The Day the Clown Cried

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

The Day the Clown Cried is an unfinished and unreleased 1972 film directed by and starring Jerry Lewis. It is based on a book 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.

Plot

Lewis plays a depressed, formerly great German circus clown named Helmut Doork, who is past his prime and has little-to-no respect. After getting fired for causing a 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, he overhears the lead clown Gustav tell the ringmaster to fire Helmut, or else he will resign, to which the showman agrees. Distraught, Helmut is caught in a bar by the Gestapo for drunkenly mocking the Führer, and imprisoned in a Nazi camp for political prisoners. He tries to keep his bravado up among the other inmates by bragging what a famous performer he was. His only friend in prison is a good-hearted German named Keltner, whose reason for being interned is never revealed but most likely due to his Christian beliefs. 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 prison commandant orders that he must be stopped.

After the SS guard 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 killed with one shot 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. 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.

Cast

• Jerry Lewis - Helmut Doork
• Harriet Andersson - Ada Doork
• Anton Diffring - Captain Curt Runkel
• Ulf Palme - Johann Keltner
• Pierre Etaix - Gustav the Great

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. He 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 unright 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 O'Brien and Denton's first draft, Lewis felt that he would be doing something worthwhile and that the horrors of 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 Caesar's 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. 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, Jerry 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 in his office. The location of the film negative is unknown. He refuses to discuss the film. Occasionally, the film is shown at exclusive screenings organized by longtime Hollywood insiders. Their source for the film is unknown. Recently [1], a fan asked Lewis, during one of his motiviational speeches, if and when he was going to release it, only to be told "None of your goddamn business!"

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.

A May 1992 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 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.

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) 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."

Trivia

• Spy also reported Milton Berle, Dick Van Dyke, and Bobby Darin were among those who had considered playing the clown during the years before Lewis got involved.

• 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.

• Jerry Lewis lost 40 pounds to prepare for his role.

• In Jon Stewart's America: The Book, one of the secret sections located beneath the White House is a screening room for the film.

• All accounts indicate the film was a sincere attempt at drama, but the subject matter and reports of how it was treated strangely mirror the purposeful poor taste of the Springtime for Hitler Broadway show depicted by Mel Brooks in The Producers (1968 film).

See also

• List of Holocaust films

External links

• Film summary from The Official Jerry Lewis Comedy Museum
• Extensive details about the film, from a fan's website, including
  • a draft of the script (in zipped Word format)
  • a May 1992 article about the film from Spy Magazine
• The Day The Clown Cried at IMDb