‘The Day The Clown Cried’ Script Resurrected: Turned Into Famed Unreleased Jerry Lewis Holocaust Tale, The Now-Funded Screenplay Might Finally See The Light Of Day
EXCLUSIVE: The Day The Clown Cried is getting another chance at the big screen. Rewritten by Jerry Lewis, who starred in and directed a 1972 feature drama that went unfinished and unreleased, the script for the Holocaust tale is being revived by K. Jam Media founder Kia Jam. Jam has been part of the financing and producing of films ranging from The Killing Game to In the Heart of the Sea, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For and numerous others.
Jam said he has executed a purchase agreement on the original script by Joan O’Brien and Charles Denton. Lewis took a hand in reshaping it as a starring and directing vehicle. Jam is going back to the original screenplay. He said he has the production financing, and the next step is to secure a filmmaker with the guts to tell a most harrowing story.
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Lewis disavowed the film and did his best to make sure it never got released, probably because of a combination of rights issues and an outcry over the audacity of the iconic comic actor setting a film in the concentration camps involving the deaths of Jewish children at the hands of the Nazis in World War II. He was accused of unabashedly chasing an Oscar.
Lewis starred as Helmut Doork, a failing German circus clown long past the days when he was a famous performer touring North America and Europe as part of the Ringling Brothers circus. Things get worse when he is overheard drunkenly mocking Hitler in a bar. He’s turned over to the Gestapo and imprisoned in a Nazi camp for political prisoners. There, he finds an outlet for his talents: entertaining the suffering Jewish children who are segregated in a part of the camp. After suffering numerous beatings for engaging the children, the clown is used by the camp commandant as a Pied Piper to help load the children on boxcars to Auschwitz. He winds up a passenger on that train, and, in a selfless act unusual for the previously self-absorbed clown, he escorts of the children to their deaths and is himself killed.
For an unreleased film, The Day the Clown Cried has a mythology rare in the annals of film, to the point a documentary on the film and its undoing called From Darkness to Light will premiere at the upcoming Venice Film Festival. Lewis made the film when he was squarely known for comedy, well before he turned in lauded dramatic performances in films like Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy. That, and the subject matter, led to press coverage largely colored by derision.
Since then, numerous Holocaust films have drawn acclaim by telling stories of courage, and the unbelievable cruelty shown by Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Those films range from the most recent Oscar winner The Zone of Interest by Jonathan Glazer to Steven Spielberg’s Oscar winner Schindler’s List, Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning Life is Beautiful, the Barry Levinson-directed Ben Foster starrer The Survivor, the Mark Herman-directed The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, the Robin Williams starrer Jakob the Liar, the Taika Waititi-directed Jojo Rabbit, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, the Mick Jackson-directed Denial starring Rachel Weisz and numerous others. All are hard stories by gutsy directors who importantly keep alive the memory of a dark moment in history filled with genocide and cruelty.
Though it has turned into an obsession that led him to spend years cleaning up the rights, Jam’s entry into The Day the Clown Cried began with a chance meeting in a hallway with a rabbi.
“I got approached 14 years ago by somebody I knew, who was a rabbi,” Jam told Deadline. “We happened to just work on the same floor of a building and we had some mutual friends, and he comes up to me one day and says, ‘I have a script I’d like you to read.’ I’m thinking to myself, oh, great. Now I’m getting a script from a rabbi. He’s such a nice man that I said, of course, sure, no problem. I put it on my desk and maybe I was shooting something or mixing a movie, but I was not very available. A week goes by, he calls my office and he says, ‘Hey, have you had a chance to read it?’ And I said, no, I’m so sorry. It’s right here. He says, ‘No problem. I’ll call you in a week.’ He calls me a second week, and I still haven’t read it. I don’t take his phone call and I feel like a jackass. I’m like, who the hell am I that I don’t have an hour to read a script for this nice man? I shut the door, tell my assistant to hold my calls and I start reading.”
His mind-set quickly changed into passion.
