Decoder Ring | Jerry Lewis’ Lost Holocaust Clown Movie

Summary

Decoder Ring Episode Summary: "Jerry Lewis’ Lost Holocaust Clown Movie"

In this compelling episode of Decoder Ring, host Max Friedman delves into the enigmatic and controversial lost film "The Day the Clown Cried," directed by the legendary comedian Jerry Lewis. This episode meticulously unpacks the film's troubled production, its lasting mythos, and its complex place within Holocaust cinema.

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Introduction: The Allure of a Lost Film

The episode opens with an engaging introduction to the concept of bad movies, highlighting comedian Patton Oswalt's fascination with them. Oswalt remarks, “There's nothing that I love more than something that's really bad, but the underlying attitude of it is, you're welcome, you're welcome” (00:56). This sets the stage for the exploration of "The Day the Clown Cried," a film infamous for its premise and the fact that it remains unseen by the public.

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Jerry Lewis and His Ambitious Project

Max Friedman introduces Jerry Lewis as a multifaceted entertainer who, despite his immense popularity in the mid-20th century, faced career stagnation by the early 1970s. Author Shawn Levy provides context, stating, “Jerry was really dismissed by American critics as children's entertainment. And vulgar and stupid and infantile and badly made” (10:50). In a bid to revitalize his career, Lewis embarked on directing and starring in a Holocaust drama, a stark departure from his usual slapstick comedies.

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The Making of "The Day the Clown Cried"

The episode details the film's intended narrative: the story of Helmut Dork, a failed clown who finds himself in Auschwitz and is forced to lead Jewish children to the gas chambers. The script, crafted by Joan O'Brien and Charles Denton, was initially considered by major stars like Richard Burton and Dick Van Dyke, but none took on the role until Lewis did.

Key plot points include:

• Carl Schmidt's Descent: A self-centered clown becomes a political prisoner after mocking Hitler, subsequently entertaining children in Auschwitz (14:55).
• Ethical Dilemmas: The film grapples with profound ethical questions, blending comedy with the horrors of the Holocaust.

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Production Chaos and Financial Struggles

Filming commenced in Paris and moved to Stockholm, where construction of the concentration camp sets began. However, the production faced severe financial issues due to the producer Nat Waksburger's failure to secure promised funds. Lewis resorted to personal funds, investing nearly a million dollars to keep the project afloat (25:58). Amidst mounting debts, Lewis took drastic measures, including clandestinely transporting a copy of the footage to the United States after discovering he lacked legal rights to continue the film (25:58).

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Critical Reception and Cultural Impact

Although the film was never released, its reputation as one of the "most wanted unseen films of all time" grew over the decades. Patton Oswalt describes the screenplay as “ridiculously nutty” with “comedy bits in the middle of a guy who's an Auschwitz” (32:39). This dichotomy fueled curiosity and disdain, leading Oswalt to stage his own performances of the screenplay, which became cult hits despite being “panned” and “booed” (33:05).

In contrast, the episode references Roberto Benigni's "Life Is Beautiful," which successfully melded comedy with Holocaust tragedy, winning multiple Oscars. This comparison underscores why "The Day the Clown Cried" failed to achieve similar acclaim, primarily due to its unrefined execution and insensitivity (34:13).

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Holocaust Representation in Cinema

Expert Henry Gonchzak, author of Hollywood and the Holocaust, critiques both "The Day the Clown Cried" and other Holocaust films for their sentimentalization and distortion of historical truths. He argues that such portrayals often undermine the atrocities by introducing affirmative or hopeful elements, which starkly contrasts with the brutal reality of the Holocaust (38:05, 38:46).

The episode explores the delicate balance filmmakers must strike between educating audiences and maintaining historical integrity. Steven Spielberg’s "Schindler's List" is highlighted as a successful example that presents unadulterated horror while providing a narrative of survival (39:24).

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Legacy and Continued Fascination

Despite Jerry Lewis’s assurances that the film would never be seen, fragments of "The Day the Clown Cried" resurfaced in a 2020 documentary, From Darkness to Light, aired on Turner Classic Movies (46:55). These snippets confirmed the film's troubled nature, depicting clunky writing and jarring tonal shifts between comedy and tragedy (47:13, 48:09).

The episode concludes by reflecting on the enduring mystery surrounding the film. Shawn Levy emphasizes that the legend of "The Day the Clown Cried" continues to fascinate, serving as both a testament to Jerry Lewis’s complex persona and a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of unbridled artistic ambition (51:19).

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Conclusion: A Breathtaking Act of Narcissism

Max Friedman posits that "The Day the Clown Cried" is less about the Holocaust and more about Jerry Lewis’s personal struggles with fame and relevance. The film becomes a self-absorbed project where Lewis attempts to process his own insecurities by intertwining them with one of history's darkest chapters. The episode underscores that while the film may not be a good movie, its exploration provides a fascinating character study of Lewis himself.

In closing, the Decoder Ring episode invites listeners to ponder the implications of representing immense suffering through the lens of personal turmoil and comedy, making "The Day the Clown Cried" a poignant subject of cultural and historical examination.

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Notable Quotes:

• Patton Oswalt (00:56): “There’s nothing that I love more than something that’s really bad, but the underlying attitude of it is, you're welcome, you're welcome.”

• Shawn Levy (10:50): “Jerry was really dismissed by American critics as children's entertainment. And vulgar and stupid and infantile and badly made.”

• Jerry Lewis (46:17): “I was embarrassed. I was ashamed of the work. And I was grateful that I had the power to contain it all and never let anybody see. Was bad, bad, bad.”

• Henry Gonchzak (38:17): “The theme of that film is that the bond between a father and a child can never be broken. Even by the Nazis, even by camps. But the whole point of the camp was to destroy human ties.”

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This episode of Decoder Ring masterfully dissects the myth and reality of "The Day the Clown Cried," offering listeners a deep dive into a film that remains one of Hollywood's most intriguing lost projects.

Transcript

[Max Friedman]

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[Willa Paskin]

Everyone loves a good movie. But you know what? Lots of people also really love a bad movie. And the comedian Patton Oswalt has a favorite kind of bad movie.

