10 Directors Who Sabotaged Their Own Movies

4. Jerry Lewis - The Day The Clown Cried

The Day the Clown Cried is one of the most famous unreleased movies of all time, a Holocaust drama shot in 1972, starring Jerry Lewis as a circus clown imprisoned within a Nazi concentration camp, who decides to entertain the children held there in order to distract them from their eventual fate.

Lewis took the role extremely seriously, shedding 35 pounds in six weeks to play the emaciated clown, yet the film was initially not released due to ongoing rights issues regarding distribution.

But despite his earnest intentions, Lewis turned on the film in subsequent years, claiming to be "embarrassed at the poor work", and repeatedly telling reporters that it would never see the light of day as a result.

Lewis reportedly donated a copy of the film to the Library of Congress in 2015 under the stipulation it not be screened until June 2024, and with Lewis' death in 2017, interest has been renewed in his estate possibly taking a more diplomatic approach to releasing what remains of the film.

Apocryphal stories have done the rounds over the years of actors and filmmakers who claim to have seen various bootleg copies of the film, and some scant footage has made it way online.

But between Lewis' failure to figure out the tangle of rights and his subsequent disdain for the end result, the ahead-of-its-time dramedy never stood a chance.