“The first 20 or so pages are a little clunky and felt very dated. Then, I got into the story, I was so taken by the script. When it was done, I was sobbing. I ended up just going home. I couldn’t really do anything for the rest of the day. I called him up and I said, I read and it is as powerful as you said. I said, tell me you own the chain of title. I’ve been down the chain of title rabbit hole a few times. And he is like, ‘Yeah, I got it all.’ He shows up to my office with one of his boxes of rolled up, fax paper, faded documents. Some unfortunately were missing signatures.
“It was a complete disaster,” Jam said. “But I decided that this movie is worth it, and I was going to take this on. It took me probably three or four years and a small fortune in legal fees to track everybody down and clean up the rights; there were signature pages, missing documents that had expired. There was a lien put on the project 20 some odd years ago when Kushner-Locke had it under option. They went into bankruptcy, but they didn’t release their lien. So I had to track down who was controlling their bankruptcy. It was a whole ordeal.
“Finally I managed to clean all that up,” he said. “I found all the right people, got all the right documents with the rabbi’s help, and started to work on financing the picture. I had it financed once or twice over the years, but was unable to bring on the caliber of filmmaker that this needs. You really need a master craftsman to tell his story. The actors that sign on to be in this movie are going to want to know they’re in very good, capable hands. I was unable to do that..”
He kept renewing the option, unable to shake what he’d read, while fully aware of the history with Lewis.
“I haven’t seen the movie, and I really don’t have a desire to,” Jam said. “That’s not the movie we’re going to make. I have nothing but respect for Jerry; I grew up watching his movies and he clearly was the master. Jerry took the script. I believe they had it under option, but they never exercised their option, so they never really had the rights. And he rewrote it. The movie that he shot was not our script, not the script that I own and control. I just kind of wanted to distance myself from it. The script that I own, the original one that was written by the writers back decades ago, is by far the most powerful script I’ve ever read.”
Armory Films’ Tim Zajaros and Christopher Lemole came aboard with the financing for the film, after Jam finally executed the purchase of the screenplay. The search resumes for the filmmaker who’ll shoot in Europe.
“It will be a really powerful film,” Jam said. “It’s ultimately a redemption story. And I think with everything that’s going on in the world today, now more than ever is the time to make a movie like this. It’s going to be difficult. There’s a lot of misinformation out there in terms of the original movie and what Jerry did and didn’t do, and how the movie was good, or it was bad, whatever people want to say. Jerry himself has said that he wasn’t terribly pleased with the final product.
“But the script’s core is the redemption story of our lead character, somebody who lost his way and ultimately finds his purpose in life, which is bringing joy and laughter to these kids who are in this horrible, horrible, horrible situation,” Jam said. “And it’s what he sacrifices and ultimately what the people around him end up doing to help him, and the temporary joy and laughter that he brings to these children who need it so badly. It is not based on a true story, but as you read it, it certainly feels like it is.”
Part of the effort will be in clearing up misconceptions about Lewis’ film. There are reports his estate turned over a copy to the Library of Congress, stipulating the film not be shown until this year.
“There was something about the Library of Congress having a copy and they could screen it,” Jam said. “I think it was June or July of 2024, actually. I reached out to them and I basically said, respectfully, if you do have a copy of the film, you don’t have the rights to screen it. And they said, we don’t have the film. We just have some elements. And they’re here in case somebody’s doing research, they can come and look at the stills from the set and things like that. And I don’t really care about that. There’s the documentary about the movie being shown at Venice. I tried to track down the filmmakers of that. I emailed them their lawyers and Venice, just to see what it is they’re trying to do.
“I still haven’t heard back from them, but I’m not here to stop anyone from doing anything else,” Jam said. “What I’m here to do is to make the original script. I sent it to a very dear friend of mine who’s an extremely accomplished producer and make movies at the highest level. He said, ‘Call me in two hours.’ I called and he was in tears. ‘Why did you do this to me?’ he asked. ‘This is the most powerful thing.’ So that helped me really feel that we are onto something here. And again, this is an important movie that needs to get made. It’s an important movie. It’s an interesting perspective on what went on when it went on.”
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