YOUTUBE
Will The Interview ever see the light of day? Probably, though maybe not officially. It’s only a matter of time before full-length torrents make their way online, and at that point, Sony MIGHT give it a video-on-demand release. The whole situation involving Seth Rogen and James Franco’s kill-the-leader comedy is so odd that no one knows what the hell is going on, but it’s not the first time a completed or near-completed major motion picture has been shelved. Here are a few others, not including Roger Corman’s The Fantastic Four, which we already covered.
All American Massacre
There are seven official Texas Chainsaw Massacre films, from the bloody great original to 2013’s unnecessary Texas Chainsaw 3D (starring Alexandra Daddario!), with plenty more to come, probably. Just don’t tell William Hooper, the son of Tobe Hooper, who directed the first film. He helmed a prequel about, to quote actor Bill Moseley, “Chop-top and the Hitchhiker together as twin brothers before Chop-top went off to Vietnam…It’s all told via flashback by an older Chop-top, who has been in a mental institution for ten years.” Massacre began as a 10-minute short before turning into a 60-minute feature, and guitarist Buckethead even composed the score. Alas, Moseley said “there were some rights concerns” and “different funding problems.” All that exists is a trailer.
Cocks*cker Blues
In the summer of 1977, Roger Ebert and Malcolm McLaren wrote a screenplay for a movie called Who Killed Bambi? It was to star the Sex Pistols and be, charitably, a punk rock A Hard Day’s Night. Only a single scene was filmed, according to Ebert, who wrote on his blog, “There is more than one account of what went wrong. McLaren claimed 20th Century Fox read the screenplay and pulled the plug.” Five years earlier, another influential band, the Rolling Stones, were in a movie of their very own: Robert Frank’s Cocksucker Blues, a wonderfully-named documentary about the drugged-out band touring behind Exile on Main St. in America. In one scene, a groupie injects herself with heroin. It sounds great, but the Stones blocked the release of the film, for obvious track marked reasons, and Frank is only allowed to “screen [it] four times a year.”
The Day the Clown Cried
The Day the Clown Cried makes Life Is Beautiful look like The Lego Movie. The 1972 film was directed by and starred Nutty comedian Jerry Lewis, who plays a worn-down German clown named Helmut Doork who performs for the little Jewish boys and girls at a concentration camp…before they’re led into the gas chamber. To prepare for the role, Lewis toured Auschwitz and Dachau and lost a ton of weight, eating nothing but grapefruit.
Despite knowing better, every scene in the script was shot and Lewis didn’t realize the terrible mistake he had made until the press screenings. Lewis later said, “I was ashamed of the work, and I was grateful that I had the power to contain it at all, and never let anyone see it.” Not exactly — Simpsons voice actor Harry Shearer once memorably told Howard Stern that he had seen a copy, somehow. His review: “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’s the original Yesterday and Today cover of Holocaust clown movies.