The Day The Clown Cried

"The infamous 'lost' film of Jerry Lewis, which was buried due to a legal dispute between him and the writers of the original screenplay" (another theory is that he deliberately shelved it). Never released, very few have seen any footage from it.

Imagine what might happen if Jerry Lewis directed Life Is Beautiful in the seventies, but attempted to take it to an even darker place. It's legendary for being one of the greatest cinematic miscalculations ever.

If you want to learn more about it, there's a lot of stills and articles here, as well as two versions of the script!

"With most of these kinds of things, you find that the anticipation, or the concept, is better than the thing itself. But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. 'Oh My God!' - that's all you can say." -- attributed to Harry Shearer, who has (purportedly) seen the entire rough cut on video.