Stanley Kubrick's film project Napoleon has been dubbed "the greatest movie never made." DW revisits its story as well as other ambitious works that never or barely made it to the big screen.
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Don Quixote and the top cursed film projects
Film history lists plenty of movie disasters and alleged masterworks by top directors that never or just barely made it to the screen. Never finished or never shown, here are 10 famous mad movie projects.
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Completed after 17 years: 'The Man Who Killed Don Quixote'
Filming on Terry Gilliam's legendary Don Quixote project started in 2000, only to be postponed and interrupted several times for various reasons. The 2002 documentary "Lost in La Mancha" showed the nightmarish setbacks of the production. Over the years, the actors and even the story changed. It finally premiered at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. But not all cursed projects were completed...
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Never shot: Kubrick's 'Napoleon'
Stanley Kubrick's had extremely elaborate plans for his Napoleon Bonaparte epic, but the project failed, even though the screenplay and costumes were all ready. A dissuading factor for producers was the financial flop faced by Sergei Bondartschuk's mega production, Waterloo. Kubrick's preparations weren't entirely in vain: Some material was used in his 1975 work, "Barry Lyndon."
Image: Taschen
Out of luck: Eisenstein's Mexico films
In the early 1930s, famous director Sergei M. Eisenstein planned but failed to shoot a work titled "Que viva Mexico!" in Hollywood. A second venture, a film about Mexican history, failed as well. The material that was actually filmed has been used in various documentaries.
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Incomplete projects galore: Orson Welles
Orson Welles is perhaps the master of incomplete films. His classic works are actually outnumbered by projects that were never finished, the most well-known being "The Other Side of the Wind." Welles started shooting it in the 1980s but died before filming ended. Netflix has meanwhile restored and completed the unfinished film, which premiered at the 2018 Venice Film Festival.
When filming started in 1962, no one knew this was going to be Marilyn Monroe's last movie. Director George Cukor's "Something's Got to Give" was star-crossed from the start because Monroe repeatedly dropped out. Lee Remick was to replace her, only to be vetoed by lead actor Dean Martin. A later documentary shows 37 minutes of the unfinished film.
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Experiment with colors: 'Hell'
Iconic German actress Romy Schneider was cast to star in another famous unfinished film, Henri-Georges Clouzot's "L'Enfer" ("Hell," from 1964). The production turned into a nightmare, including because Clouzot had a heart attack. The director later used some sensational color shots of Romy Schneider in his last movie, and a documentary exploring why "Hell" was never completed came out in 2009.
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Crying clowns: Jerry Lewis
Jerry Lewis' "The Day the Clown Cried" is one of the most mysterious film projects in film history, aiming to tell a story from Nazi Germany using humorous means. The American comedian directed and starred in the 1972 drama. It was completed, but never screened publicly due to legal problems and Lewis' displeasure with the outcome.
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Megalomania: Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola also worked on various projects that never progressed. Among them, he turned to "Megalopolis" in 1984, but the 200-page script about an architect and a mayor quarreling about the future of New York City between was never turned into a movie.
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A dream not come true: Leone's 'Leningrad'
In the 1980s, Italian director Sergio Leone, himself no stranger to epic movies (above, on set filming "Once upon a time in America"), wanted to make a film about the grueling German siege of Leningrad in World War II. The film was never realized, as the director died in 1989 at the age of 60.
Even the "master of suspense" Alfred Hitchcock couldn't realize all of his projects and ideas. In the late 1950s, he planned to film "No Bail for the Judge," starring Audrey Hepburn, a film about a judge charged with murdering a prostitute. But there were problems, the lead actress withdrew — and Hitchcock moved on to other projects.
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Stanley Kubrick had already acquired his reputation as a perfectionist by directing works such as Spartacus, Lolita and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. All possibilities appeared open to the filmmaker following the release of his 1968 masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The next film he planned to direct was on the legendary ruler Napoleon.
Kubrick didn't want to simply focus on a certain period of Napoleon's life, but rather portray his "entire" life, including ambitious battle scenes with thousands of extras — a definitely megalomaniac project.
The book Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon. The Greatest Movie Never Made, published by Taschen, details how much energy Kubrick had dedicated to researching and preparing his film.
