1:09am Monday 22nd March 2010
By Owain Paciuszko - Seat 13
Bringing a film to the screen is a complicated, difficult, frustrating, expensive, destructive process, and for all the movies that make it through from scripting to filming to editing and release there are those that are scuppered, and not always before cameras start rolling. Here are five intriguing movies that for various reasons didn't quite reach the big screen...
Don Quixote
The big kahuna of cursed productions, the most notable failures in trying to adapt Cervantes lengthy, complex and masterful novel to the cinema screen belong to auteurs Orson Welles and Terry Gilliam.
Welles shot some footage of Russian actor Mischa Auer as Quixote for a proposed anachronistic TV special, the suits at CBS were unhappy with Welles unedited rushes and cancelled the project. Welles decided, however, to keep ploughing ahead, expanding the 30 minute project into a feature. Welles would fund the film from his own pocket (this probably explaining his decision to voice Birds Eye commercials and Transformers cartoons), with singer Frank Sinatra also investing in the project. In 1958 Welles began work on the film, with Spanish actor Francisco Reiguera cast now as Quixote; they worked without a script, improvising scenes silently, shooting without sound. Filming stalled throughout the early 60s, and with Reiguera's health diminishing Welles managed to wrap up photography before his lead actor's death in 1969. But Welles never put together a final assembly of his footage, and was still talking about completing the film at the time of his own death in 1985. Since then there have been attempts by various film-makers and archivists to compile the footage left behind by Welles into a workable film, but these edits have been short montages or poorly received by critics and often mired in legal wranglings.
Gilliam didn't fare any better, his production barely lasting a week! With sets being built, props and costumes made, actors cast; legendary French actor Jean Rochefort as Quixote (he even learned English to play the part) and Johnny Depp as a yuppie who finds himself time-travelling and plunged into the Spanish countryside. The first days of shooting were beset with location problems, it turned out bomb tests were being conducted nearby, then the torrential rains started; completely washing away the set and changing the very face of the dry, desert landscape. As if that wasn't bad enough, Rochefort was diagnosed with a severe hernia that prevented him from riding a horse, which is unfortunately Quixote's primary mode of transport! With Rochefort at the doctors and unable to keep filming the completion guarantors had to step in and take possession of the script. Gilliam is still determined to finish the film, with Robert Duvall now cast in the Quixote role and production rumoured to be beginning sometime this year.
The Thief and the Cobbler
It's not only live-action movies that are blighted by troubles, animation can fall foul to a myriad of problems and it is legendary animator Richard Williams' ill-fated The Thief and the Cobbler than boasts the longest production history of any film.
It took 28 years for this film to reach the screen, and when it did it was not the film it was intended to be, thus qualifying this film as 'unfinished'. Williams, whose work as Animation Director on Who Framed Roger Rabbit secured him a deal to finally complete his dream project; by this point, after 20 years of work, Williams had only completed twenty minutes of painstakingly hand-drawn footage. Unfortunatley the film went beyond its production deadline, and in 1992 was seized by the Completion Bond company who out-sourced the film to another animation company under the direction of Fred Calvert. Calvert's version was released in 1994 as The Princess and the Cobbler, with Miramax then buying the film, heavily re-editing it and re-titling it Arabian Knight. So, as of 2006, six different versions of the film exist, with one being a boot-legged, fan-made cut that tries to bring the film as close as possible to William's original vision of an animated film for an adult audience. Indeed, the quality of the hand-drawn animation is absolutely dazzling, but is an incomplete version that fills in the blanks with pencil sketches and storyboards. It is, sadly unlikely, that Williams - now 77 - will ever be able to finish his 'reason for living'.
Arrive Alive
Fashion photographer Jeremiah S. Chechik made his film debut with National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, the third in the series of Chevy Chase comedies, that is surprisingly much better (in my opinion) than its predecessors. Clearly buoyed by the success of this film famed producer Art Linson hired Chechik to helm Arrive Alive; a comedy written by National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live contributor Michael O'Donoghue; who co-wrote Scrooged.
After only two weeks of shooting though Linson pulled the plug on the movie (and a few million dollars). Linson relates the tale in his book A Pound Of Flesh, the script wasn't getting laughs from the cast and crew, and leading man Willem Dafoe (who was hot off of The Last Temptation of Christ) was making attempts to inject 'edge' into his character, which Linson described as 'terrifying' and unsuited to a rom-com starring role!
Chechik managed to earn a comeback by directing the off-beat rom-com Benny & Joon, but followed this up with the dual misfire of Sharon Stone starring re-make Diabolique and the troubled The Avengers movie.
Dark Blood
Actors have died mid-way through productions on numerous occasions; Oliver Reed passed away before completing photography on Gladiator, Brandon Lee was tragically and accidentally killed on set during the filming of The Crow (both actors' parts were finished using stand-ins and computer effects), and most recently Heath Ledger died prior to filming green screen work on Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus; Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell ultimately stepped in to pay homage to Heath and portray aspects of his character via a canny plot device.
No such technique was really available to the makers of Dark Blood, a strange low-key drama starring River Phoenix as a young hermit living on a nuclear testing site, who effects the lives of a couple (Jonathan Pryce and Judy Davis) when their car breaks down nearby. Phoenix, aged 23, died of a drug overdose, outside of Johnny Depp's LA club the Viper Rooms, 11 days before production was to be completed, forcing the film to shutdown. The producers tried, and failed, to sue Phoenix's mother to the sum of $6million saying that Phoenix did not declare his drug use. The director George Sluzier owns the material shot and has suggested using it in an - as yet - unmade documentary about Phoenix, with some of the raw footage recently cropping up on Youtube.
The Day The Clown Cried
An infamous, unfinished and unreleased film from 1972, directed by and starring comedian Jerry Lewis; this is the controversial tale of a clown imprisoned in a Nazi camp, though that plot synopsis admittedly bares resemblence to Roberto Benigi's Oscar winning Life Is Beautiful. It took producer Nathan Wachsberger some convincing to get Lewis on board the project, Lewis was unsure if he was capable of playing the lead role of Helmut Dorque, and asked; "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?"
Ultimately Lewis felt he would be doing something worthwhile, telling a dramatic and emotional story about the horrors of the Holocaust and began principal photography in April 1972. But probelms plagued the film, with equipment either arriving late or not at all, then money required by the production was nowhere to be found, neither was Wachsberger. It transpired that Wachsberger had not only run out of money before finishing the film, but he had never paid the script-writer Joan O'Brien the full fee for her work. Lewis eventually paid the fee and production costs from his own pocket, but none of the other financial parties involved were able to come to an agreement that would allow the film to be released. With threats of lawsuits, Lewis took the only existing rough cut of the film on video cassette which he, allegedly, has locked away in his office. Lewis, to this day, refuses to talk about the film, but occasionally it is shown at exclusive screenings organized by Hollywood insiders, though who the source for the film is nobody knows.
Comedian (and The Simpsons voice actor Harry Shearer) wrote for Spy magazine of a screening he attended in 1979, saying; "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."
O'Brien, and her co-writer Charles Denton, insist that the film will never be released and they fully intend on preventing it from happening, disagreeing with Lewis' diversions from their original screenplay. Though Lewis himself has written that he intends to finish the film as he originally intended, in his 1982 autobiography he wrote; 'One way or another, I'll get it done.'
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