he stole a complete workprint of the film from the archives of its production studio in 1980 – and has been screening it for guests in his apartment ever since.
Former 35mm projectionist here. I suspect there are a lot of old stashes like this. In our booth we had a gigantic reel of old 1960s and 1970s horror film trailers that previous projectionists had spliced together until there was no more space on the reel. We were not supposed to save trailers, but no one checked what we did with them after removing them from the film reels at the end of the run and returning those prints to the distributor.
On a quiet summer night, after the last showing had ended and the customers had left, we employees would sometimes lock the doors, get some snacks, and watch these old treasures from previous decades spool by.
The trailer reel included several versions of The Shining trailer, including one that had a slow-motion scene of blood pouring from the elevator that was waaaay longer than the clip in the movie (possibly from one of the alternate cameras, see https://geektyrant.com/news/the-story-behind-the-infamous-bl...). The reel also had some long-forgotten stinkers, including for the 1966 British horror film Psychopath which I only remember because the trailer featured an unusual song structured like a nursery rhyme that I can still partially recall.
A corporate chain took over (Lowes) and sometime in the early 1990s the theater was closed. The space is now a Staples. This illicit reel, if it wasn't thrown out during the closure, is probably in someone's basement. The only way to know the contents is to play it, which is hard to do as not many traditional 35mm projectors are still around or available for screening a 50-year-old reel that might be brittle, gunky, or otherwise damage the machine.
I've heard of similar stashes. For instance, around the same time, I had friends who worked in a photo shop. They had several binders of, um, special photos that they had copied from customers' negatives during the on-site development process.
I visited this basement lair once, which was dominated by a modern color processing machine. I remember flipping through one of the binders. It was very, very strange stuff, like something out of Blue Velvet.
The film appears to be "inspired" by the story of Janusz Kurchark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janusz_Korczak
I only read about this recently. Such a dark premise, which I could imagine being an incredibly powerful movie if shot well, but missing the mark by even an inch would likely just end up to be an offensive mess. I presumed this movie was a case of the latter.
> Other films that have not yet screened because of filmmaker stipulations include 100 Years starring John Malkovich. The short film is from 2015 but has been placed in time-locked safes that won’t open until 2115, 100 years after the film was made.
I wonder how one goes about engineering a "time-locked safe" such that it opens, reliably, only after 100 years...
> "I want to sell it to a serious producer who either restores it or keeps it locked away"
It was arguments over money that caused the film to be "lost" in the first place. It's a shame that it's still all about money and greed could cause it to be lost again. The best thing to do would be to release it online for free so that everyone could see and learn from it. That way, if others want to restore it using modern methods they still can. I'd rather see it as it is anyway. Before the inevitable re-edited (perhaps even censored) AI "enhanced" version a "serious producer" would shit out and overcharge for.
The Europafilm staff dubbing The Day the Clown Cried was covered in From Darkness To Light, a documentary from last year about Jerry Lewis' The Day the Clown Cried which premiered on American TV back in August 2024. It's honestly surprising to me that this continues to make the news this year.
This was the topic of a recent episode of "Decoder Ring", a wonderful podcast that explores cultural mysteries: https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring/2025/02/on-the-lates...
A post-divorce girlfriend of mine claims she lost her mind at a private screening that was held for her and some posh English friends. It sounded horrible.
> The film tells the story of a German circus clown who is imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp for mocking Adolf Hitler and is then forced to lure children to their deaths as punishment.
How do you pitch that?
The film tells the story of a German circus clown who is imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp for mocking Adolf Hitler and is then forced to lure children to their deaths as punishment.
“This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is.”
“It was bad, and it was bad because I lost the magic. No one will ever see it, because I'm embarrassed at the poor work.”
The best publicity there is!
Please do post a link to the film, if it finally leaks online.
From everything I've heard, it should have stayed lost. It sounds utterly misbegotten.
Torrent link anyone?
The movie was never "lost". All of the original film apparently made some rounds in private viewings and was donated to the library of congress and has been available since last year.
What this guy has is workprint - someone in the production office probably hastily assembled the available footage into a rough draft. So it's true this could be a 1 of 1 copy but all of the source material is still available.
> I want to sell it to a serious producer who either restores it or keeps it locked away, or restores it and shows it to people for studying purposes.
How is someone who "keeps it locked away" even an option if he believes it "must be seen"?
This seems like the perfect candidate for going on archive.org, if the goal is for it to be preserved and for people to see it.
I also find it odd that he's been screening it for friends since the 80s, yet has only shown it to 24 people.