Jack Abramoff once tried to 'remake' "The Day The Clown Cried"

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

The June issue of Harper's features brief, unsigned excerpts from letters written in support of Abramoff to Judge Paul Huck of Federal District Court in Miami. (In March, Huck sentenced Abramoff to nearly six years in prison and ordered him to pay $21.7 million in restitution on charges of fraud.) One of the excerpts, appearing just below one asserting that "the Abramoffs held up their share of the car-pool duties," stated:

Jack made every effort possible to secure funding for a film entitled The Day the Clown Cried, a movie about the importance of taking care of children, set in a WWII concentration camp.

As every pop-culture geek knows, The Day the Clown Cried was meant to be Jerry Lewis's first "serious" film, the story of a German circus clown who winds up shepherding kids into the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Lewis played the clown (name: Helmut Doork) and directed, using his own rewrite of a screenplay by Joan O'Brien and Charles Denton, shooting in Paris and Stockholm in 1972. But the movie never made it past the rough-cut stage, getting tied up in litigation over rights, and only a handful of people have ever seen it. (Eight of those incredulous viewers described what they saw in Bruce Handy's 1992 Spy article "Jerry Goes to Death Camp"; on-set photos, film clips, and two versions of the screenplay are available here(*).) Its legacy is never-ending: just this year, the Hollywood novelist Bruce Wagner published a characteristically twisted "what if?" account of the film's release, envisioning an Oscar sweep and Mel Gibson's conversion to Judaism.

So where does Abramoff fit in? The letter in question, which I obtained, was written by Michael Barclay, who fifteen years ago was president of a short-lived independent production company called Rainbow Ridge Films. It runs about 1,000 words and also states:

"I can comment on Jack as a human being of ethics and principle. I don't know what may or may not have happened in Washington, but I have been blessed to see this man's spirit and soul in action as he helped numerous people here in Los Angeles. … I participated with him in an attempt to make a film about the need for hope and faith in times of horror."

contd: http://looker.typepad.com/looker/2006/06/the_clown_still.html

(*)http://www.subcin.com/clowncried.html

Probably the best source online on The Day The Clown Cried:
http://www.subcin.com/clowncried.html

[NYCGirl]

1. I'd give a lot to see that film. Have you ever read Harry Shearer's review

of it?

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

2. I've read the Spy magazine piece

"With most of these kinds of things, you find that the anticipation, or the concept, is better than the thing itself. But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presense of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. 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. Oh My God! - thats all you can say."
http://www.subcin.com/clownspy.html

It's quite remarkable its never leaked. I first heard of it about 6 years ago in an interview with Harmony Korine where he was going on about how desperately he wanted to see this film, but I thought he was making it up.

[NYCGirl]

3. It is remarkable that no bootleg copies exist anywhere. NT

[CdnObserver]

4. Do you have a link to it? n/t