Over the past few days I’ve had a few people point me toward mypdfscripts.com, a script repository featuring all sorts of great and weird screenplays, some produced and some not. Naturally, I gravitated to the geeky stuff like J.J. Abrams’ Superman script, Michael Chabon’s X-Men treatment, and Brian K. Vaughan’s adaptation of his comic Y the Last Man (which has since been pulled), but there’s plenty of other great stuff on the site—namely, weird shit like the shooting script for the infamous The Day the Clown Cried:
The Day the Clown Cried is an unfinished and unreleased 1972 film directed by and starring Jerry Lewis…. The film was met with controversy regarding its premise and content, which features a circus clown who is imprisoned in a Nazi camp.
The Day the Clown Cried was shot, but has never been released for, uh, fairly obvious reasons. (Apparently, somehow comedian Harry Shearer saw a rough cut of it in 1979, noting that Lewis made the film because he thought “the Academy can’t ignore this” and comparing the experience of watching it to “if you flew down to Tijuana and suddenly saw a painting on black velvet of Auschwitz.”)
Have at, cinephiles and masochists.
And in the hands of Roberto Benigni it becomes “Life Is Beautiful”, and wins an academy award.
@rich bachelor beat me to it.
It’s worth the time to go back through back issues of Spy circa 1992 for a point-for-point assessment of the movie, from an unnamed individual (probably Shearer) who saw the film. The Drew Friedman illustrations alone will make it all worthwhile.