The Day the Clown Cried: The script for Jerry Lewis’ unreleased Holocaust story gets funded for a potential film release

Last Updated on August 31, 2024

Deadline has reported that an old jettisoned project by Jerry Lewis may be getting a second chance thanks to a new producer and financier. The iconic comedian reworked a script to The Day the Clown Cried as he directed and starred in the feature in 1972. However, the film would not be released since it would not be completed. According to Deadline, Lewis had disavowed the film and he did his best to make sure it never saw the light of day. Rights issues over the story became complicated. Controversy also surrounded the film due to an outcry over the audacity of Lewis setting a film in the concentration camps involving the deaths of Jewish children at the hands of the Nazis in World War II. Additionally, he was accused of shamelessly using the movie for Oscar bait.

Now, Kia Jam of K. Jam Media has taken to funding the original script in order to start a new production on the film. Jam has produced and financed a number of projects that include The Killing Game, In the Heart of the Sea, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For and numerous others. Jam is said to have closed a purchase agreement on the original screenplay from the scribes Joan O’Brien and Charles Denton before Lewis took it and reworked it. Jam says he has secured the funds for the production and he is now on the lookout for a bold enough filmmaker who is willing to take on the project.

Per Deadline, the unreleased film’s plot involved Lewis starring 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.”

Jam told Deadline the story of how the he feels about the project, “It will be a really powerful film. 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.”