[Patton Oswalt]

There's nothing that I love more than something that's really bad, but the underlying attitude of it is, you're welcome, you're welcome. For me bestowing this upon you, I am bringing the elixir to heal the world.

[Willa Paskin]

The laughter you're hearing on the other end of that call is from Decoder Ring producer Max Friedman.

[Max Friedman]

I called Patton Oswalt to talk about one bad movie in particular, a movie made by a comedian and filmmaker who was, in the 1950s and 60s, one of the most famous people in the world, Jerry Lewis.

[Jerry Lewis]

He wasn't tall, he wasn't handsome, he wasn't even clever, and yet he ended up marrying a beautiful princess.

[Patton Oswalt]

Jerry Lewis was one of those things that was just kind of always around in the atmosphere. I grew up in the 70s and 80s, so they show his movies on TV when I was a little kid. Cinder Fella, Nutty professor, the Family Jewels.

[Jerry Lewis]

Yes, sir. We'll be going in a moment, girls.

[Max Friedman]

In 1972, after years of making wacky slapstick comedies, Jerry Lewis set out to direct and star in a film unlike anything he had ever done before. A drama set during World War II called the Day the Clown Cried. Here he is explaining the premise to a French TV reporter and for some reason, saying the word clown in a French accent.

[Jerry Lewis]

It is the story of a clune who was once the premier clune, who is no more the top clown, and who is having a difficult time handling being just a small part of the surface.

[Max Friedman]

But what makes the clown cry in the Day the Clown Cried is that he ends up in Auschwitz, where he entertains a group of Jewish children on their way to the gas chamber. Just the premise has been enough to make the film notorious beyond imagining. Something you'd have to see to believe. Except you can't see it. Almost no one ever has. The Day the Clown Cried was shot, then buried.

[Patton Oswalt]

The legend was it was so terrible that the studio wouldn't release it.

[Max Friedman]

But over the last 50 years, even though the film itself has been locked away, its stature has only grown as the ultimate bad movie.

[Patton Oswalt]

It became like this lost ark, kind of cursed artifact, this legendary grail for film enthusiasts.

[Max Friedman]

You have to talk about the Day the Clown Cried, the worst movie ever made. What's this movie about? Take a seat, because this is a doozy. Jerry Lewis made a Holocaust movie about a clown that led the children into the ovens. Can you imagine a worse thing? It's often cited by movie historians as one of the most wanted unseen films of all time. Please, if anybody has it, I'm begging, I'm begging people for this. You have to see this. So if almost no one has seen it, how is everyone so sure that it's so bad?

[Willa Paskin]

This is decoderain.

[Max Friedman]

I'm Max Friedman. It's hard to imagine now, but back in the early 70s, there had never really been a Holocaust movie. As such, 25 years after the end of the war, Nazi death camps had still rarely appeared on screen and almost never in a Hollywood film. So if Jerry Lewis had actually finished and released the Day the Clown Cried, it very well may have been a landmark in both the history of Hollywood and public memory of the Holocaust. Instead, he made a different kind of landmark, allegedly one of the worst movies ever. In this episode, I'm going to trace how the Day the Clown Cried went from a potential watershed to a legendary disaster. While I also try to figure out if the Day the Clown Cried deserves its reputation. And I'm gonna do all this without actually seeing the movie myself, because even though the movie remains lost, there's actually a lot we do know about what's in it. And even more we know about Jerry Lewis. So today on decodering, should we be laughing at the Day the Clown? CR.

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[Max Friedman]

I'm about 20 years younger than Patton Oswalt. And so I did not grow up with Jerry Lewis in the atmosphere. I saw the Nutty professor as a kid and I was vaguely aware of the annual Jerry Lewis telethon. But I don't think I knew just how big he had been in his prime.

[Shawn Levy]

Jerry was at various times in his career the highest paid performer on radio, television, movies, live stage, nightclubs and Broadway.

[Max Friedman]

Shawn Levy is the author of about a dozen books about film and pop culture, including King of Comedy, the Life and Art of Jerry Lewis.

[Shawn Levy]

Jerry started being well known in the late 1940s for the act he began with Dean Martin and now the Dean.

[Jerry Lewis]

Martin and Jerry Lewis Show.

[Shawn Levy]

It was chic. People like would go to the Copacabana. You couldn't get a ticket.

[Max Friedman]

Martin and Lewis worked their way up from nightclubs to become superstars in radio, movies and television.

[Jerry Lewis]

Like pizza and wine. Everything fine. Lasagna for you, bagels for mine. We belong together.

[Max Friedman]

Their act was built on the contrast between Dino, the suave crooner and Jerry, who played a character he nicknamed the Kid.

[Shawn Levy]

He was sort of a man child, you know, he was six foot, maybe six foot one, dressed elegantly, but when he was performing, he would do a wheedling, squealing voice, sort of lose control of his limbs.

[Jerry Lewis]

Jerry, it's your mother from New Jersey.

[Max Friedman]

Newark.

[Jerry Lewis]

She heard me all the way.

[Max Friedman]

Ellie.

[Jerry Lewis]

Oh, I'm so excited. Uh huh.

[Max Friedman]

Hello, Ma. After Martin and Lewis broke up in 1956, Jerry became even more famous. He put out a hit record, played sold out residencies in Vegas and on Broadway, hosted the Oscars three times, started to produce his own movies and eventually to direct them too.

[Shawn Levy]

He was the first comedian in the sound era to start directing himself in Hollywood films.

[Max Friedman]

And he was prolific. In 10 years he directed 10 movies and appeared in 10 more besides. Well into his 30s, he continued to play variations of the Kid in movies like the Delicate Delinquent, the Disorderly Orderly, the Bellboy, the Errand Boy, the geisha.

[Jerry Lewis]

Boy talking, you know, mitzvah Watanabel.

[Max Friedman]

I was just talking. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, oh, oh. As silly as these movies are, they still reveal a lot about the man who made them.

[Shawn Levy]

They're not distinguished as cinema. They're more distinguished, I think, as personal expression of this man with a very complex personality.

[Max Friedman]

For example, you can tell from Jerry's films that he was deeply sentimental about children.

[Shawn Levy]

He treats children like Faberge eggs. He will cut to shots of him crying over a child being cute or a child being sad. The idea that there's a innocence and Jerry is special because he can recognize and tap into that innocence.

