"Failure is simply the non-presence of success. But a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions." - Orlando Bloom
Odds are, you will never see 1972’s
The Day the Clown Cried.
The film starred Jerry Lewis, who also directed, and was based on a script by Joan O’Brien and Charles Denton which had been kicking around for about a decade prior. By all accounts, the production was fraught with legal and financial troubles. The film was eventually finished by Lewis paying production costs out of his own pocket, with everyone involved almost immediately exploding in a flurry of accusations and lawsuits. Despite Lewis’ claims at the time - that it would be screened at Cannes before a US release - it has been securely locked away for over 50 years now.
It’s no secret why – the film is terrible. I don’t mean just badly acted, or poorly directed. I mean existentially terrible. The plot revolves around a has-been circus clown (played by Lewis) in 1930’s Germany who is sent to a prison camp for mocking Hitler and later entertains Jewish children, ultimately accompanying them to Auschwitz.
Jerry Lewis. Nazi death camps. Any questions?
Lewis hung onto a rough cut, Europa Studios kept the film negative, and various clips and rough copies have popped up, or been rumored to have popped up, over the years. But it will never, ever, be released, per Lewis and everyone who’s ever had legal control over it. Even for a movie industry that is never shy about putting out gigantic bombs and vanity projects (Battlefield Earth, Gigli, et al), this is something special - a true epic fail.
And that fascinates me.
Read on . . .
“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.” – Harry Shearer, on seeing the 75-minute rough cut footage in 1979.
And that sums it up nicely. I can’t write in-depth about the film, because I only know the summary of its plot, and some details about changes Lewis made to O’Brien’s script. I can imagine how it
must be, but for its own director and the studio to seal this thing away until the sun burns out, like it was some Lovecraftian monster, it must be more awful than you or I can imagine.
So how did it happen? Lewis wasn’t a bad director – he’d already helmed The Bellboy, The Nutty Professor and The Ladies Man, among others, in the years prior to The Day the Clown Cried. Presumably at least most of the crew knew what they were doing, and it was all done under the auspices of a studio that you have to think knew a thing or two about making movies that weren’t Biblically toxic.
So how did this epic fail happen?
"Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don't fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgment, repeated every day." - Jim Rohn
How do we fail? I don’t mean how do we miss a field goal, or drop a contact lens when we’re trying to put it in. Those are one-off flubs by an individual, an alignment of bad luck and poor judgment and a lack of preparation and the ill favor of the gods. Those can and do happen to all of us, and always will.
No, I mean large-scale failure. I mean something that takes a lot of people being wrong or deluded on a daily basis for an extended period. That’s the kind of fail that results in a misbegotten war, or a perverse social policy blunder or, yes, a mythically bad film. The point of collaboration, in any exercise, is to bring in multiple skills and perspectives and ideas – to increase the odds of doing something right. How does that sometimes go so horribly wrong?
It’s possible for a single person to make something truly awful (Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, et al). It’s possible for a single person to make something delusional or just flat-out evil. But those individuals are not themselves mainstream, and the overwhelming majority of us do not see what they see, or think how they think.
When you take a group of basically normal people - most of whom, at least, are fairly conventional in their moral perspective and sense of taste - you expect to get something from that group that is consistent with the judgment of those individuals. You expect that, putting aside the limits of technical knowledge and workload and creative range, the collaborative result would be something that any one of them, acting alone, would put out. And yet, sometimes you get something from a group that is so incongruent with the individuals comprising it that you have no idea how to reconcile it.
“Theirs not to make reply / Theirs not to reason why / Theirs but to do & die / Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred. “ – Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”
In one of the later permutations of the infamous Milgram experiment (testing obedience to authority), test subjects were shown to be more likely to go along with a cruel experiment if their “fellow subjects” (actually actors) went along too. That is how
homo sapiens rolls. We supplant our judgment – even our
moral judgment – for that of the collective. We are herd animals, group thinkers.
That has a purpose – it keeps the group intact, which is the key to survival, at least on the primitive level. And it can amplify our good ideas and intentions. Unfortunately, it can also go the other way, pulling otherwise rational people in directions they’d never go alone, further than they’d otherwise dare, and with seemingly no sense of accountability. No rain drop blames itself for the flood.
It’s how a hundred bad ideas and wild misstatements make it all the way through the public policy machine and become codified into law. It’s how a whole society of (mostly) rational people march toward climate catastrophe with little resistance beyond some muttered misgivings, a few bumper stickers and an ever-shifting game of “What’s the Greenest Thing to Buy?”. That’s how key grips and costumers and set designers can show up, day after day, and work on a movie about a clown in Auschwitz, and no one say “hey, isn’t this all a terrible idea?”. It is, for that matter, how Auschwitz happened in the first place.
“But I recognize no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such an individual, I have no absolute faith in any person.” - Mikhail Bakunin
It’s tempting to write this off as simply an example of the acquiescence to authority seen in Milgram. There is always a director, or a president, or even some knowledgeable lobbyist whose whole job is to exude that confidence of being the smartest person in the room. We could dismiss this all as the power of ego and self-delusion of whoever is in charge (or seems to be) intersecting with the general tendency of people to follow when they see someone leading.
But I don’t think that’s it. Milgram got it’s high obedience numbers under specific conditions, and while I accept those numbers, their consistency and the scary implications they hold, I don’t think they apply quite as much to the less organized and authoritarian setting of day-in, day-out work on a movie or a policy proposal or a social issue. If it were that easy to rule the world, it would have been locked down tight a long time ago, rather than just blundering along, sometimes in the direction of the wealthy and powerful, sometimes not.
“Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility.” - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
I think you’re much more prone to make bad decisions when you’re not accountable. There’s no shortage of examples of what happens when someone of power surrounds themselves with yes men. When you’re never made to face your mistakes – or even admit there
were any – you’re destined to make many, many more.
This is the very sort of thing collaboration is supposed to prevent. It’s the sort of bad end that’s supposed to be avoided by having a whole crew of experts bringing their own technical and moral judgment to the table. Unfortunately, the very act of collaboration diffuses personal accountability for the result. When a whole table of people is making the decisions, no one makes the decisions. It takes the risk out of showing up, the guilt out of collecting a paycheck.
“There is only one real failure in life that is possible, and that is, not to be true to the best one knows.” ―Frederic William Farrar
It is in our nature to go along with each other. It is in the nature of committees and councils and forums to stumble along as entities in their own right, scapegoats for the actual human beings that comprise them (a principle equally applicable to corporations, incidentally). Most of the time, that nature serves us reasonably well - or at least, we're lucky more often than we're not.
But is also how epic failures happen - from the comedic to the genuinely horrific - and the only remedy for that is for each of us to retain our own sliver of judgment and accountability. The insurance against disasters of our own making is our own, individual, sense of what is good and what is not. We are not raindrops - whether the flood happens or not is always, always, up to us.