12 Controversial Movies That Never Got Released

3. Uncle Tom's Fairy Tales: The Movie for Homosexuals

The Premise: Directed by a 23-years-young Penelope Spheeris in 1968, Uncle Tom's Fairy Tales: The Movie for Homosexuals was intended as a starring vehicle for an on-the-rise Richard Pryor in this comedy about race relations in the US. Why It Never Got Released: For starters, the plot itself was pretty controversial, revolving around a white man who is kidnapped by the Black Panthers and put on trial for the entire history of racial crimes against black people by whites. That's without even getting into the production difficulties, the source of which, hilariously enough, appeared to be Pryor's wife at the time. She bemoaned the actor spending more time working on the film than with her, and depending on which source you read, Pryor either shredded the negative himself to placate her, or (perhaps more likely), she ruined it out of jealous anger. After some scenes from the film were screened during a tribute to Pryor in 2005, a legal fracas emerged about whether Spheeris in fact owned a copy of the negative, and to this day, it remains unresolved.