[Max Friedman]

And that's because Jerry himself felt like he didn't have a real childhood.

[Shawn Levy]

His parents were itinerant show people. Jerry was often left in the care of his maternal grandmother. While his parents played in vaudeville houses and the Borscht Belt.

[Max Friedman]

Almost every Jerry Lewis movie is about a schlemiel who becomes a hero. Like his most famous and also probably his best film, the Nutty Professor.

[Shawn Levy]

Which is the Jekyll and Hyde story about a nebbishy chemistry professor.

[Jerry Lewis]

Were it not for your assisting me, I might very well be here all semester.

[Shawn Levy]

Who makes a concoction. And he becomes this suave lady killer jazzbo guy named Buddy Love.

[Jerry Lewis]

Mood is wrong Innkeeper got sexy lights Lay it on me now watch, baby that black magic has beIN its spell.

[Max Friedman]

Off screen, Jerry was both Jekyll and Hyde. The insecure underdog and the arrogant, controlling skirt chaser. He had a hand in essentially every aspect of production. On his films. In fact, he started calling himself the Total Filmmaker. He even wrote a book by that name.

[Shawn Levy]

He was the total Filmmaker. He made the decisions. He looked at everything. He didn't care about everything.

[Max Friedman]

He really was a brilliant physical performer. And his movies almost all have some inspired comic bit. But they're also sloppy. The plots are flimsy, the lighting is impossible. And Jerry insists on wearing his giant gold pinky ring. No matter what kind of character he's playing. And so while Jerry saw himself as a great artist. And film critics in France agreed with him. His countrymen, not so much.

[Shawn Levy]

Jerry was really dismissed by American critics as children's entertainment. And vulgar and stupid and infantile and badly made. It was antagonistic. And Jerry was a thin skinned man. He read all the reviews. And he always compared his critics to Nazis.

[Max Friedman]

Still, in the early 1960s, he was turning out hit after hit. He really was the king of comedy. Until the culture started to pass him by.

[Shawn Levy]

If you were 12 in 1963 when the Nutty professor came out. You were 16 in 1967. When he's still making comedies of that sort. And you're listening to the Doors. You're not interested in a guy doing pratfalls and squealing. And Jerry insisted that he was right to keep playing to that audience. But nobody was there anymore. And there was a lot of bitterness attached to that.

[Max Friedman]

Doing one of those pratfalls, he hurt his neck so badly he developed an addiction to painkillers. And worse, his movies started to lose money. By the early 70s, he hadn't had a mainstream hit in five or six years.

[Shawn Levy]

There wasn't a person in America who thought that Jerry Lewis was an important director in 1972 other than Jerry Lewis.

[Max Friedman]

And this is when he decided to take the biggest risk of his career. He decided to make the Day the Clown Cried.

[Chuck Denton]

The idea came from Joan O'Brien.

[Max Friedman]

Chuck Denton knew the screenwriter Joan O'Brien when he was a kid.

[Chuck Denton]

Joan had, after the war, in the early 50s, had visited Germany and Austria, and in her European travels, she had learned that, you know, a huge percentage of the Jews that died in the Holocaust were children.

[Max Friedman]

She made her way to Hollywood where she worked as a press agent for a clown named Emmett Kelly. Kelly was famous for creating a hobo clown character named Weary Willie. Unshaven, with a sad white frown painted over his mouth and a red nose. In character, he never spoke. But one day he said something to Joan which sparked her imagination, which was.

[Chuck Denton]

In a world without children, a clown's life would be a living hell.

[Max Friedman]

With her memories from post war Europe still fresh, Joan came up with the idea for a movie about a circus clown who meets Jewish children in a concentration camp. She brought this idea to Chuck's father, Charles Denton. He was a newspaper man on the Hollywood beat, but like Joan, what he really wanted to do was write for the movies.

[Chuck Denton]

I mean, these are two people who, you know, lived through the war. And I remember my father repeating this idea that, you know, if we don't pay close attention to our transgressions, we surely will repeat them. I think that was kind of the impetus for it.

[Max Friedman]

So Joan and Charles got to work drafting a screenplay they called the Day the clown cried. It's September 1938 in Berlin. The Nazis are in power. But Germany isn't at war just yet. Our hero, or really anti hero, is a third rate circus clown, selfish and vain, named Carl Schmidt.

[Chuck Denton]

He's not a good clown and he's not a good person.

[Max Friedman]

After Karl is fired from the circus, he gets drunk and makes fun of Hitler in public, which gets him sent to a concentration camp as a political prisoner. He isn't Jewish. For three years in this camp, Carl claims to his fellow inmates to have been one of the great clowns of Europe. But he refuses to actually perform for them. Then one day, a group of Jewish children arrive at the camp. They're separated by a fence from the non Jewish prisoners like Carl.

[Chuck Denton]

He I think is pushed or falls in the mud and the other political prisoners are laughing at him. But the children are laughing and he thinks they may be laughing with him. That sort of sparks in him, this desire to entertain them.

[Max Friedman]

So Carl starts putting on little shows at the fence. The guards tell him to stop, and when he does it anyway, they beat him to a pulp and shoot one of his friends. But then they see a way to use the clown to their advantage. They promise him his freedom if he will keep the children calm while they wait in a boxcar bound for Auschwitz. He agrees, but then accidentally gets locked in when the train departs. Once they get to Auschwitz, the commandant ups the stakes. He will let the clown live if he accompanies the children on their way to the gas chamber. And he does it like the Pied Piper in Greasepaint. He leads them single file to their deaths. Only in the end, he finds he can't leave them behind. The last little girl takes him by the hand. He smiles sadly and goes in after her. The door slams shut behind them. The final scene is described as follows. Close shot. Carl. His face is pressed against a steel door. He fights the panic within him. Then he quickly wipes his eyes and turns back towards the children. Slowly, he takes three chunks of stale.

[Willa Paskin]

Bread from his coat pocket and begins.

