I have been tasked by my friends to locate a copy of this Lewis Masterpiece.
Anyone have a line on it? The Screenplay perhaps?
Anyone?
Spellcheck all ya want, you gotta proofreed more closely son.
Sorry.
This gem was under production when some legal snag came up, and it was determined that the rights (for the book) had not been properly secured.
Lewis at some point did get the legal rights (I think) and completed the film. Since a lot of the money was coming from his pocket at that point, he owned (and still owns) the film.
It has never been releaseed, however, to theaters or video.
I have read that Lewis does occasionally screen it to his guests, and that the comments from some people who have seen it are that it’s really awful. (I think Daniel Stern is one such person who commented on having seen it.)
I also read that Lewis does not plan to release it as long as he’s alive. Whether or not it will be released on that die when France mourns his passing is something we’ll just have to wait for.
(And you probably already know this, and I’m going from memory, so I might be a little off)
23 years later it is now 2024, the year stuff related to the movie is available to scholars at the Library of Congress.
There is a new documentary just screened at the Venice Film festival [I can’t find who will be streaming it. Anyone know?]:
For the first half of “From Darkness to Light,” the filmmakers drop in quick snippets from “The Day the Clown Cried,” but they’re so unfinished and brief that questions linger: Will we see a significant amount of footage? And how bad was it, really?
By the end of the doc, both questions have been answered. The film contains a lot of Lewis’ original footage, albeit in highly rough form, and for the most part, it’s pretty damn bad.
The full screenplay is available online:
https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/the_day_the_clown_cried.html
I just recently rewatched the King of Comedy and Jerry Lewis is really good in it.
Yeah, but it was directed by Scorsese. I think that probably had a lot to do with it.
I remember having seen a documentary about “The Day The Clown Cried” only a few years ago, probably on Arte TV (a German/French TV channel) which included some original footage from the movie, but I don’t remember the title of the documentary, and I can’t find it on the web.
It might be:
On February 3, 2016, German public TV ARD aired a 2-hour documentary called Der Clown.[36] German film maker Eric Friedler shows interviews, a 31-minute version of original footage and re-staged scenes from the original scripts with some Swedish actors who participated in Lewis’s movie. Finally, the film shows the first full interview with Lewis about his work after 43 years. The documentary was later put on DVD and shown theatrically at the Deutsches Filminstitute. In June 2016, a 31-minute version from Der Clown was uploaded to YouTube and Vimeo by editor Kay Brown, and dubbed into German with English subtitles, marking the first time a version of The Day the Clown Cried was made available to the general public.[37] It has since been removed.[38]
Scorsese said he thought Lewis did a great job in that movie, I’m not a Lewis fan, but he was great.
Yeah, that was the documentary I saw. Thanks.
My point was that under another director, Lewis could be a decent actor. Under his own direction, he was execrable IMO.
No, I wasn’t arguing the point. I never got his appeal as a comedian, but he was stellar in that movie.
There’s a funny scene in which a woman tells him she’s his biggest fan and asks for an autograph. Lewis is in a hurry and politely declines and she’s says, “I hope you get cancer.” Scorsese said that Lewis suggested the line because that happened to him.
O.k. I missed your point. Do you recommend the movie at all? I’ve avoided it because I find Lewis so repulsive.
It was a bomb for Scorsese but I love it. It’s very weird and funny and Lewis plays kind of a version of himself, he’s a talk show host similar to Johnny Carson.
I didn’t know it was a box office bomb…I’ll take your word for it, though…one wouldn’t expect it to be a crowd pleaser, though, for sure!
I watched it again maybe a decade or so ago and was shocked at how grim and cynical a worldview it presents. I’d seen it maybe four times previously and was locked into the outstanding songs on the soundtrack, and the very dark comedy of Sandra Bernhard, and, yes, Lewis himself.
I confess I still sometimes use that line Shelley Hack uses (she’s Lewis’s character’s…assistant, or something…) to Rupert Pupkin: “Well, I’m very sorry you feel that way, but I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do about it, now is there?” Well, maybe I’ve never actually said it…but thought about saying it a lot.
Anyway, agreed about Lewis, under other direction…Tashlin comes to mind…
Can’t say I’ll be the first in line to see Day/Clown/Cried, but it’ll go on the list…Heaven’s Gate and Ishtar will be ahead of it, though!
Yeah, the movie is a bookend to Taxi Driver, both are about delusional people in the city who find some level of happiness by giving in to their violent and delusional impulses.
I want to see The Day the Clown Cried to compare it to Life is Beautiful, which has a similar plot.
Agree 100%. I loathe Jerry Lewis, but he’s just right in this film. He and Sandra Bernhard have great “anti-chemistry.” I read that they really didn’t like each other off screen, which was quite believable.
I believe you mean *Sandra Bernhard."
Sandra Bernard. And she is amazing in it.