Jerry Lewis’ Infamous “Holocaust Comedy” Finds New Life in Venice (Kind Of)

“All you have to do,” says author Shawn Levy, who wrote King of Comedy , the definitive Jerry Lewis biography, is to give the plot summary. “If you just tell people: Jerry Lewis wrote, directed and starred in a drama about a clown in a concentration camp leading children into the gas chambers, people say: ‘What? How have I never heard of this movie, how have I never seen it?’ “

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You haven’t seen the film, The Day the Clown Cried . No one has. Jerry Lewis shot it in 1972, but it was never released. And it never will be. It is one of the last white whales of lost cinema, like Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune or Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind , except Jodorowsky never got to shoot a single frame of his Arrakis epic. And Welles’ opus was eventually finished, 48 years later, thanks to Netflix money. It screened at the Venice Film Festival in 2018.

In Venice this year, The Day the Clown Cried obsessives — yes they exist — will get a peek at never-before-seen footage of the lost work. From Darkness to Light , a new documentary about the making of the film, and Lewis’ complicated, decades-long relationship to it, will screen in the Venice Classics section. Co-directed by American Michael Lurie and German documentarian Eric Friedler, the movie builds on Friedler’s 2016 doc Der Clown , which featured several minutes of original scenes as well as staged reenactments of the Clown Cried script, several versions of which are available online.

The story of the making of Clown Cried rivals that of history’s greatest production train wrecks. Publicist turned TV producer Joan O’Brien and L.A. Examiner TV critic Charles Denton wrote the original script, about a German circus performer who gets sent to the camps for mocking Hitler. It was optioned by producer Nathan Wachsberger, who got Lewis attached, despite the actor’s concerns he wouldn’t be able to pull off the transition from the slapstick antics of Cinderfella and The Nutty Professor to a movie about the Holocaust.

“Why don’t you try getting Sir Laurence Olivier?” Lewis, in his 1982 autobiography, recalls asking Wachsberger. “My bag is comedy.”

But something in the story, apparently, spoke to him. Or maybe it was the Percodan talking. (In his autobiography, Lewis admits to a severe addiction to painkillers). He threw himself into the work, touring Dachau and Auschwitz for research and losing 35 pounds on a grapefruit diet to look gaunt. He made the script more Lewis-appropriate, adding jokes and pratfalls and changing the protagonist’s name from the more generic Karl Schmidt to … Helmut Doork. Yes, Doork.

By 1972, when Lewis arrived in France to begin shooting for a Swedish studio, Wachsberger was gone. The option on the O’Brien-Denton script had expired. He no longer had the rights to make the movie. He went ahead anyway, investing, by his accounts, $2 million of his own money. “Our beachfront property on Vancouver Island, our house in Palm Springs, his boat, those things all went away to be able to put that money into the film,” his son Chris Lewis told The New York Times in 2018.

Lewis kept shooting, ignoring the incongruities of the script and the staging (such as the blond, blue-eyed Scandinavian kids cast to play the Jewish children). But money was tight, and when he wrapped, the Swedish studio, claiming it was owed $600,000, held back some of the footage and the original negatives. Undeterred, Lewis headed back to the U.S. with a rough cut of the film and screened it for O’Brien.

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“She left the screening room in tears, saying, ‘This will never see the light of day, I will never give you the rights,’ ” says Levy. “When she passed, she put it in her will: This film can never be shown.”

There have been several attempts to reboot the original O’Brien-Denton script, once as a possible Chevy Chase vehicle. More recently, K.Jam Media founder Kia Jam — a producer on Sin City: A Dame to Kill For — said he has secured chain of title for the script as well as financing and is going forward with the project.

In 2015, two years before he died , Lewis donated his personal archive, including The Day the Clown Cried material, to the Library of Congress with the stipulation that the footage not be shown for 10 years. But fans expecting a release next year will be disappointed. The library has confirmed it has only partial negatives of the movie, some 13 cans (or about 90 minutes) of unedited camera rushes without sound and some behind-the-scenes footage.

However good, or so-bad-it’s-good The Day the Clown Cried could have been, not having the movie means the myth of the lost Jerry Lewis Holocaust comedy will never die.

“Even if it was Schindler’s List , even if it was a masterpiece, we wouldn’t be talking about it so much if we had the film,” says Levy. “Whereas now, if there’s 90 seconds of new footage that turns up on a documentary or Danish television, the internet goes nuts. If the film had succeeded, it would have shrunk over time. The fact that we can never see it means it has never shrunk, and it never will.”

This story first appeared in the August 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe .

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