[Max Friedman]

Juggling them at the same time waggling his head from side to side. From deep inside him comes a tiny, tiny laugh. Suddenly, Carl tosses the pieces of bread high, high into the air and stretches out his arms to encompass all of the children. As they gather around him, they take up his soft laugh, timidly at first, then more assuredly, until the chamber resounds with gentle laughter. Fade out. The end. Just to underscore it, at the end of the movie as written, the clown and the children are inside the gas chamber, filling it with their laughter. Presumably, when the screen goes black, they all die. It's bleak. Despite this challenging material, when Joan O'Brien and Charles Denton started shopping their script around, they got the attention of some major stars. Richard Burton, Anthony Quinn, Dick Van Dyke, Milton Berle and even Bobby Darin. All reportedly considered taking on the lead role, but nothing ever materialized. And then along came Jerry Lewis.

[Jerry Lewis]

The script came to me 10 years ago. 10 years ago I fell in love with this idea. And in 10 years I'm happy that I have learned what I think is enough to go forward with this production.

[Max Friedman]

So a past his prime comedian who had never made a serious film was going to direct and star in a Holocaust drama. When he gave that interview during pre production, Jerry couldn't have known what chaos was in store. But he must have known that it wouldn't be easy, because what he was trying to do had never really been done before by anyone.

[Shawn Levy]

Remember in 1972 there were barely any depictions of the Holocaust in American popular culture.

[Max Friedman]

Jerry's biographer Shawn Levy.

[Shawn Levy]

There was no Schindler's List. There was no sort of foundational piece that said, okay, here is where conversation in American cinema about the Holocaust begins. So it was crazy to even think that you would approach the Holocaust as a subject matter, let alone Jerry Lewis.

[Jerry Lewis]

It's a large crapshoot, what I call a crapshoot, a gamble. I've been very fortunate, though. The public has been very good to me. I think that they will accept us if it's real. And to date it is.

[Max Friedman]

We'll see when we come back. Jerry rolls the dice and he comes up with snake eyes.

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Learn [e-mail]. when Jerry Lewis decided to make the Day the Clown Cried, he was signing on to what could have been a groundbreaking project. There had been plenty of Hollywood movies about World War II starting while the war was still being fought, but there had been almost none that depicted the Nazis so called Final Solution.

[Henry Gonchzak]

It was very explicitly done on the part of the studios not to foreground the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

[Max Friedman]

Henry Gonchzak is a retired English professor and the author of a book called Hollywood and the Holocaust.

[Henry Gonchzak]

The studio heads in Hollywood at the time were all Jews, Harry Cohen, Willie Mayer, Adolf Zucker. But they were immigrant Jews, very assimilated and very much wanted to be seen as real Americans. And they were Afraid that if there was too much emphasis placed in their films on the Jews that that would inspire an anti Semitic backlash in America, which was a reasonable assumption. It was a very anti Semitic country at that time.

[Max Friedman]

So there were war pictures, espionage thrillers, movies set in POW camps, and yes, even comedies with Nazi villains like Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be.

[Jerry Lewis]

You know, you're quite famous in London, Colonel. They call you Concentration Camp Erhart. Yes, yes, we do the concentrating and the Poles do the camping.

[Max Friedman]

What was still much more unusual was for Hollywood to confront the full extent of the horrors the Nazis had wrought. One of the first attempts was the Diary of Anne Frank, which started as a Broadway play and became a movie in 1959. I want to write, but more than.

[Jerry Lewis]

That, I want to bring out all kinds of. Of things that lie buried deep in my heart.

[Henry Gonchzak]

The play was enormously popular and so was the film, but that never shows the camps. It ends with the Frank family being arrested in their secret annex in Amsterdam.

[Max Friedman]

The 1961 courtroom drama judgment at Nuremberg was more direct, featuring several minutes of real documentary footage taken by Allied soldiers after the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau. A couple years after that, there were a few brief flashbacks in a movie called the Pawnbroker. But otherwise, when Jerry Lewis set out to make the Day the Clown Cried. The Nazi death camps had never been recreated on screen for an American narrative film. And Lewis, who was Jewish, he was born Jerome Levitch, wanted to change that. As he told biographer Shawn Levy, he.

[Shawn Levy]

Said to me, I don't care if this movie makes any money so long as everyone who never heard there was such a thing as a Holocaust sees it. That was the passion behind it.

[Max Friedman]

Whatever Jerry's loftier ambitions, after several years of flops, what was also immediately at stake was his career. He had a lot to prove.

[Shawn Levy]

So I think also he thought this has a serious subject. They can't dismiss it as the Three Stooges. It's something real and true and powerful. I am going to make a work of art.

[Jerry Lewis]

It's terribly important to me and I am in a very vulnerable position. I feel somewhat like the mother prior to giving birth to the child, praying for its well being.

[Max Friedman]

Jerry dove into the project like a total filmmaker would. He and his production designer visited Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen and Dachau for inspiration. He lost 35 pounds on a grapefruit diet. He even hired a former SS officer as a technical consultant, a man who admitted it had been his job to pull the lever to release the gas. Jerry also rewrote the script, though the original screenplay already spoke to some of his favorite themes. Casting his critics as literal Nazis and himself as the champion of innocent kids. Jerry made some telling changes. For example, he changed the main character's name from Carl Schmidt Ordinary, Not Funny to Helmut Dork D O O R K. And he gave Helmut real talent. Instead of a pompous hack with delusions of greatness. Helmut is a great clown who used to be adored by audiences but has now fallen out of favor. Not unlike Jerry Lewis himself. As he says to his perfect doormat wife, a character also invented by Jerry, I can't handle the pain of being a. Has been with. Has been in all caps. But the broad outlines of the story remained the same. A sad clown gets his groove back thanks to the love of some sweet, doomed and mostly undifferentiated Jewish children. Filming began in Paris in March 1972. Then moved to Stockholm, where the concentration camp sets had been constructed. But in Stockholm, everything began to come apart. The trouble started with the movie's producer, a Belgian named Nat Waksburger. Waksburger never showed up to set, and it quickly became clear he had not raised the money he claimed he had. The cast and crew started getting rubber checks or not being paid at all. So to keep the movie alive, Lewis began paying them out of his own pocket. By Jerry's own account, he spent almost a million dollars of his own money on this. But it wasn't enough. The Swedish studio where they were filming said it was owed hundreds of thousands more. So having shot most of the movie, but not all, Jerry took drastic measures.

