[HN Gopher] Jerry Lewis's "The Day the Clown Cried" discovered i...
___________________________________________________________________
Jerry Lewis's "The Day the Clown Cried" discovered in Sweden after
53 years
Author : danso
Score : 100 points
Date : 2025-05-30 20:27 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thenationalnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thenationalnews.com)
| ocschwar wrote:
| The film appears to be "inspired" by the story of Janusz
| Kurchark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janusz_Korczak
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| That was a rather horrible but also beautiful thing to read.
| I-M-S wrote:
| 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...
| qntmfred wrote:
| also in a Joe Scott video last month
|
| https://youtu.be/FWc68sHWzrA?t=17m41s
| roskelld wrote:
| 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.
| jfengel wrote:
| From everything I've heard, it should have stayed lost. It sounds
| utterly misbegotten.
| iwanttocomment wrote:
| 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.
| labrador wrote:
| 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.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| due to the content of the film or was this all a non-sequitur
| labrador wrote:
| The cont. I wouldn't repeat it my son or daughter and
| haven't.
| autoexec wrote:
| > "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.
| reddalo wrote:
| Yeah, I agree. He should release a high-quality capture of the
| VHS, without edits whatsoever. VHS quality also decays with
| time, so he better hurry up.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I thought the main point of this version is that it's edited
| to be an actual movie based on the script. The Library of
| Congress already has a bunch of original material with no
| edits.
| al_borland wrote:
| > 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.
| observationist wrote:
| Maybe he's talking about the physical medium, and not the movie
| - a copy of the movie should be distributed, for sure, but the
| film (and the vhs tape) should be kept locked away, it's a
| piece of history.
| reddalo wrote:
| Call me a dreamer, but he should just make a good capture of
| the VHS and upload it to the Internet Archive.
| al_borland wrote:
| All original copies of all films should be properly archived.
| I agree with that. The fact that so many have been "lost" is
| why I don't think we should put our faith in these companies
| to be the archivists for these works.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Probably shows it to a small group of people, like 3-6, every
| 7-8 years.
| abootstrapper wrote:
| If he stole it, how does he have the right to sell it?
| dylan604 wrote:
| he wouldn't. but eventually, it'll become part of the public
| domain. at that point, he could release his "work output" and
| own the copyright on that. that new work could be sold. i
| worked with someone that did this very thing of restoring
| copies of old films and released them on DVD
| bawolff wrote:
| In the us, unpublished works created before 1978 are
| copyrighted until 70 years after the death of the author
| (Sweeden might be different though).
|
| So you might be waiting a long time.
|
| > he could release his "work output" and own the copyright
| on that
|
| Probably not in the united States, but other countries (i
| know UK at the very least) this would be true. The united
| states requires "creative decisions" to grant copyright.
| Work output by itself doesn't count.
|
| You could still distribute it, you just couldn't copyright
| it.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| The film is interesting due to its rarity, but most likely it's
| not a very good film. So the only people that you might screen
| into are people who are interested in film history or
| especially interested in Jerry Lewis
| dylan604 wrote:
| You can find old film reels from random places. I used to work
| at a film post house where people would bring us film they
| purchased without really knowing what it was. One person scored
| several features from an old broadcaster from when they would
| actually broadcast straight from the telecine. Some of these
| might be in the public domain now, but most were not. A lot of
| them reeked of vinegar and beyond saving.
| legitster wrote:
| 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.
| dhosek wrote:
| If you read the article, you would have read:
|
| "The footage, which has been made available to scholars, was
| screened last August for _The New Republic_ journalist Benjamin
| Charles Germain Lee, who reported that the footage was
| fragmentary and does not constitute a complete film, leading
| the industry to conclude that the full film did not exist."
| duxup wrote:
| > 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?
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| 1973: Nazi cosplayers had been marching in the streets of
| Chicago for years.
|
| Nazi Germany and the Holocaust was a living memory for most
| adults, including Mr Lewis who was Jewish.
|
| How do you help people remember? By showing the horror.
|
| https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/November-2016/Chicago-N...
| duxup wrote:
| I think everything other than Nazis in general tied with it
| is the issue.
| gwervc wrote:
| > How do you pitch that?
|
| Using exactly the text you quoted. Since it's about Hitler,
| Nazi and camps the TV channel ARTE will fund it in a heartbeat.
| (The current top movie on arte.tv/fr/videos/cinema is "Lili
| Marleen, un chant d'amour dans l'Allemagne nazie)
| croes wrote:
| How was ,,Life is beautiful" pitched?
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| The best publicity there is!
|
| Please do post a link to the film, if it finally leaks online.
| ilamont wrote:
| _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_.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Were these old prints with an optical track, or was there a
| corresponding mag reel? Listening to optical audio is a bit of
| retro nostalgia in and of itself.
| ilamont wrote:
| Optical. AFAIK all commercial 35mm film prints used optical
| at that time (1960s-1980s).
|
| I've used 16mm film with audio on separate magnetic tape, but
| my god was that a pain to deal with.
| dylan604 wrote:
| That's what I assumed. One of the post facilities I worked
| in had multiple mag followers where the audio was recorded
| in 2 channel pairs before ultimately getting mixed down to
| the final mix that would be used to make that optical track
| on a release print. At some point, for the lulz, someone
| laid down a 5.1 mix to 3 separate 35mm mags just to
| playback in the theater. These would all sync to the
| projector, and would make all sorts of clunks and loud
| noises when they'd all start playing. these were all kept
| in sync with quartz crystals. it was the most steampunk
| thing I had ever seen. Mind you, this was in the early/mid
| 90s just after the first NLEs were coming out. So my mind
| was totally blown in how it used to be done.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, worked at a one-hour photo store when I was a teen. "Put
| the screen down" was the signal that some "amateur stuff" was
| about to come down the print out-feed (a kind of curtain/cover
| would hide the prints coming out from the general public).
| (Kind of wild that people's photos coming out of the machine
| was something of a feature the store made readily visible to
| the passersby in the mall where the One House Photo was
| located. Privacy, what?)
|
| And though I wasn't one of the techs that made the prints, I do
| seem to recall they would spin off dupes for their own private
| collection(s).
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Torrent link anyone?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-05-30 23:00 UTC)