The
Day The Clown Cried
Original Screenplay by
Joan O'Brien and Charles
Denton
Reviewed by Rich Drees
Making a film is a substantial financial
investment and no matter how bad the final product is it will still get at least
a cursory release in an attempt to at least recoup a small fraction of its cost.
But there are still a few films that, for whatever reasons, never see the light
of a projector bulb and Jerry Lewis’ The Day The Clown Cried is certainly
the most famous and if not the most infamous.
Let’s face it, for better or worse, the
description “Jerry Lewis is a clown in a Nazi concentration camp” is an
attention getter.
Harry Shearer, one of the very small
handful of people who has actually seen the film in rough cut form described it
in an interview on radio’s The Howard Stern Show as, “If you say ‘Jerry
Lewis is a clown in a concentration camp’ and you make that movie up in your
head, it’s so much better than that. And by better I mean worse. You’re
stunned.”
How did such an audacious sounding
project ever come about?
Well, here’s what the online
Official Jerry Lewis Comedy Museum and Store has to say about the film-
In 1971, producer
Nate Wachsberger asked Jerry to direct and star in The Day the Clown Cried,
based on Joan O’Brien’s book by the same name, about a German clown who was
arrested by the Gestapo, interred in a concentration camp, and used to march
Jewish children into the ovens. Jerry lost close to 40 pounds to play the role.
The shooting began in Stockholm, but Wachsberger not only ran out of money to
complete the film, but he failed to pay Joan O’Brien the money she was owed for
the rights to the story. Jerry was forced to finish the picture with his own
money. The film has been tied up in litigation ever since, and all of the
parties involved have never been able to reach an agreeable settlement. Jerry
hopes to someday complete the film, which remains to this day, a significant
expression of cinematic art, suspended in the abyss of international litigation.
Maybe that’s how Jerry remembers it, but
a little research will reveal a much larger picture.
The Day The Clown Cried had its
origin with publicity agent Joan O’Brien who conceived the story while working
for famous sad-eyed clown Emmett Kelly and spending her free time reading about
the Holocaust. Teaming with TV critic Charles Denton, O’Brien penned a
screenplay about an unlikable gentile circus clown named Karl Schmidt who, after
being caught satirizing Hitler by members of the SS, is sent to Auschwitz and
forced to lead unsuspecting Jewish children to the gas chamber.
The script made the usual Hollywood
rounds and at various points had reportedly been considered by such names as
Dick Van Dyke, Milton Berle and Austrian-born Joseph Schildkraut.
In 1966, Jerry Lewis’ long time sound
engineer Jim Wright signed onto the project as a co-producer. The film was set
to film in Europe that spring with director Loel Minardi (Sinderella and the
Golden Bra) and producer Paul Mart (Sinderella and the Golden Bra,
For Men Only). But for unknown reasons, the production fell through.
By the spring of 1971, Belgian producer
Nathan Wachsberger (The Sea Pirate (1966), Starcrash) had picked
up an option on the screenplay and approached Lewis to star and direct.
Wachsberger had a long, if undistinguished career first as an importer of
European films to the United States in the `30s and as a partner in comedian
George Jessel’s production company before directing several forgettable features
in Europe.
Wachsberger convinced Lewis that he had
met with O’Brien and the two agreed that he would be perfect for the lead. Since
he had no other projects in development, Lewis agreed to look over the script.
As Lewis recalled saying to Wachsberger in his 1982 autobiography –
Why don’t you try
to get Sir Laurence Olivier? I mean, he doesn’t find it too difficult to choke
to death playing Hamlet. My bag is comedy, Mr. Wachsberger, and you’re asking me
if I’m prepared to deliver helpless kids into a gas chamber. Ho-ho. That’s some
laugh—how do I pull it off?
Wachsberg sweetened the deal by telling
Lewis that he had secured financing from French and Swedish backers and the
filming would use the resources of Europa Studios in Stockholm, where Ingmar
Bergman had shot several films. Lewis finally agreed and the August 1st,
1971 issue of Variety announced that Jerry Lewis Productions and
Wachsberg were joining forces to produce The Day The Clown Cried with a
start date of sometime later in the year.
It was an ambitious schedule that Lewis
would not be able to meet. Jerry was at the end of a three-year contract with
Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas stipulating he had to appear for four weeks a year.
He would renew the contract for an additional year that winter, obligating him
to get his entire month in before leaving for filming. Lewis also took advantage
of the delay in the production start to work on a rewrite of the script.
By February 1972, pre-production had
started up with Lewis and his new publicist Fred Skidmore heading to Stockholm.
Lewis put himself on a grapefruit diet in an effort to drop some of the weight
he had been putting on over the past few years. Ultimately he would drop 35
pounds for the role. The two also toured concentration camps in Germany and
Poland. Lewis also assembled his cast, which was to feature Bergman veteran
Harriet Andersson as Helmut’s wife Ada Doork, French comic Pierre Etaix, Ulf
Palme and Sven Lindberg.
Reportedly Lewis also shot some footage
for the film while performing with the Bouglione Cirque d’Hiver in Paris.
 With a production set a $1.5 million, principal photography for the film began
on April 5th at Studio Europa. But it was obvious that within the
first couple weeks that something was wrong. Lewis was starting to get reports
that film and equipment suppliers hadn’t been paid and the paychecks issued to
the crew were bouncing. Lewis made some calls to Wachsberger in the south of
France, who assured his director that money was on its way.
However, Wachsberger wasn’t being honest
with Lewis. At the time that production started Wachsberger’s option on the
script had already expired. He had paid O’Brien the initial five thousand dollar
fee, but not the fifty thousand dollars due her once production commenced. Lewis
was producing a film that he had no legal right to make. Whether Lewis knew of
this turn of events is unknown, though O’Brien believed that he did. As she was
quoted in Shawn Levy’s Lewis biography King Of Comedy: The Life and Art of
Jerry Lewis, “Jerry knew that the option had expired, but he decided to go
ahead.”
CONTINUED
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