[Shawn Levy]

He basically escaped in the night with a copy of the footage. The Swedish studio kept the original negative, but Jerry had a duplicate of the.

[Max Friedman]

Negative back in the United States. He started editing the movie and talking about it. Here he is on the Dick Cavett Show.

[Jerry Lewis]

The Day the Clown Cried will be said, I hope. Hopefully we'll finish cutting it the next six or seven weeks. And we've been invited to the Cannes Film Festival. So I think we will open it then in May. Then it'll be released in America.

[Max Friedman]

This was optimistic, to say the least.

[Shawn Levy]

When he returned to the States, he discovered not only had Nat Waksburger run out of money. His option on the material had expired prior to production beginning.

[Max Friedman]

In other words, the whole time Jerry had been filming the Day the Clown Cried, he had never had the rights to the story. When he found this out, he went to the screenwriters, Joan O'Brien and Charles Denton Hat in hand.

[Chuck Denton]

I think they were kind of shocked at first that somebody would do this, basically steal the script.

[Max Friedman]

Still, Chuck Denton told me after 15 years, his father and Joan were eager to see the movie made, even under these fishy circumstances. But then Lewis showed them some of what he had filmed and they thought.

[Chuck Denton]

It was just terrible, just, just a disaster. And I think it was heartbreaking.

[Max Friedman]

What did they think was terrible about it?

[Chuck Denton]

You know, he had turned it into something that was more maudlin. I think that, you know, he was really a great clown and, you know, he was this heroic figure. And that's not the script that they wrote.

[Max Friedman]

Like all Jerry Lewis movies, it was precise in some ways, sloppy in others. For example, how he had cast and costumed the Jewish children in the camp.

[Chuck Denton]

The kids were all Scandinavian, you know, little blonde haired kids and they've got new clothes and their hair is all done. And you know, it's just. I don't know what he was thinking.

[Max Friedman]

Jerry confessed to the writers that he knew the movie had problems.

[Chuck Denton]

Lewis kind of broke down and said, I know, I know, I know. And talked about being addicted to Percodan and, you know, I can make it better, I can fix it. And I think he wanted them to either put up some money or agree to defer any payment while he tried to, quote, fix it. And they said no.

[Max Friedman]

Without the writer's sign off, Jerry had no legal right to continue. For a long time he kept on hoping he could somehow finish the movie. One way or another, I'll get it done, he wrote in 1982. The picture must be seen. But the writers were not the only obstacle. He would also need his original negatives back.

[Jerry Lewis]

Hey, I hope in my lifetime we get the right to pull it out of Sweden. That's been the hangup.

[Max Friedman]

Over time, that hope curdled into something else.

[Shawn Levy]

He lost his shit when I asked him about it.

[Max Friedman]

Shawn Levy interviewed Jerry in the early 90s for his biography, the King of Comedy.

[Shawn Levy]

Red in the Face. He'd been drinking beer. It's about 11 in the morning and screaming and yelling at me. Profanity, personal accusations.

[Max Friedman]

He grabbed Sean's tape recorder and threw him off his yacht.

[Jerry Lewis]

When you walk through a storm, keep your head up.

[Max Friedman]

As the decades passed, Jerry's public image evolved.

[Shawn Levy]

He represents the flame out of that generation of post war American showbiz titans who couldn't understand why if they were doing the thing that made them successful, they were no longer successful.

[Max Friedman]

He only directed two more movies after the Day the Clown Cried. One was about a clown who can't find words. The other about a man who fails over and over again to kill himself. They were both flops. So Jerry started to become better known for his annual telethon to benefit the Muscular dystrophy Association, a 21 and a half hour parade of aging stars and novelty acts.

[Jerry Lewis]

Though your dreams be tossed and blown.

[Max Friedman]

The Telegraph telethons raised millions of dollars, but they were also mocked for being tacky and saccharine. Meanwhile, in interviews, Jerry was often angry, profane and grandiose. I'm a multifaceted, talented, wealthy, internationally famous genius, he said. People don't like that. You never.

[Jerry Lewis]

Want.

[Max Friedman]

And so, as Jerry became a punishment popular punching bag, just the notion of the day the clown cried began to seem increasingly outlandish. This overgrown man, child and self proclaimed egomaniac made a movie about a circus clown at Auschwitz. How could it be in anything but world? Historical bad taste, so toxic it had to be locked away forever. This was the thrust of a 1992 story in Spy magazine called Jerry Goes to Death Camp that cemented the film's reputation as the most notorious cinematic miscue in history. The piece features interviews with a handful of people who claim to have actually seen the day the clown cried or parts of it, including the comedian Harry Shearer, who had been friends in the 70s with one of Jerry's sons.

[Shawn Levy]

I think it's worse than you would.

[Patton Oswalt]

Be led to believe just by the force of your own imagination.

[Max Friedman]

Shearer has continued to talk about this over the years. Here he is in 2016.

[Patton Oswalt]

I just remember the overall feeling of it, which was it couldn't be more wrong.

[Max Friedman]

Rumor had it that Jerry Lewis kept the only extant print of the movie on his person at all times in a bulletproof metal briefcase. But the screenplay started to circulate underground like contraband. One copy eventually found its way to a young comedian named Patton Oswalt.

[Patton Oswalt]

I just read it for pure pleasure and fascination.

[Max Friedman]

He was awed by the wrongness of what Jerry had done.

[Patton Oswalt]

He adds that ridiculous nutty professor cartoonish reality comedy to it. Like at one point his character gets up, it's very cold and he goes to use the urinal and like you hear ice, like he's peeing ice or something. Like he's adding comedy bits in the middle of a guy who's an Auschwitz.

[Max Friedman]

The script gave Patton an idea.

[Patton Oswalt]

This is just pre Internet where we weren't used to the idea of, oh, everything is going to be available forever. So there was this feeling of, well, this is never going to be seen unless we do something about it. So I started staging these readings.

[Max Friedman]

Patton cut the screenplay down, cast a few of his friends and staged the Day the Clown Cried live at an LA comedy club in 1996. The first performances were by invitation only, but they couldn't keep a lid on it for long.

