Sony Pictures made the shocking decision this week to cancel the release of The Interview after a group called the “Guardians of Peace” threatened to attack theaters showing the James Franco/Seth Rogan comedy.
The Interview was set to be released on Christmas Day nationwide, but now even the on-demand and DVD releases are in jeopardy. Our own Ian Casselberry wrote about the growing fear among theater owners before Sony made its decision to pull the film entirely from theaters.
While shocking, this move by Sony isn’t unprecedented. Studios have shelved movies in the past, but their motives usually have more to do with their own bottom line, and not the possibility of a terrorist attack.
Here are three other movies canceled for various reasons that were either completed or mostly filmed before being locked away.
Possibly the “grandaddy” of all canceled films, this Holocaust film directed by and starring Jerry Lewis (yes, that Jerry Lewis) has achieved a cult following without ever being completed, and its footage rarely seen.
In 1972, Lewis set out to tell the story of a German clown named Helmut Doork who becomes imprisoned in a concentration camp during World War II for drunkenly impersonating Adolf Hitler. Doork begins performing for the other prisoners, who mock and beat him, but eventually he finds his audience with the Jewish children of the camp. These children are led onto a train car to Auschwitz, where Doork mistakenly joins them, and ultimately entertains them all the way to the gas chamber where he decides to join them. The end.
Obviously, that sounds insane. Harry Shearer saw a rough cut of The Day the Clown Cried in 1979, and told Spy Magazine:
“This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. Oh My God! – that’s all you can say.”
Sensing that the film would be a disaster, and essentially out of money, Lewis stopped production in 1973, and never returned to The Day the Clown Cried. After years of defending the movie, Lewis told an audience member during a Cinefamily Q&A last year that the movie was, “bad, bad, bad,” and that he “slipped up.”
In 1997, Patton Oswalt hosted several readings of the script with fellow comedians, and writes about it in his upcoming book, Silver Screen Fiend, of which Vulture posted a timely excerpt this week. Last year, the only footage widely circulated made its way to YouTube. This footage from a Danish TV show is probably the only look at The Day the Clown Cried any of us will ever see.
The story of how The Fantastic Four was optioned, filmed, and eventually shelved all revolve around one man, Bernd Eichinger. In 1983, Eichinger optioned Marvel’s first family for the low sum of $250,000 with plans to shop it around to the major Hollywood studios.
In 1992, with no one willing to shell out money to film a comic book movie, Eichinger needed to start production on the film, or his option would run out at the end of the year. This is when he decided to contact a man known for filming quickly and cheaply, Roger Corman.
Corman, the king of the B-Movie, came up with a ridiculous budget of $1 million, and chose the director of Bloodfist 3: Forced to Fight, starring Don “The Dragon” Wilson, to lead his production. After 21 days of shooting, filming for The Fantastic Four was finished and the movie was scheduled for a Labor Day 1993 release.
Over 20 years later, we’re still waiting for the movie to be officially released. Depending on who you ask, either Eichinger never intended to release the movie or he was bought out by Marvel, who feared the movie would ruin one of their signature franchises. Eichinger did eventually produce the big-budget Fantastic Four starring Jessica Alba and its sequel.
In the years that followed the release of Corman’s Fantastic Four, bootleg copies of the movie popped up in comic shops (where I bought one in the late 1990’s, only to lose it a few years later), and a documentary titled Doomed! The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s The Fantastic Four is currently making the rounds on the festival circuit.
While the movie has never been released in theaters, or officially on DVD or VHS, it is currently available to view on YouTube.
Tom Schiller started as a writer for Saturday Night Live in 1975 and a few seasons later, he was directing short films for the show. Some of his work includes “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” which features an elderly John Belushi celebrating being the last SNL cast member alive and “Love is a Dream,” starring Phil Hartman and Jan Hooks.
In 1984, Schiller set out to make his feature debut and with Lorne Michaels producing, he wrote and directed Nothing Lasts Forever starring Zach Galligan, Lauren Tom, and Bill Murray. It is the only feature film Schiller has ever directed.
This sci-fi comedy revolves around pianist Adam Beckett (Galligan), who flees to Europe after a riot ensues during a piano performance in New York City. Eventually returning to New York, he discovers that the city is being run by the Port Authority. Soon he learns that the bums of the world are actually controlling the entire world, and they send him on a mission to the moon to spread peace.
Wacky premises aside, the film was also shot mostly in black and white with some musical numbers thrown in as well. Schiller believes it was shelved by MGM because it wasn’t commercial enough, and he’s probably right.
While it has never been officially released in theaters here in the States, or on DVD, it has been shown several times on German television. It also has occasionally been screened at festivals, including during a Bill Murray retrospective in New York in 2004. Earlier this year Nothing Lasts Forever was briefly posted on YouTube before being pulled at the insistence of the studio.
With so many avenues for distribution available today, it seems unlikely that The Interview will suffer the same fate as these films. The long unreleased Louis C.K. film Tomorrow Night was finally released on C.K.’s own website, and River Phoenix’s last film, Dark Blood, was released this year after sitting unreleased for 19 years.
Whether it’s released on demand or DVD, Sony could eventually distribute The Interview in an attempt to recoup some of the almost $100 million they may lose by canceling the film, but by withholding the film they could also receive money through an insurance claim.
So it looks like our best bet to see The Interview anytime soon is either through a DVD screener leak, or if Paulo Coehlo, author of The Alchemist, is successful in purchasing the film from Sony.
I offer @SonyPictures 100k for the rights of “The Interview” I will post it free on my blog. Pls get in touch with me via @SonyPicturesBr
— Paulo Coelho (@paulocoelho) December 18, 2014
