24 Frames: Never To Be Seen

There are a ton of movies out there that just never get made. Some of them are stuff of legend; some are just passing glimpses of what’s going on in Hollywood’s head. In today’s internet age, rumors and speculation run rampant. Anytime an executive farts, some site picks it up and tells us it’s going to be next summers big budget blockbuster starring Shia LaBeouf.

But there have been those that have been passed down over the years and become part of the film geek mythos. These are movies that have been made but will never (or rarely) be seen, and those that stepped into the rainbow somewhere along the script stage. Now I’m not talking about small potato movies either, I’m talking about the big stuff.

The biggest happens to also deal with the smallest, or more on point the shortest. Napoleon: written, but never directed by Stanley Kubrick. This was to be a giant movie. Kubrick being the perfectionist that he was researched every book and wrote what geekdom has considered the greatest epic never made. The film was ready to roll in Romania with five thousand extras it would have been a massive undertaking. He was rolling off of the success of 2001, so anything seemed possible.

Then came Waterloo. It starred Rod Steiger as Napoleon and to be honest, I have no idea if it is any good or not, I’ve never seen it. But it bombed at the box office and that sent a message to the financing folks behind Kubrick’s film that Napoleon had no chance for profit. So they pulled out and the film never happened. This was a supposed hit for Kubrick who had a fascination with the military leader for years and had developed and constructed the script with an incredible passion.

Another cinematic master who was never able to get his vision up on the screen was Alfred Hitchcock, but unlike Kubrick it would be for very different reasons.

Kaleidoscope was rejected by Universal because of Hitchcock’s radical visual ideas as well as the content. This was in the mid-sixties and he was hailed a master again after releasing Psycho and The Birds. His idea for Kaleidoscope was to shoot it in a verite style thanks to the success of the French New Wave and he wanted to try some very experimental stylistic choices. He has even shot about an hour of experimental footage to show what he was going to go for.

Well, that caused some nervousness at the studio, but it was the script that really flipped their wigs. It was to be told from the point of view of an attractive young man who is a serial killer, gay, oh and a rapist. The script also included nudity. For evident reasons the studio said nope. Years of reworking and moving back to England, Hitchcock was able to release a version that we know today as Frenzy. There is a geek myth that the experimental footage that was shot is occasionally screened to audiences. I can neither confirm nor deny.

Now I’m going to wrap it up by mentioning a film that has been made, completed and has never seen the light of day. Rumor is that it’s for the best.

The Day The Clown Cried was a passion projects for Jerry Lewis. Shot in 1972, the central storyline is about a circus clown (Lewis) who becomes a political prisoner in Nazi Germany and eventually starts clowning for the Jewish children to lead them to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Sounds like a hoot, right?

Lewis refuses to discuss the film to this day and it has gained the reputation of being tasteless and insulting. Harry Shearer attended a private screening in 1979 and reported that is was one of the most "misplaced" films he’d ever seen. "For everything it was attempting to do, it did just the opposite." Ouch.

Hearing about films like these makes me wonder what the cinematic landscape would be like today if they had made it into theaters. Would Kubrick have made A Clockwork Orange or Barry Lyndon if Napoleon had been green lit? Would Hitchcock be looked at with a different eye today if he’d completed Kaleidoscope? Would Jerry Lewis have any remaining self-respect? We’ll never really know, but it’s fun to think about.