[Patton Oswalt]

The word spread. It was kind of amazing.

[Max Friedman]

The show became a cult comedy hit starring a rotating who's who of up and coming. Stephen Colbert, Bob Odenkirk, Ike Barinholtz, Will.

[Patton Oswalt]

Arnett, Jack Black, Andy Preboy wrote a theme song for us. It's been panned, it's been booed, it's been banned and pew'd. It's a script that's really rotten that be better off their bottom. That'd be that Patton's putting on with pride. Tonight's the Night the Day the Clown Cried. It evokes one of the best versions of laughter you can get, which is the laughter of disbelief.

[Max Friedman]

So here were Patton, Oswalt and friends presenting the Day the Clown Cried as something so transparently terrible you could only laugh at it. And yet, just a couple of years later, a movie arrived in theaters that would get good reviews, make money at the box office, and eventually win three Oscars for a story about clowning around in a concentration camp.

[Jerry Lewis]

Buongiorno, Principessa.

[Max Friedman]

Is it possible Jerry Lewis was just 25 years too early after the break? Oh, sheet.

[Willa Paskin]

Honey, chill.

[Max Friedman]

It's just laundry. Not that I'm talking about these Arm and Hammer power sheets. All the power of Arm and Hammer laundry detergent and a convenient tossable sheet.

[Willa Paskin]

Oh, sheet.

[Max Friedman]

That's what I'm saying.

[Willa Paskin]

And Arm and Hammer power sheets deliver an effort. Effective, clean at a great price.

[Max Friedman]

Think of all the laundry we'll do and all the money we'll save. Oh, sheet. Arm and Hammer. More power to you. I can say to my new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra. Hey, find a keto friendly restaurant nearby and text it to Beth and Steve. And it does without me lifting a finger so I can get in more squats anywhere I can. 1, 2, 3.

[Shawn Levy]

Will that be cash or credit?

[Max Friedman]

Credit. 4 Galaxy S25 Ultra. The AI companion that does the heavy lifting. So you can do. You get [e-mail] compatible with select apps. Requires Google Gemini account. Results may vary based on input. Check responses for accuracy. At the 1999 Academy Awards, the Oscar for best picture went to Shakespeare in Love. But the most memorable winner that night was a compact, wiry Italian named Roberto.

[Jerry Lewis]

Roberto.

[Max Friedman]

Roberto. Roberto Benigni's reaction To his win for best foreign language film instantly entered Oscars history when he climbed onto the back of his seat, climbed over the two seats in front of him to stand on top of Steven Spielberg, then jumped down, ran down the aisle and hopped up each step to the stage. Thank you, thank you.

[Jerry Lewis]

This is a moment of joy and I want to kiss everybody because you are the image of the joy.

[Max Friedman]

The movie for which he won this award and later that night, best actor was Life is Beautiful.

[Jerry Lewis]

In a story that proves love, family.

[Max Friedman]

And imagination conquer all. Benigni plays Guido, a Jewish waiter turned bookseller who is sent to a concentration camp with his four year old son where he shields the boy from the horrors around him by convincing him it's all just a game. In the end, Guido dies, but his son survives. And it's implied that Guido's improv skills have not only saved his son's life, but preserved his innocence and humanity, his belief that yes, life is beautiful. So some 25 years after Jerry Lewis tried to make the Day the Clown Cried, here was another actor known for his childlike Persona and elastic physical comedy. Writing, directing and starring in a drama about a clown like figure in a Nazi concentration camp. But instead of being mocked, instead of being dismissed out of hand for hubris and bad taste, Benigny was celebrated. So what gives? Well, first of all, Life is Beautiful had the benefit of actually being released. Who knows how audiences would have responded to the Day the Clown Cried if they'd actually been able to see it. Certainly by 1999, the movie going public was more accustomed to stories like this with the death camps no longer a cinematic third rail. But most importantly, I think what made audiences love Life Is Beautiful is that weirdly, it's a feel good movie. The ending is sad, but joyful too. The movie says that even in the most horrific circumstances, humanity can be creative and loving.

[Henry Gonchzak]

These are soothing, consoling messages for the audience. But they're also messages that falsify these very black truths that you get from the Holocaust.

[Max Friedman]

Henry Gonchack, author of Hollywood and the Holocaust, is not a fan of this movie.

[Henry Gonchzak]

The theme of that film is that the bond between a father and a child can never be broken. Even by the Nazis, even by camps. But the whole point of the camp was to destroy human ties, you know, to dehumanize the prisoners and to pit them against one another. All of that is falsified if you say that the bond between a father and a son can't be broken.

[Max Friedman]

Life Is Beautiful was hardly the first movie to sentimentalize The Holocaust. In fact, this has long been the Hollywood way.

[Henry Gonchzak]

To give the famous example in the Diary of Anne Frank. What they did was they took out of context one line from Anne Frank's diary. And the line is, in spite of.

[Jerry Lewis]

Everything, I still believe that people are.

[Max Friedman]

Really good at heart.

[Henry Gonchzak]

And that is the way both the play and the film ends. If everyone is good at heart, I mean, the Holocaust couldn't have occurred. But that's a soothing message for the audience.

[Max Friedman]

Commercial filmmakers who want to tackle this subject have always had to strike an uneasy balance. If you want to educate as many people as possible about what happened, well, as the song goes, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. This was true even for Steven Spielberg when he directed Schindler's List, without a doubt the most successful Holocaust film ever made.

[Henry Gonchzak]

There are depictions of the Holocaust in that film that are as horrific and as historically accurate as, I think, in just about any other movie. But on the other hand, Spielberg, who's very savvy about his audience, knew that if he just presented the Holocaust with unadulterated horror, with nothing affirmative, he would never reach a mass audience.

[Max Friedman]

So he gave them something affirmative. Survival.

[Henry Gonchzak]

There's that powerful scene at the end where you see all the real people who live to old age because Schindler saved them, the Jews. So the question is, you know, how much do you soften it before you fundamentally distort it?

