Sometimes movies not deemed commercially successful 9even if they’re actually good) don’t get officially released, but show up on the lecture circuit and the like.
As I mentioned recently in another thread, the BBC commission Peter Watkins’ The War Game and found it so dark and subversive that they sat on it instead of releasing it. But plenty of people saw it in screenings and film festivals (including me) before the BBC finally aired it – twenty years later. It really is, in my mind, the darkest and scariest Nuclear War film, far more disturbing than The Day After or Threads.
One TV pilot I saw on the college talk-show circuit was Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video. It featured John Candy and other Second City and SNL regulars. among the skits it included were
Celebrity Deformities (Dan Ackroyd shows off his webbed toes – you can see this clip on YouTube)
The Last Episode of Mil Bill (Sluggo takes care of him and his dog in the hospital)
The Church of Jack Lord (Terri Garr sings “Were you There when they Crucified Jack Lord?”)
Holy crud! I can’t believe the 1979 version had two sequels! That motorcycle helmet…
Yeah, 1990 version was the one I was referring to.
Had to dig some more based on this; with the glut of super hero movies these days, I’m continually surprised how early it all started – the first live-action Cap seems to be a series from 1944!
(Sorry about this whole tangent, didn’t mean to hijack the thread)
It’s been mentioned on SD before, but the film Nothing Lasts Forever (1984) has yet to have an official release. It is not available on video. It made its American broadcast debut in 2015(!).
I have it on DVD, and it seems to be a legit (non-bootleg) copy.
Matt Salinger, son of J.D. Salinger, oddly enough. I’ve heard it said that it was his only film role, but his imdb page is a decent size, with well-known H’wood flicks, TV and straight to video stuff. That Captain America movie was directed by Albert Pyun, one of the most persistent (as in, how does he keep coming back?) schlockmeisters of the past forty years.
A old timer Hollywood guy I know swears that the sequel to Doc Savage Man of Bronze had been shot, but not edited, and was dumped, as the first film bombed.
He did concede that maybe only some scenes, not the whole film, but he said it was not uncommon in those days to shoot parts of a sequel while filming the first.
I like many UK movies and some time ago, read about Hippie Hippie Shake, which started filming in 2007, though development on it started ten years earlier. Wikipedia describes it as “based on a memoir by Richard Neville, editor of the Australian satirical magazine Oz, and chronicles his relationship with girlfriend Louise Ferrier, the launch of the London edition of Oz amidst the 1960s counterculture, and the staff’s trial for distributing an obscene issue.” It starred Cillian Murphy, Sienna Miller and other established British actors and was produced by Working Title, but somehow it never was released.
Do films that were started then abandoned count? Jeremiah Chechik started directing a movie called Arrive Alive which, fascinatingly, was co-written by Mitch Glazer and Michael O’Donoghue. As a huge fan of the latter, I’d love to see how it turned out. Unfortunately, after a week of filming, the comedy was falling flat, and Willem Dafoe chose to drop out because he wasn’t comfortable with the slapstick direction it was shifting to. So it got axed.
Speaking of Chechik (and we so rarely do), his big-screen Avengers adaptation was rightfully a catastrophe in 1998, but reportedly half an hour of whacked out of it with little rhyme or reason by the studio after disastrous test screenings and in its released form, the movie’s utterly incomprehensible. I’d so love to see a proper cut but I imagine there’s virtually no interest in it surfacing.
Some times a movie gets scrapped between production and distribution because of a scandal involving one of the filmmakers. An example of this is I Love You, Daddy. The film was written and directed by and stars Louis C.K. and the sex crimes allegation against him went public right before the movie’s scheduled release date. The studio decided to cancel the release.
It was eventually released on video, but not when I saw it. And AFAIK it was never shown on TV (which is where it was supposed to go, only it was considered beyond the bounds of network taste.)
There was that Area 51 film that was made by the Paranormal Activity people which had a weird history.
Basically the premise was that a news filming crew is invited to Area 51 by the military to “prove” there’s no aliens, but of course something goes wrong during the tour and aliens break out, and all of this would be seen by the film crew cameras perspective. From what I understand the thing was filmed entirely in 2009 and you can find news reports with that premise hyping it for a theatrical release.
Then there were some disastrous test screenings in 2010 and over the next 3 years there was extensive rewrites and reshoots. By the time it was 2015 for it’s straight to video release the films premise was radically different, now it was about a bunch of teenagers who break into Area 51 with their own cameras to reveal the truth. So basically there’s an entirely different Area 51 movie the studio shot and basically scrapped for their new one.
The real movie about fake real aliens actually uncovered real real aliens, so they had to make a new fake movie about real aliens but make you think they were fake.
So what happened? Were the unreleased Fatty Arbuckle films later released, or did they simply disappear forever? Is there any way to track down where they are today?
Thanks, RealityChuck. I can see why they were shelved, but you’d think someone would have squirreled them away somewhere safe if only for archival reasons. They spent the money to make them ao why throw that all away when you don’t know if they might be valuable some day?
Even if they weren’t thrown away deliberately, films (especially ones from that era) are vulnerable to deterioration or accidental destruction. A film that wasn’t widely released, and thus had few copies made, could easily be lost completely.
Following his third trial, Roscoe was unanimously acquitted by a jury, but apparently, his reputation never recovered from the scandal, so there was no reason to keep those unreleased films around since they were never going to be shown in the US, and therefore copies wouldn’t have been made. Case closed.
I remember when I was a student at the University of Kansas back in the 80’s, Jack Nicholson and Timothy Hutton were in town for a few weeks filming a movie version of the novel “The Last Cattle Drive”. I don’t believe it was ever released, not sure if they ever even completed shooting.
I know there are films that were started but never completed. Sometimes a lead actor dies during shooting and the producers decide to scrap the film for that reason. I’m more interested in films that were shot and edited, but when tested scored so poorly that they decided to scrap the film rather than reshoot it or fix it in post.
