Fitzcarraldo
Acclaimed German director, Werner Herzog, besides making some amazing films, has had some pretty insane productions. Let’s ignore the fact that he whips out fantastic scripts in literally two or three days. Let’s ignore that he insisted on frequently working with absolute nut-case, Klaus Kinski, despite the fact that he had to threaten a murder-suicide to keep Kinski on set. Let’s even ignore that to get the surreal, distant performance he wanted out of actors for his film Heart of Glass, he had the actors hypnotized whenever filming. And instead, let’s concentrate on the filming of the hauling-an-entire-steam-boat-up-a-mountain epic, Fitzcarraldo:
Plot is a crazy guy wants to haul a whole steam ship up a mountain in the Amazon for some money-making scheme or another. This, of course, ends up a horrible ordeal, causing massive amounts of anguish to characters. This wouldn’t seem like too horribly difficult a movie to film. That is, it wouldn’t, unless you decided to film on location and also drag an actual full-size steam ship up a hill. It’s like he ignored his own script.
The filming itself was such an ordeal that an award-winning documentary, The Burden of Dreams, was made about it. Here’s Herzog in Burden talking about what a super fun blast working in the Amazon is:
Bonus, Kinski freaking out on set of Fitzcarraldo, from the documentary about the Herzog/Kisnki partnership, My Best Fiend:
The Kid & I
This one is… something. The plot of the movie is this: Tom Arnold plays himself. His career is washed up. But then a billionaire hires him to make a sequel to True Lies with one catch: his disabled son (Eric Gores) will star. The movie will only be seen by those at the son’s birthday party and is only being made because True Lies is the son’s favorite movie. Along the way, the son makes a lot of crazy demands, but they end up finding that he’s a real inspiration blah blah blah…
What’s particularly strange about this movie, much like Fitzcarraldo, is how much the plot paralells the actual production of the movie. Gores is actually disabled. He actually is a big fan of True Lies. Gores’s actual dad financed the film, hiring his real-life neighbor, Tom Arnold to star. The movie actually did have EXTREMELY limited distribution and was basically made just for Gores. I think the most interesting part, though, is that the movie itself ends up pointing out how kind of screwed up making a movie just for one person is, as shown in the scene below.
It seems the movie is condemning the fact that it exists at all. And, I regret to say, rightfully so. There’s a lot of things you should do for your kid if he’s disabled and you’ve got the resources. However, buying him his own vanity project probably isn’t one of them.
The Day the Clown Cried
This is one of the most famous movies never released. And thank God it wasn’t. Jerry Lewis portrays a circus clown in the holocaust who leads children to the gas chamber pied-piper, style, in exchange for his freedom (though either out of ego or guilt decides to continue entertaining them and goes in the gas chamber with them). Seriously. Someone thought that plot was a good idea.
And Lewis, though hesitant at first, thought it would be a good role for him to play. However, fate was on the viewing public’s side. There were so many problems with the production, financial and otherwise, that it could never really be released. Therefore a minute of behind-the-scenes footage with creepy music from The Biography Channel is all we have of it:
The word on the street is there only exists one VHS copy of the film, and that it’s in Jerry Lewis’s office. Harry Shearer, who has apparently seen this legendary screener, compares it to a velvet painting of Auschwitz. Some films are really just better off unmade.