[Max Friedman]

Look, obviously there were Jews who survived the Holocaust. Otherwise, I wouldn't exist. And I can understand both the commercial imperative and the human impulse to find something affirmative or meaningful in the ashes. But on the other hand, 6 million Jews were murdered, along with 5 million Roma, homosexuals, disabled people and other undesirables. And there is no upside, no catharsis. They died, and they died for nothing. I just don't know if anyone really wants to see that movie. The release of Schindler's List in 1993 kicked off what one critic called a Holocaust boom, which included Life Is Beautiful and many more films besides. On the big screen and small, they're so common now, they have subgenres. The Holocaust sports movie, the Holocaust revenge thriller, the Holocaust courtroom drama, the Holocaust love story. Some of them are better than others. But by and large, these movies play by the rules of Hollywood storytelling. There is a central character who goes on a journey, faces challenges, and is transformed by the experience. So if the Day the Clown Cried had been made today, it seems like it would fit right in. On the surface, it's a sentimental story of personal Redemption for Helmut Dork, a selfish man who is transformed by the love of children and nobly sacrifices himself so that those children won't have to face their final moments alone. Certainly Jerry saw it that way. Here's how he described the story at the time.

[Jerry Lewis]

You will see wonderful things happen to a human being because some things happen that make him think about others besides himself. And that's all I'm going to tell you.

[Max Friedman]

That may have been the movie he wanted to make, but that's not how it comes across on the page. Even after Jerry's rewrites. I think Helmut is insufferably self absorbed, basically from beginning to end. And I don't think he fundamentally changes. He only learns to care about others because they like his act. And don't forget, the ending is incredibly grim. Unlike Guido in Life Is Beautiful. Helmut's sacrifice doesn't save anybody. The kids all die. And why does he decide to die with them? It's ambiguous. Maybe he wants to offer them some comfort. Maybe he can't live with the survivor's guilt. Maybe he decides life isn't worth living without an audience. Not so sentimental, if you ask me. And in fact, when I finally spoke to someone who has actually seen the Day the Clown Cried, he told me the film is remarkable precisely because Jerry rejected sentimentality. My opinion, this is only my opinion.

[Patton Oswalt]

Is that at this moment he knows.

[Max Friedman]

Very well what he's doing. And he wants not to be nice with nobody. And nobody includes the audience. Jean Michel Frodomme is a film critic and historian who writes for the French version of Slate. And he told me, in his very French way that the Day the Clown Cried is an important film because it refuses to make the Holocaust palatable to me. This is a film you cannot watch peacefully.

[Patton Oswalt]

It's disturbing, and this is one of.

[Max Friedman]

The reason it was attacked later on, that it was not nice to look at the film. Of course it's not nice. Talking about death camps as nice is for me something unacceptable. It's a suffering film, and to a certain extent it's a film that makes you suffer. I have to confess, despite everything I had heard and read about how terrible this movie is, part of me wanted Jean Michel to be right. There is so much Holocaust fiction out there. Some of the story and character beats are so familiar that I have found myself becoming almost numb to it. But ever since I first heard about the Day the Clown Cried years ago, just the image in my head of that grotesque final sequence, it has haunted me. It got under my skin, which I think a depiction of genocide probably should do. So I went into this project halfway, hoping that the Day the Clown Cried might have the power to shock or at the very least, surprise in a way that few modern Holocaust movies do. And now that's exactly what Jean Michel Fredon was telling me. And he had seen the movie. He told me it was shown to him by a French film director who had gotten it from his father who had been friends with Jerry. He not only showed it to me.

[Patton Oswalt]

But he gave it to me.

[Max Friedman]

Oh. So do you still have it? Of course. In what format? Well, now it's on a dvd. Is that something you could share with me?

[Patton Oswalt]

No.

[Max Friedman]

Jerry Lewis himself would have told me the same thing.

[Jerry Lewis]

Are we going to ever gonna get.

[Max Friedman]

To see the Day the Clown Cried?

[Jerry Lewis]

No. No.

[Max Friedman]

After decades of blaming others for the movie's failure to launch near the end of his life, Jerry changed his story. Now it was he who did not want the Day the Clown Cried to be seen. And it had been his decision all along to scrap it. Not the screenwriters, the producer, or anyone else.

[Jerry Lewis]

I was embarrassed. I was ashamed of the work. And I was grateful that I had the power to contain it all and never let anybody see. Was bad, bad, bad. It could have been wonderful. But I slipped up. I didn't quite get it.

[Max Friedman]

But despite Jerry's wishes, the Day the Clown Cried has not been entirely containable. He did his best. In 2014, when he donated his archives to the Library of Congress. He put in a stipulation that any material relating to the Day the Clown Cried had to be kept unavailable to the public for 10 years. So 10 years came and went. But when the prohibition was finally lifted last summer, the archive turned out to be a red herring. The movie wasn't in there. All they had was a few hours of unsynced, unedited dailies from just a couple of scenes. But there was a real treasure trove. It just turned out to be in Sweden.

[Jerry Lewis]

So this is where you've been hiding.

[Max Friedman]

It's Helmut. It is. It is. Footage from the film reels Jerry left behind in Stockholm in 1972 have now reappeared in a documentary called From Darkness to Light, which aired in December on Turner Classic Movies.

[Jerry Lewis]

Again, it's your funeral. Aren't funerals usually in order when someone dies?

[Max Friedman]

It's not the same thing as actually seeing the movie. It's mostly talking head interviews with only selected scenes sprinkled in. But I'm not gonna lie. Seeing this footage did scratch a certain itch.

[Jerry Lewis]

Come back, damn you come back and listen. Listen to the children laughing. I am a clown.

[Max Friedman]

Mostly, it confirmed what I had already suspected. The Day the Clown Cried is probably not a good movie, but it is a fascinating character study. The character being Jerry Lewis himself.

[Jerry Lewis]

Did you hear them laugh? I mean, did you hear them laughing and reacting?

[Max Friedman]

Yes, I did.

[Jerry Lewis]

And they said I couldn't come up with anything new. I mean, if they could see me now, I really felt funny again. It was funny, wasn't it?

[Max Friedman]

For example, consider this early scene with Helmut and his wife.

[Jerry Lewis]

He's a star, I'm a stooge. And he just took the last bit I had away from me because of a stupid accident. But he can't take your talent away. That's what makes you strong.

