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Jerry Lewis's “The Day the Clown Cried” discovered in Sweden after 53 years
- ocschwar 1y agoThe film appears to be "inspired" by the story of Janusz Kurchark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janusz_Korczak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janusz_Korczak
- JKCalhoun 1y agoThat was a rather horrible but also beautiful thing to read.
- I-M-S 1y agoThis was the topic of a recent episode of "Decoder Ring", a wonderful podcast that explores cultural mysteries: https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring/2025/02/on-the-latest-decoder-ring-is-the-day-the-clown-cried-a-lost-masterpiece-or-a-cinematic-disaster https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring/2025/02/on-the-lates...
- qntmfred 1y agoalso in a Joe Scott video last month https://youtu.be/FWc68sHWzrA?t=17m41s https://youtu.be/FWc68sHWzrA?t=17m41s
- roskelld 1y agoI only read about this recently. Such a dark premise, which I could imagine being an incredibly powerful movie if shot well, but missing the mark by even an inch would likely just end up to be an offensive mess. I presumed this movie was a case of the latter.
- jfengel 1y agoFrom everything I've heard, it should have stayed lost. It sounds utterly misbegotten.
- iwanttocomment 1y agoThe Europafilm staff dubbing The Day the Clown Cried was covered in From Darkness To Light, a documentary from last year about Jerry Lewis' The Day the Clown Cried which premiered on American TV back in August 2024. It's honestly surprising to me that this continues to make the news this year.
- labrador 1y agoA post-divorce girlfriend of mine claims she lost her mind at a private screening that was held for her and some posh English friends. It sounded horrible.
- autoexec 1y ago> "I want to sell it to a serious producer who either restores it or keeps it locked away" It was arguments over money that caused the film to be "lost" in the first place. It's a shame that it's still all about money and greed could cause it to be lost again. The best thing to do would be to release it online for free so that everyone could see and learn from it. That way, if others want to restore it using modern methods they still can. I'd rather see it as it is anyway. Before the inevitable re-edited (perhaps even censored) AI "enhanced" version a "serious producer" would shit out and overcharge for.
- reddalo 1y agoYeah, I agree. He should release a high-quality capture of the VHS, without edits whatsoever. VHS quality also decays with time, so he better hurry up.
- Hamuko 1y agoI thought the main point of this version is that it's edited to be an actual movie based on the script. The Library of Congress already has a bunch of original material with no edits.
- daveFNbuck 1y agoIf you think this is more important than the money it can be sold for, you should be the one to buy it.
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- mulmen 1y agoExchanging money for something implies you believe it has a monetary value. That is the opposite of thinking something is too important to have a monetary value.
- aspenmayer 1y ago
- al_borland 1y ago> I want to sell it to a serious producer who either restores it or keeps it locked away, or restores it and shows it to people for studying purposes. How is someone who "keeps it locked away" even an option if he believes it "must be seen"? This seems like the perfect candidate for going on archive.org, if the goal is for it to be preserved and for people to see it. I also find it odd that he's been screening it for friends since the 80s, yet has only shown it to 24 people.
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- observationist 1y agoMaybe he's talking about the physical medium, and not the movie - a copy of the movie should be distributed, for sure, but the film (and the vhs tape) should be kept locked away, it's a piece of history.
- reddalo 1y agoCall me a dreamer, but he should just make a good capture of the VHS and upload it to the Internet Archive.
- rapidaneurism 1y agoBut how can he sell that to 'worthy collector' ?
- al_borland 1y agoAll original copies of all films should be properly archived. I agree with that. The fact that so many have been "lost" is why I don't think we should put our faith in these companies to be the archivists for these works.
- gwbas1c 1y agoProbably shows it to a small group of people, like 3-6, every 7-8 years.
- legitster 1y agoThe movie was never "lost". All of the original film apparently made some rounds in private viewings and was donated to the library of congress and has been available since last year. What this guy has is workprint - someone in the production office probably hastily assembled the available footage into a rough draft. So it's true this could be a 1 of 1 copy but all of the source material is still available.
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- dhosek 1y agoIf you read the article, you would have read: “The footage, which has been made available to scholars, was screened last August for The New Republic journalist Benjamin Charles Germain Lee, who reported that the footage was fragmentary and does not constitute a complete film, leading the industry to conclude that the full film did not exist.”
- duxup 1y ago> The film tells the story of a German circus clown who is imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp for mocking Adolf Hitler and is then forced to lure children to their deaths as punishment. How do you pitch that?
- readthenotes1 1y ago1973: Nazi cosplayers had been marching in the streets of Chicago for years. Nazi Germany and the Holocaust was a living memory for most adults, including Mr Lewis who was Jewish. How do you help people remember? By showing the horror. https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/November-2016/Chicago-Nazi-Party-1978-Skokie-March/ https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/November-2016/Chicago-N...
- duxup 1y agoI think everything other than Nazis in general tied with it is the issue.
