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Friday, August 20, 2004
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THERE'S GOLD IN THEM THAR HILLS!
There's one thing that you teenagers should know about me. I didn't discover the majesty of the Internet until I was 28 years old. Shocking but true, I know. For the first three decades of my life, I had to get my news from actual papers and magazines. Most of my half-baked ideas about life were gleaned from such antiquated things as books. All of my pornography was consumed from the medium of magazines and VHS tapes. Do you have any idea how humiliating it is to admit in public that I was nearly 30 years old before I learned how masturbate in a chair with wheels? Back when I lived like the Amish, I actually had to meet people to get them naked.
I feel like a savage even thinking about those days.
But even then, in those days of my Paleolithic shame, I was still compelled most by the darkness of the human spirit. Even then, I viewed life as car accident waiting to happen and spent nearly 20 years compiling evidence to support that thesis. I was widely read on all things ugly.
And this is where Jerry Lewis comes in. I've always hated Jerry Lewis. My parents hated Jerry Lewis. I come from a long line of honest, hard working stock whose only common virtue is an intense loathing of Jerry Lewis. When I was no more than three years old, my parents caught me giggling to a re-run of The Nutty Professor on television. A family intervention was called. I was sat on the floor at my father's feet and the evils of Jerry Lewis were described to me. No detail was spared. As the discussion continued, though she understood nothing we were saying, my baby sister wailed in her crib. She sensed the cold wind blowing through our once warm family dynamic. I was told in the harshest tone I have heard from either of parents, before or since, that there could be no sense of decency in a man so despised by Dean Martin.
Dino has long been a role model for my entire gene pool. The alcoholism inspired us all. Dino taught me the most important lesson of my life, that the consumption of sundry amber nectars will make you talented and funny. Things such as education and ambition were to be damned.
I was much older, perhaps in high school, when I learned of The Day The Clown Cried. This film is perhaps the darkest, most catastrophic disaster in Hollywood's storied tradition of debauched excess. Rumors of this cinematic nightmare have circled the globe for nearly my entire lifetime. As I write this, only two prints of the film are in existence. For these reasons, I've always been fascinated by it.
Some background first. In the early 1970's, the script for The Day the Clown Cried made the rounds of Los Angeles. Jerry Lewis learned of it, fell in love with the story and immediately signed to star in it.
And what a story it is.
It tells the story of a self-centered circus clown, Helmut Doork, who is
sent to a concentration camp after a drunken impersonation of Hitler.
There, he befriends the Jewish children of the camp, and performs
for them, angering the camp Commandant. He is accidentally sent
with the children on a train to Auschwitz, and there, he is expected
to lead the children, like a Pied Piper, to the gas chambers.
To this day, it has never been made clear if the film was intended as a dramatic or comedic vehicle. From the accounts of those in the know, the horrific consequences to the careers of everyone involved were endless.
At this point, Lewis had been stewing in a boundless supply of Percocet. If there is one thing one should know about drug addicts is that they tend to be very single minded. Jerry was consumed with the idea that The Day the Clown Cried would mark the most dramatic comeback in Hollywood history. So delusional was Lewis, that when the financial backers walked away midway through principal shooting, he assumed full responsibility for completing it. The shooting of almost half of the film and all of the post production was paid for from the pocket of Jerry Lewis alone.
After the film was completed, Lewis either had a "moment of clarity" or it was quietly explained to him the low odds of the film ever receiving a distribution deal. At this time, Lewis withdrew any hope of his depraved masterpiece ever being seen in public. The only existing prints were locked away in a vault controlled soley by Jerry. Other than to blame the entire nightmare on his drug dependence, Lewis almost never speaks of the project.
Of course, the story became legendary to people like me the world over. Knowing that Jerry will never release a print of the movie, anything related to it is highly coveted by people who were born wrong. I, of course, am such a person.
And thanks to the miracle of the Internet and what I now consider to be God's very blessing on Earth, Mother, May I Sleep With Treacher, I have found the shooting script of The Day the Clown Cried online.
This makes all of the truly ugly things that have happened to my life in the last month worthwhile. If only for this weekend, I shall be a happy boy.
Thank you, Jim. You're a secular saint.
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