OK everyone, let’s pause a second here.
There is a report that began making the rounds yesterday stating that the legendary and long unreleased Jerry Lewis film The Day The Clown Cried was finally going to be screened this year.
Unfortunately, that is not a definite thing.
The confusion seems to stem from some a misunderstanding on the part of a writer at the National News in an article with the misleading headline “Controversial Jerry Lewis film to screen in public for first time after 52 years.” As of publication of this article, there has been no such announcement.
An Unfinished Film
For the uninitiated, The Day The Clown Cried is an unfinished film project from comedian/director Jerry Lewis. In a bid to try and transition to a more serious actor, Lewis embarked on a project that would see him as a clown imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, tasked to keep children calm while on their way to the gas chamber. Amazingly, Lewis was able to secure financing for this project and the film started production in Stockholm at Studio Europa in April 1972. The shoot was reportedly fairly rough, leading an under-pressure Lewis to reportedly yell at one point at one child extra “There’s no room for Shirley Temple in a concentration camp!”
Principal photography wrapped by the end of June, but there were financial “irregularities” and some issues over the production having properly secured the rights to the Joan O’Brien novel that was the basis for the script. Lewis plowed through the editing phase of post production, hoping that these issues would be resolved. However, when it was obvious that they wouldn’t be and that O’Brien had no intention of relinquishing the needed film rights to Lewis and his producer, the director had no recourse but to shelve the work he had completed.
Shelved For Decades
The legend of The Day The Clown Cried lived on though. Comic actor Harry Shearer claims to have seen a video tape transfer of the edited footage via a girlfriend who worked in Jerry Lewis’s office. In an interview on radio’s The Howard Stern Show he stated, “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.”
While a draft of the screenplay has been circulating for years (we reviewed it here), only a few stills from the production and a few moments of footage appeared in a German documentary have managed to surface. For the most part, the film has been shrouded in mystery.
Gifted To Library Of Congress
In December 2015, it was revealed that Lewis had a few months earlier gifted the Library of Congress with his personal collection of all his films, including his rough, unfinished cut of The Day The Clown Cried. According to the LA Times who broke the story in 2015, part of the agreement that Lewis reached with Rob Stone, then moving-image curator at the Library of Congress, was that the film could not be shown “for at least 10 years.” Other reporting put the earliest that the film could be screened was June 2024.
And that is all that we know about any possibility of The Day The Clown Cried being screened for the public. No promise was made that there would be be a screening in June 2024. A look at the Library of Congress’s calendar of film events does not show a screening scheduled. A look at the Library of Congress’s press release site has no mention of a screening, and that would be something you would think would merit a press release.
Now a lot has happened in the almost decade since Jerry Lewis donated his films to the Library of Congress and now. Stone is still Moving Image Curator at the Library, so he may have some ideas that he is working on for how to best present this fascinating bit of film history. But as of yet, there has been no official announcement of any such event. And that marks the National News report as, at its best, misleading.
This isn’t the first time that someone got the details about The Day The Clown Cried potentially coming to light wrong. When the story of Lewis’s gifting of his films to the Library of Congress broke in December 2015, a reporter for the Sunday Times of London, England conflated the Library of Congress with the National Film Registry, which is administered by the LoC, and stated that Day was slated to be added to the registry. (A possible explanation for this confusion could stem from the fact that annual new additions to the National Film Registry – which was established by Congress to build a collection of film of “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significance – had also just been announced.) This mistake was picked up by an unnamed New York Post writer, though the Post’s entertainment writer Lou Lemenick would pen a more accurate article which the Post would use as a replacement on their website.
