I wrote this article to submit to a film blog, which subsequently closed for submissions before I finished. It was originally intended to have ten entries - I will hopefully finish the others at some point.
In movie land there exists a small but strange group of films. A group of movies that remain strangely out of reach, gathering dust on shelves, locked away from human eyes, never or rarely to be seen.
These films are not lost - there is not reason to believe that their original elements have destroyed. Nor do they exist in mere fragments; they are complete works, you just can't see them, at least not in full.
The reasons for these restrictions are usually legal; a battle between who owns what, who gets paid, a battle that keeps these films in a stage of limbo. But there are of course other reasons, controversies, disagreements and other reasons which remain mysterious.
Here are five such films, films that you won't be seeing at the cinema or be buying on Amazon any time soon.
I Woke Up Early the
Day I Died
Even decades after his death, Ed Wood projects were still
destined for disaster. His 1959 movie
Night of the Ghouls lay unseen in a
post-production lab for over twenty years because he didn’t have enough money
to process it. A similar fate would befall this 1999 tribute production, based
on one of his most beloved yet unmade scripts.
I Woke Up Early the Day I Died starred Billy Zane as a
psychiatric patient who steals a nurses uniform (cross-dressing, of course) to
escape from hospital, ending up in a variety of scrapes amongst the city
low-life. It was a star-studded tribute, with an impressive cast that included
Eartha Kitt, Christina Ricci, Tippi Hedren, Ron Perlman, Nicolette Sheridan and
many former Wood alumni.
The jury’s still out on whether it’s any good, and by that I
mean true to Wood’s unique kind of enthusiastic ineptitude, but few of Wood’s
fans actually got to see it. Its production company, Cinequanon, went under,
causing the film to be mired in legal difficulties. After a
blink-and-you’ll-miss-it New York City release, the film went unseen beyond a
brief VHS release in Germany and some Mexican TV screenings.
Cocksucker Blues
The Rolling Stones 1969 documentary Gimme Shelter culminates
in several Hell’s Angels stabbing to death a gun wielding audience member at the
notorious Altamont concert. Yet this is
the documentary that’s banned from release.
Cocksucker Blues was supposed to build on Gimme Shelter’s success, once again following a huge American Tour but this time with Exile
on Main Street photographer Robert Frank behind the camera. Unfortunately,
Frank was more interested in what goes on back stage than on, and captured
candid scenes of drug-taking, roadie sex and all kinds of debauchery, though
soon clearly put-on for the camera.
Perhaps almost as damaging was that it showed all that was
awful about touring, the arguments, confusion, strained-relationships, not to
mention the signs of addiction. Jim Jarmusch said of the film: "one of the
best movies about rock and roll I've ever seen. . . . It makes you think being
a rock and roll star is one of the last things you'd ever want to
do." He’s one of the few to have
seen it; the Stones brought out an injunction to prevent its release. Frank is
now legally only able to show the film once a year, with himself in
attendance. Good luck getting tickets.
Filming Othello
Welles later years were full of projects half-finished or
trapped in limbo. The most famous of these, the filmed but not edited The Other
Side of the Wind, may still eventually make it to cinemas, but oddly the last
film Welles ever actually completed seldom gets mentioned.
True, it was more making-of than movie; Filming Othello
was commissioned by West German television to accompany an up-coming screening
of his 1952 Shakespeare adaptation. Typically of Welles, the project was tinged with
disaster – all his insert shots were lost by a producer - leaving the film
consisting of Welles talking straight to camera while sat behind editing desks,
books and water bottles in an effort to disguise just how much weight he had
now put on.
Finished four years too late, Welles raconteurial skills
still won over the critics in its few screenings, but as there was little
demand for such a niche project in the 70s, and with no home video market, the
film faded into obscurity. The re-release of Othello in 1992 seemed the ideal
time to dust-off the film but the on-going feud between Welles’ daughter
Beatrice, who owns Othello, and his mistress Oja Kodar, who owns Filming
Othello, prevented it. Somewhat ironically, Welles follow-up, the unfinished
Filming the Trial, has fallen into the public domain and is free for all to see.
The Pied Piper of
Cleveland: A Day in the Life of a Famous Disc Jockey
So little is known about this music documentary it may be a
lost film. Some have even doubted that it ever existed at all, but there’s
evidence that it was made and that it was screened for an audience at least
once. What’s so special about it? Only that it features the first ever recorded
performance of Elvis Presley, that’s all.
The film was a tribute to famous DJ Bill Randle, who
financed the film himself and arranged for performances by Elvis, Bill Haley,
Johnnie Ray, La Vern Baker and others at Cleveland’s Brooklyn High School.
Elvis performed five songs but it’s not known how many made it into the 48
minutes long documentary.
The film was edited down to 20 minutes for national
distribution, but this mysteriously never occurred. Parts of it were shown on
local television, but since then the film has been shrouded in mystery. Randle spoke only obliquely about the film,
and seldom consistently. Music historian Jim Dawson has claimed Randle sold the
footage to music producer Ray Santelli in 1992, who then sold it swiftly to Polygram.
It is now said to exist within Universal’s archive, but no one knows for sure.
Ingagi
There’s an argument that King Kong might not have been made
if it wasn't for Ingagi. Made three years earlier, Ingagi was a documentary
charting the adventures of British explorer Sir Hubert Winstead as he explored
the Belgian (!) Congo, culminating in the discovery of a tribe of naked women
who gave over one of their own as a sex sacrifice to a giant gorilla.
Suspicions towards its authenticity were raised early; Sir
Hubert appeared to be American, the newly discovered Tortadillo appeared to be
a tortoise with feathers and wings stuck on, and the naked tribeswomen’s
genitals always seemed to be conveniently covered by thickets. One of the
lion’s in the film also bore more than a slight resemblance to the one that
roars in the famous MGM production ident.
The Hay’s Office were determined to get this smut out of
theatres and tried to get it pulled on the grounds that it was falsified. They
even got a signed affidavit from the actor who played the film’s lead gorilla, stating that it was faked. But when the studios backed off, the film’s
producers took it to independent cinemas. It took three years before it was driven
out of theatres by which time it had made more than $4 million, making it one
of the most profitable of the decade. Reason enough for RKO to invest in
cinema’s most famous giant gorilla epic soon after.
Ingagi hasn’t been seen since. Prints do exist, but the
film’s non-pc content perhaps makes it rather a risky proposition for
distributors. Interestingly enough, the title was appropriated for the otherwise unconnected
Son of Ingagi, Hollywood's first all-black horror film.
Mr Camera likes to film his criminal exploits, strangely not
realising how this might impact him on a later date. He, however, strikes it
lucky when his camera manages to capture both Batman and Robin changing into
their costumes, thus revealing their secret identity. He is arrested soon
after, but is able to hide the film so it can be developed later.
