10 Movies That Were Scrapped After Being Shot

There's perhaps no single more infamous scrapped film than The Day the Clown Cried, a 1972 drama written, directed, and starring Jerry Lee Lewis as a German circus clown who is imprisoned in a concentration camp.

Filming was fraught with issues, such as Lewis having to stump up $2 million of his own cash to complete shooting after a producer ran out of money, but the real problems didn't emerge until the film entered post-production. At this point, the various parties with claims on the picture couldn't agree on terms for its release, and so The Day the Clown Cried was simply never finished.

The film quickly entered the annals of Hollywood legend, and over the decades has remained one of the most fascinatingly sought-after "lost" movies, largely due to its peculiar and controversial premise.

In 2015, Lewis finally submitted an incomplete print of the film to the Library of Congress with the condition it couldn't be screened until 2024. And indeed, last year it was screened privately for The New Republic's Benjamin Charles Germain Lee, who revealed that Lewis' footage was a "fragmentary" five-hour assembly rather than anything close to a coherent film.

And with that revelation, any remaining optimism about The Day the Clown Cried finally getting a long-belated release basically evaporated.