Scandalous Jerry Lewis Film ‘The Day The Clown Cried’ Might Be Redeemed In A New Adaptation
In the realm of lost media, sad twists of fate and freak accidents typically cause a film to disappear forever. Such was the case, for instance, with Lon Chaney’s 1927 silent mystery London After Midnight, which has no known copy left in existence once the last print went up in smoke in the 1960s.
Other times, a deliberate choice is made that keeps a film from being finished or seen by the public. 50 years before Batgirl or Scoob’s Holiday Haunt, there were few examples more controversial than The Day The Clown Cried.
The tragicomedy that takes place during the Holocaust was ahead of its time as that subject was talked about very little, if ever, in narrative films before Schindler’s List. Moreover, it was never used for satire, but that’s what nearly happened in a project co-written, starring, and directed by Jerry Lewis.
In 1972, Lewis made the story of a fictional World War II-era comedic performer named Helmut Doork the focus of his next big film. However, the funnyman went sideways with his screenwriters and the project was abandoned despite bearing some fruit.
The Day The Clown Cried was filmed without Lewis’s producer having sufficient rights and when the former showed dailies to the authors of the original screenplay they optioned, Joan O’Brien and Charles Denton, the duo was “horrified” according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It was a disaster,” O’Brien once recounted.
“The original story was a tale of horror, conceit, and finally, enlightenment and self-sacrifice. Jerry had turned it into a sentimental, Chaplinesque representation of his own confused sense of himself, his art, his charity work, and his persecution at the hands of critics,” Denton elaborated.
The story involves Doork being jailed for drunkenly insulting Hitler at a bar. He is eventually sent to Auschwitz and persuaded to use his rapport with the captive children to lead them into the gas chambers. Doork does this but also meets his end when he goes inside with the little ones.
O’Brien and Denton’s script became an object of fascination in Hollywood’s comedic circles and somewhat cursed. Attempts to properly adapt it failed when financiers – including Princess Diana’s lover Dodi Al-Fayed and lobbyist Jack Abramoff – either met untimely ends or saw their careers crash and burn.
Now, there is renewed interest, between a German documentary about Lewis’s “disaster” of a production and a newfound ambition by a producer to send in the clown and see it through.
Kia Jam (Sin City: A Dame to Kill For) purchased the rights to the original script after a bevy of research and hurdles he recounted in detail to Deadline. Intent on being true to the material, he won’t be doing things Lewis’s way.
“I haven’t seen the movie, and I really don’t have a desire to,” Jam began. “That’s not the movie we’re going to make. I have nothing but respect for Jerry; I grew up watching his movies and he clearly was the master.”
He continued, “Jerry took the script. I believe they had it under option, but they never exercised their option, so they never really had the rights. And he rewrote it. The movie that he shot was not our script, not the script that I own and control. I just kind of wanted to distance myself from it.”
Jam added, “The script that I own, the original one that was written by the writers back decades ago, is by far the most powerful script I’ve ever read.” He then said to the JTA, “I’m not really interested in what somebody else did with the movie. I’m interested in making this movie, which we’re going to do.”
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Kia Jam’s other credits include The Strangers: Chapter 1, its inexplicable sequels to come, and the upcoming shoot-em-up action thriller The Killer’s Game starring Dave Bautista, Pom Klementieff, and Ben Kingsley.
Jerry Lewis distanced himself from The Day The Clown Cried, vehemently refusing to discuss it for years. He donated all his material regarding the project to the Library of Congress under a stipulation none of it would be exhibited until after his death.
Long after the comic’s passing in 2017, a buzz arose that audiences would see a rough cut of the film in some capacity during the summer of 2024. However, the season has come and gone with no screening taking place.
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