- gwervc 1y ago> How do you pitch that? Using exactly the text you quoted. Since it's about Hitler, Nazi and camps the TV channel ARTE will fund it in a heartbeat. (The current top movie on arte.tv/fr/videos/cinema is "Lili Marleen, un chant d'amour dans l'Allemagne nazie)
- croes 1y agoHow was „Life is beautiful“ pitched?
- duxup 1y agoThat seems dramatically different than the Lewis movie.
- croes 1y agoIs it? > In 1997, Italian director Roberto Benigni won Oscars for “Life is Beautiful,” about a father who uses humor to comfort his young son when they are imprisoned in a concentration camp. ”Benigni stole the idea from me, but he did it well,” Lewis adds. https://qz.com/613084/jerry-lewis-has-broken-a-40-year-silence-about-his-disaster-of-a-holocaust-movie-on-german-tv https://qz.com/613084/jerry-lewis-has-broken-a-40-year-silen...
- DrNosferatu 1y agoThe best publicity there is! Please do post a link to the film, if it finally leaks online.
- ilamont 1y agohe stole a complete workprint of the film from the archives of its production studio in 1980 – and has been screening it for guests in his apartment ever since. Former 35mm projectionist here. I suspect there are a lot of old stashes like this. In our booth we had a gigantic reel of old 1960s and 1970s horror film trailers that previous projectionists had spliced together until there was no more space on the reel. We were not supposed to save trailers, but no one checked what we did with them after removing them from the film reels at the end of the run and returning those prints to the distributor. On a quiet summer night, after the last showing had ended and the customers had left, we employees would sometimes lock the doors, get some snacks, and watch these old treasures from previous decades spool by. The trailer reel included several versions of The Shining trailer, including one that had a slow-motion scene of blood pouring from the elevator that was waaaay longer than the clip in the movie (possibly from one of the alternate cameras, see https://geektyrant.com/news/the-story-behind-the-infamous-blood-gushing-elevator-scene-from-stanley-kubricks-the-shining https://geektyrant.com/news/the-story-behind-the-infamous-bl...). The reel also had some long-forgotten stinkers, including for the 1966 British horror film Psychopath which I only remember because the trailer featured an unusual song structured like a nursery rhyme that I can still partially recall. A corporate chain took over (Lowes) and sometime in the early 1990s the theater was closed. The space is now a Staples. This illicit reel, if it wasn't thrown out during the closure, is probably in someone's basement. The only way to know the contents is to play it, which is hard to do as not many traditional 35mm projectors are still around or available for screening a 50-year-old reel that might be brittle, gunky, or otherwise damage the machine. I've heard of similar stashes. For instance, around the same time, I had friends who worked in a photo shop. They had several binders of, um, special photos that they had copied from customers' negatives during the on-site development process. I visited this basement lair once, which was dominated by a modern color processing machine. I remember flipping through one of the binders. It was very, very strange stuff, like something out of Blue Velvet.
- dylan604 1y agoWere these old prints with an optical track, or was there a corresponding mag reel? Listening to optical audio is a bit of retro nostalgia in and of itself.
- NKosmatos 1y agoTorrent link anyone?
- neuroelectron 1y agoThe film tells the story of a German circus clown who is imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp for mocking Adolf Hitler and is then forced to lure children to their deaths as punishment. “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.” “It was bad, and it was bad because I lost the magic. No one will ever see it, because I'm embarrassed at the poor work.”
- alwa 1y ago> Other films that have not yet screened because of filmmaker stipulations include 100 Years starring John Malkovich. The short film is from 2015 but has been placed in time-locked safes that won’t open until 2115, 100 years after the film was made. I wonder how one goes about engineering a "time-locked safe" such that it opens, reliably, only after 100 years...
- AngryData 1y agoYou could power a clock with a radioactive isotope and it could get you 100 years worth of power. With a big enough spring you could also theoretically get a small mechanical watch-like clockwork to last that long, however calibrating it to be accurate and not wear too much over such a long time span would be difficult.
- timschmidt 1y agoOr just power or wind the clock externally. If it's [electro]mechanical, losing power or forgetting to wind it will only extend the period of time for which it remains closed. Otherwise it would need an internal backup battery, which, if it's only powering an extremely low power clock and nothing mechanical, could last that long with the right chemistry. Solar cells could also last a hundred years, suitably encased, with some reduction in effectiveness due to ionization.
- mminer237 1y agoThe most reliable way is to set up a trust & hire a big bank to hold it for 100 years in a deposit box.
- andrewflnr 1y agoI'm reminded of those long gear reductions where the last gear is calculated to turn once every century or so. You'd need a lot of power to make that work here, at least the naive version of it.
- burkaman 1y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Years_(film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Years_(film) It's just an ad. I'd be willing to bet that there is nothing in the safe and the film is just a file in some corporate cloud that will be deleted in 10 years when everyone involved in the marketing stunt has moved on to other jobs.