Can you think of a case in which a fictional movie was shot but remained unfinished, and substantial amounts of footage from that film were later incorporated into a completely different fictional film?
(Both films must be fictional!)
(Extra credit if the footage includes key characters with speaking parts!)
Not exactly what you’re looking for, but the original Paul Veerhoeven version of Total Recall included, playing as a commercial on the TV screens in the subway, an early computer-generated cartoon about “BotCo” fuels (“Tomorrows Fuels, Tomorrows Prices”) made by Pacific Data Images that I’d seen at computer animation festivals (and later owned on a video collection of Computer Animation)
Also not what you’re looking for (since the film was finished, but not widely distributed, and even banned in the UK), but Daughter of Horror (AKA, in a slightly different version as Dementia) is the movie that’s being shown in the theater in the original version of The Blob. Its name is even up on the theater marquee.
http://www.monstermoviehouse.com/2015/09/dementia-daughter-of-horror-1958.html#!/2015/09/dementia-daughter-of-horror-1958.htmlEdited to add: As the last link shows, not only is the Colonial Theater still around, but they have an annual re-creation of the scene from The Blob.
https://thecolonialtheatre.com/programs/blobfest-2019-the-blob-saturday-evening/
Not an unfinished film, but an unfinished revision:
The ending of the theatrical release of Bladerunner, where Ridley Scott spliced in the footage of flying over evergreen trees and added the Harrison Ford voiceover, in an attempt to give a modicum of hope at the end.
Aha! Found an article called “Why Does the Ending of ‘Blade Runner’ Look Familiar?”:
Would you count Bela Lugosi’s scenes in Plan Nine from Outer Space?
I know that it’s popular to say that “Bela Lugosi died during the filming of Plan Nine, so Ed Wood used his wife’s chiropractor to stand in for him.” But that’s not exactly what happened. Actually the footage of Lugosi was filmed in 1956 (three years before Plan Nine) for a film to be called The Vampire’s Tomb. Wood abandoned the project when Lugosi died.
Plan Nine (originally called Grave Robbers from Outer Space) was a completely different project, and Wood decided to use the footage of Lugosi that he had already shot (and, yes, used his wife’s chiropractor to stand in for Lugosi in subsequent scenes). But at the time he was shooting with Lugosi, Plan Nine hadn’t even been conceived yet.
According to Wikipedia, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive was first intended as a TV pilot and filmed as such. Once that plan fell through, some additional filming took place and the scenes were put together into a feature film. If that counts.
Bruce Lee had started filming “Game of Death”, including the fight scene with Kareem Abdul-Jabaar, when the offer to make “Enter the Dragon” came along. He went off to film “Enter”, and then died before going back to complete “Game of Death”.
Many years, and many (horrible) Bruce Lee wannabe movies later, some studio obtained the completed footage from “Game of Death” and created an entirely new story in order to incorporate the footage (only like 20 minutes worth). 3 different “actors” were used to fill in the Bruce Lee part, along with some splicing in of scenes from earlier Bruce Lee movies (and other, even more horrible attempts-at-effects). The completed (new) “Game of Death” was a total cluster, but it became the vehicle to finally present Lee’s completed footage.
Damn! - that was mine. Beat me to it, digs.
j
During his time as a film student, a pre-fame Francis Ford Coppola produced and directed Tonight For Sure. TFS recycled several minutes of footage from an unfinished Western/softcore hybrid film.
EDIT: So far as I can determine, Tonight For Sure had at least an “arthouse” release in the L.A. area. It was screened for paying customers and is included among Coppola’s IMDB credits. So while it was made while Coppola was still in UCLA Film School, it wasn’t a ‘student film’ per se. Not turned in for a grade or anything like that.
I’m not sure if this fits the requirements:
In Sunset Boulevard, William Holden and Gloria Swanson watching a fictional silent film of hers, which was made up of footage from Swanson’s unfinished film Queen Kelly.
It was released on VHS. I rented it back then, but have don’t recall much about it.
Again, not clear if this qualifies, since it might not be from a movie not released, but the footage of Laurence Olivier as “Dr. Totenkopf” in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was apparently from the BBC, but nobody seems to know from exactly what.
So far, I think teela brown’s entry seems to be the only one to undoubtedly fit the OP’s bill.
Footage from “Voyage to The Bottom of The Sea” ended up in “Wonder Woman” (1978)*.
*I only watched it for the articles.
Do TV episodes count? Doctor Who had a partly filmed but incomplete episode Shada. A few moments of the footage was later used in the later episode The Five Doctors.
If it’s TV, then the obvious example is “The Cage” pilot for Star Trek which was extensively used in The Menagerie.
Doesn’t really fit OP’s criteria, but due to budget, battle sequences from the animated film Wizards (1977) were rotoscoped from the films Zulu, El Cid, Battle of the Bulge and Alexander Nevsky, and included live action from Patton.
Samuel Fuller used color footage he had shot in Brazil ten years earlier for a sequence in the otherwise black and white Shock Corridor where the main guy hallucinates. (He was scouting locations for a film he was hired to write called Tigrero, which was eventually scrapped, though I don’t know if his footage was intended for inclusion in the unmade picture.)
Wait, live action from Patton was used in an animated movie about wizards?!? That sounds intrusive and stupid…
“(Both films must be fictional!)” You mean we can make them up. Hey, this is easy.
Neither of these are exactly what you’re looking for but “Mant” was a fictional movie featured in “Matinee”. And scenes from “The Night Stalker” were used in “Trilogy of Terror” (The drive-in sequence.)
The conceit of the movie is that, after human society annihilated itself in a nuclear war, it was replaced by a world with elves and magic and shit replaced it. One of the titular wizards is trying to resurrect the old technology to conquer the new world, hence, tanks.
The rotoscoping is still intrusive and stupid, but mostly because it was done in an obvious and ham-fisted way. Like, to make the Nazi soldiers look like orcs, they colored them solid black to look like silhouettes, and then drew little horns on their helmets. Go to about 1:30 in the linked video. It’s startlingly terrible.