Unfinished Movies

The demise of Terry Gilliam's The Man who Killed Don Quixote is well known thanks to the behind the scenes film Lost in La Mancha, which documented the variety of catastrophes that finally forced Gilliam to abandon the project after filming began. The film would have starred Johnny Depp as a modern day business man transported back in time where Don Quixote mistakes him for Sancho Panza. The time travel plot combined with Don Quixote's famously hyperactive imagination seems an ample foundation for Gilliam's dark comic style.

It's not over till the fat lady sings, however. Gilliam is now trying to get the project going again, this time with Robert Duvall as Don Qiuxote. Hopefully he has better luck this time.

Game of Death has a very simple, very awesome premise. Bad guys hold an important item at the top of a five-level pagoda. Each level is guarded by a badass, so only the biggest badass in all the land can go get the item. That badass, of course, is Bruce Lee.

Bruce Lee interrupted filming of Game of Death to go make the big Hollywood production, Enter the Dragon. Though he had every intention to finish the film, he died before he got the chance. Had he been able to finish it, the film likely would have been the most badass kung fu movie ever.

They did fashion a very different movie called Game of Death out of the footage. It's certainly worth seeing simply to watch Lee take on Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in that iconic yellow track suit. But it's nothing compared to the film we almost got.

Briefly, Universal hired Industrial Lights & Magic to begin working on a black and white, all computer animated adaptation of the iconic Boris Karloff 1930s Frankenstein. Shortly after starting work on the film, enthusiasm for the expensive project fell victim to concerns over the film's more adult tone and its black and white, old fashioned aesthetic. All that survives of the film now is a brief test footage clip. It probably would have been something truly special had they only been allowed to finish.

Certainly one of the more infamous unfinished films, The Day the Clown Cried is a film where Jerry Jewis plays a clown who entertains Jewish children in a concentration camp. The film even ends with him leading children to the gas chambers and entertaining them while they're all exterminated. It's a controversial, strange picture to say the least.

The film ran out of money during production and Lewis paid out of pocket to get enough footage to call it finished. Supposedly the film was never completed beyond a very rough cut, and Jerry Lewis has locked away the one and only VHS copy while the only negative sits locked up in Sweden. Some Hollywood types claimed to have seen it, but it's equally likely they're just lying.