[Max Friedman]

The writing is clunky, the mix of accents bizarre. But to me, it's riveting. It's like watching Jerry give himself a pep talk about his own declining career.

[Jerry Lewis]

What the hell are you talking about? What talent? You mean the talent I had that's gone? I am now nothing but a prop to be used and reused. You call that strong? How do I rise above that? By not quitting. You got to fight. You got to fight because you're an artist, a human being.

[Max Friedman]

Jerry's performance can be hammy, but also genuinely affecting, especially towards the end. Now, we want you to lead the.

[Jerry Lewis]

Children quietly to that building over there. Oh, God, not the children. It isn't like killing the enemy in battle.

[Max Friedman]

Far more humane.

[Jerry Lewis]

Enemy? Humane? They're babies. They're just babies.

[Max Friedman]

Why, here he is, about to lead the children to their deaths, lying to them for the last time.

[Jerry Lewis]

What's wrong now, Helmut? Where are we going this time? We're just going to another building, that's all. Where we'll have more room to play. See? Now I would like you all to line up behind me, okay?

[Max Friedman]

In the final, wordless moments of the movie, Helmut Dork appears to finally accept the truth about himself. His talent, or lack thereof, doesn't matter at all. He is small and powerless. He could live to clown another day. Or he can choose to end his life bathed in the love of his last adoring fans. Watching this play out on Jerry's face and in his body, the ending feels perversely aspirational. Because Jerry himself struggled to accept his own decline, his own inevitable smallness. And so he responded by making a fiction in which his alter ego both accepts his fate and remains a hero to the bitter, bitter end. A hero specifically to children. The only ones Jerry felt truly understood and Appreciated him. In sum, the Day the Clown Cried is a breathtaking act of narcissism. Jerry used the largest mass murder of the 20th century to work through his own neuroses about comedy and fame. He found a way to make the Holocaust all about him. Jerry Lewis died in 2017 at the age of 91. But the legend of the Day the Clown Cried lives on.

[Shawn Levy]

I wrote about Jerry almost 30 years ago. People still, such as yourself, are fascinated by this movie. Ask me about it regularly.

[Max Friedman]

This fascination with Jerry's Waterloo is ironically an important part of his cultural footprint, which, as Shawn Levy told me, is otherwise shrinking by the day.

[Shawn Levy]

I'm probably at 62, one of the last generations who grew up with him as a cultural constant. So my children would only know about Jerry Lewis because their dad wrote a book about him, and their children will never know who he is. He's kind of vanished.

[Max Friedman]

The list of comedians and filmmakers he influenced is long, but his own movies have not held up very well. And it's unlikely anybody's rushing to reassess and defend his work, seeing as after his death, multiple actresses came forward to say that he had sexually harassed them and worse. So without much cultural memory of Cross Eyed Crazy Jerry or even Vegas telethon Jerry, and with precious little goodwill towards the real Jerry, it's the Day the Clown Cried that keeps him almost relevant. And I suspect it's much more powerful to imagine the Day the Clown Cried than it would be to actually see it.

[Shawn Levy]

You know, I think if people could see it all this time, we wouldn't be chatting today.

[Max Friedman]

The mystery is essential to keeping the legend alive and by extension, Jerry. I almost wonder if that was intentional on his part. Sure worked on me. Perhaps in the strangest twist of all, it's still possible we'll see a new version of the Day the Clown Cried, based on the original Screenplay by Joan O'Brien and Charles Denton, which is still somehow kicking around Hollywood almost 70 years after it was written. The producer who now owns the rights told the industry website Deadline last summer. This is an important movie that needs to get made. 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. I'll believe it when I see.

[Jerry Lewis]

Seems to me I've heard that song before.

[Max Friedman]

This is Dakota Ring. I'm Max Friedman.

[Willa Paskin]

And I'm Willa Paskin. If you're a Slate plus member or ready to become one, please stick around and listen to a conversation Max and I had about the state of contemporary Holocaust fiction, which is booming.

[Max Friedman]

This to me is the question. It's like, why this? This why now? Like five or six Holocaust or Holocaust adjacent TV shows kind of all at the same time.

[Willa Paskin]

If you want to hear more, you can sign up for Slate Plus. If you aren't already a member, you can subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking Try Free at the top of the Decoder Ring show page or visit slate.com decoderplus to get access. Wherever you listen. Slate+ members get to listen to our show and every other Slate podcast without any ads, and you'll get unlimited access to Slate's website. Again, you can subscribe on Apple podcasts by clicking try free or visit slate.comdecoder plus to sign up. This episode of Decoder Ring was reported, written and produced by Max Friedman and edited by me. Decoder Ring is produced by me, Max and Katie Shepard. Evan Chung is our Supervising producer. Merritt Jacob is our Technical Director. Special thanks to Judy Berman, Bruce Handy, Benjamin Charles, Jermaine Lee, Kaylee Thompson, Lizzie O'Leary and Derek John. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us@decoder ringlate.com and you can also call us now on our Decoder Ring hotline. That number is 347-460-702. We'd love to hear from you. Otherwise, we'll see you in two weeks.

[Patton Oswalt]

I'm Leon Nayfak and I'm the host of Slow Burn Watergate. Before I started working on this show, everything I knew about Watergate came from the movie all the President's Men. Do you remember how it ends? Woodward and Bernstein are sitting at their typewriters, clacking away. And then there's this rapid montage of newspaper stories about campaign aides and White House officials getting convicted of crimes, about audio tapes coming out that prove Nixon's involvement in the COVID up. The last story we see is Nixon resigns. It takes a little over a minute in the movie. In real life, it took about two years.

[Shawn Levy]

Five men were arrested early Saturday while trying to install eavesdropping equipment known as the Watergate Incident.

[Patton Oswalt]

What was it like to experience those two years in real time? What were people thinking and feeling as the break in at Democratic Party headquarters went from a weird little caper to a constitutional crisis that brought down the President. The downfall of Richard Nixon was stranger, wilder, and more exciting than you can imagine. Over the course of eight episodes, this show is going to capture what it was like to live through the greatest political scandal of the 20th century. With today's headlines once again flying of corruption, collusion and dirty tricks, it's time for another look at the gate that started it all. Subscribe to Slow Burn now. Wherever you get your podcasts.