discuss the film at all in interviews, and reporters are warned in advance not to bring up the subject of the film in his presence. Occasionally, the film is shown at exclusive screenings organized by longtime Hollywood insiders. Their source for the film is unknown. Several years ago [1], a man mentioned the film to Lewis during one of Lewis' motivational speeches, indicating that the man had heard the film might be eventually released. Lewis replied to this comment with "None of your goddamn business!"

[edit] Criticism and changes

Although never seen publicly, the film became a source of legend almost immediately after its production. Controversy centered around both its widely-rumored poor taste and insensitivity, and the role it may have played in Lewis suspending his nearly 25-year film career.^{[citation needed]}

In May 1992, an article in Spy magazine quotes comedian and actor Harry Shearer, who saw a rough cut of the film in 1979:

“

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.

”

Shearer also goes on to point out why Lewis would make the film: he believed "the Academy can't ignore this." Upon seeing the rough cut, he told Lewis the film was "terrible," which reportedly made him furious. When asked to sum up the experience of the film overall, he responded by saying that the closest he could come was like "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."

The article quoted Joan O'Brien as saying the rough cut she saw was a "disaster"; it also says she and the original script's other writer, Charles Denton, will never allow the film to be released, in part due to changes in the script made by Lewis which made the clown more sympathetic and Emmett Kelly-like. In the original script, the protagonist was an arrogant, self-centered clown named Karl Schmidt, who was "a real bastard," according to O'Brien. Her script reportedly had him trying to use his wife, who knew the ringmaster, to get him a better gig, and he apparently informed on nearly everyone he knew after being interrogated for mocking Hitler. She stated that the original draft was about a selfish man becoming enlightened and redeeming himself, but that Lewis practically changed the entire story into a Chaplinesque dark comedy.

[edit] Later events

In the early 1980s, Lewis' comeback film Hardly Working proved to be a hit in Europe, and Europa Studios announced their plan to edit the film negative of the film and release it. O'Brien stopped this from happening, stating that it could never be released. Later, Jim Wright revealed to the press of his plan to produce a new version of The Day the Clown Cried, and he mentioned he had Richard Burton in mind for the title role. Despite major buzz about the project, nothing concrete came through the planning stages. By 1991, producer Michael Barclay announced that he and Tex Rudloff (apparently with the help of Jack Abramoff^[1]) were preparing a joint production of Clown with the Russian film studio Lenfilm. Allegedly, Robin Williams had been offered the leading role and given a copy of the script. Jeremy Kagan, who made The Chosen, reportedly was slated to direct the film, but once again, the idea was dropped before it was officially "green lit". (Williams later made his own concentration camp drama, Jakob the Liar.) In 1994, William Hurt was considered to play the role, but nothing major came to fruition.

For his part, Lewis never gave up hope that his unseen pet project would finally see the light of day. According to a chapter in his autobiography, Jerry Lewis in Person, he was still trying to clear the litigation so he could return to Sweden for some pick-up shots of the exterior of buildings, edit the rough cut, have a score and title created, and get it released. "One way or another, I'll get it done," he writes. "The picture must be seen, and if by nobody else, at least by every kid in the world who's only heard there was such a thing as the Holocaust."

[edit] Cultural references

In a rather obscure joke, the film (and Lewis) are the subject of a sketch from Animaniacs entitled "Heart of Twilight" that also spoofs Apocalypse Now. It features Lewis (as Mr. Director) as a Colonel Kurtz-type character making a movie called The Wretched Clown against the wishes of the studio in an isolated sound stage.

During an interview with Jason Rimkus for his novel Not Enough Indians, Harry Shearer was asked about the film and what it was like seeing it. He then made a confused face, then a shocked one, which refers to his dumbfoundment at the film's misplaced comedy with drama.

In Jon Stewart's America: The Book, a parody of a U.S. high school civics textbook, one of the secret sections located beneath the White House is indicated to be a screening room for this film.