A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

"THERE'S NO ROOM FOR SHIRLEY TEMPLE IN A CONCENTRATION CAMP." The 1972 film The Day The Clown Cried holds a special place in my heart, and in the hearts of those thousands of fans worldwide who would rather live in a world where we all could view a drama in which MDA spokesman Jerry Lewis plays an alcoholic clown at Auschwitz whose job it was to lead all the children into the ovens.

(I'll pause a second so that those of you who hadn't heard of this movie before can compose yourselves.)

Instead, because of issues of financing, litigation and, perhaps, taste, the movie has never been released, and sits in a vault at Lewis's home. "Jerry hopes to someday complete the film," his website maintains, "Which remains to this day, a significant expression of cinematic art, suspended in the abyss of international litigation."

I won't go into the whole story here -- there is plenty on the web about the movie as-is. Here's one of my favorite articles, for starters, and this website contains copies of the first draft and final script, plus links to other articles on Lewis' opus. Just know this, and it'll tell you enough for now. Harry Shearer, one of the few people to have seen the movie, once said of it:

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 presence 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! - that's all you can say.

I bring this up today because Lewis is notoriously silent about the movie, ending his cooperation with biographer Shawn Levy after an initial question about the movie. "What sort of sick childhood did you have, or what's missing in your life that you can sit there and ask me things like that?" Lewis responded, and from that point forward, Levy was on his own.

So whenever Lewis ends up discussing it, to me, it's newsworthy. Last Sunday, he did -- well, sorta. From an interview in the Kansas City Star:

Your official Web site, jerrylewiscomedy.com, calls your unreleased film, "The Day the Clown Cried" -- about a clown interred in a German concentration camp during World War II -- "a significant expression of cinematic art, suspended in the abyss of international litigation." Will we ever see it?

That's about the only thing you can mention that I will not talk about.

Why not?

I won't talk about it.

Have you seen Roberto Benigni's "Life Is Beautiful"?

They stole the idea. And he's supposed to be the Jerry Lewis of Italy.

Did you like "Life Is Beautiful"?

I thought it was beautifully done.

"One way or another," Lewis has said, "I'll get it done. The picture must be seen, and if by no one else, at least by every kid in the world who's only heard there was such a thing as the Holocaust."

We can only hope.