While the book is about a film that was finally never made, there is certainly more pre-production material documenting it than most movies that were actually produced.
Publisher Alison Castle started researching the book in 2002, and was surprised to discover the rich Napoleon pre-production archives available at the Kubrick estate.
Costumes had already been planned in detail: a page from the Taschen bookImage: Taschen
The over 800-page-long book covers different aspects of the director's preparatory work in various sections — Script, Reference, Notes, Correspondence, Chronology, Production, Text, Costumes, Location Scouting and Picture File.
Kubrick wanted to shoot most of his film in Romania, with thousands of actual Romanian soldiers. Since the director knew that Napoleon would be a difficult project to finance, he avoided casting top stars. Among the people he was in touch with for the lead role were solid actors, including Ian Holm and Oskar Werner, as well as Jack Nicholson, whose fame at the time was restricted to his anti-hero role in the counter-culture film Easy Rider.
Napoleon's last residence, the Château de Malmaison, was another planned film locationImage: Taschen
It would have been a film on human folly
Kubrick wanted to highlight Napoleon's megalomania, a trait in some ways shared by the director, and one that certainly fascinated him. Even though he had already touched a wide variety of topics and genres, all his films had one thing in common, pointed out Jan Harlan, Kubrick's executive producer on his last four films: Kubrick's "never-ending interest in observing human folly was the well-spring of nearly all his films," he wrote in the book.
The film was never produced. The two studios Kubrick had brought his project to, MGM and then United Artists, got cold feet. Historical epics were perceived as too much of a financial risk at the time.
The book on Kubrick's Napoleon is a monumental work in itselfImage: Taschen
Stanley Kubrick was disappointed and depressed. That however didn't damage his career. His following project, A Clockwork Orange, was produced relatively quickly by his standards.
He also managed to direct a monumental historical film, Barry Lyndon, that came out in 1975. The special cinematography technology he famously had developed to capture candlelit scenes in this work had originally been planned for Napoleon.
Revisiting Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey'
The iconic science-fiction film came out in cinemas 50 years ago and remains one of the most influential works in film history to this day.
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Philosophical science-fiction
This is one of the films in cinema history that has been written about the most. Kubrick's masterpiece was analyzed by film critics, cultural scientists and philosophers. Fifty years after its premiere, the German Film Museum in Frankfurt is dedicating an exhibition to the film. "Kubrick's 2001. 50 Years A Space Odyssey" showcases many original exhibits from the Stanley Kubrick Archive.
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Reflections on humanity
What makes us human? This is just one of the many questions director Stanley Kubrick dealt with in his 1968 film "2001: A Space Odyssey." When a computer takes over the control of a spaceship, astronauts appear helpless, despite their protective helmets and spacesuits.
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The unforgettable opening sequence
Composed of three major segments, the epic science-fiction drama opens with the prologue "The Dawn of Man," set in an African desert millions of years ago. A tribe of hominids discover a mysterious black monolith. They then start using bones as weapons, accompanied by Richard Strauss' "Thus Spoke Zarathustra."
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Film history's most famous match cut
The sequence is followed by a cut that has become legendary among film experts and fans alike. The bone used by the ape to kill another one is thrown into the air; it switches to a similarly shaped satellite orbiting in space — four million years later.
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Destination Jupiter
The main segment of the film, entitled "Jupiter Mission," depicts the mission of the spacecraft Discovery One. Two pilots and three scientists in suspended animation are on their way to Jupiter. The ship's computer, HAL, controls the spacecraft.
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A classified mission
The astronauts do not know much about the goals of their journey. HAL is the only one who's been informed of the mission's true objectives. They are headed to Jupiter, where the enigmatic monolith is based. It is believed to a be tool created by aliens.
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Spectacular scenery
The main segment of "2001: A Space Odyssey" showcased visuals unlike anything moviegoers had seen in 1968, and they would rarely be surpassed in later works. The outer space scenes were directed to appear extremely realistic; Kubrick worked with NASA and other companies to achieve this.
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Humans and computer
The two pilots, portrayed by Gary Lockwood and Keir Dullea, fatally confront the supercomputer HAL, which turns out to be the actual captain on board. The astronauts' every movement and conversation is followed by the computer. The power of artificial intelligence was a central and pioneering theme in "2001."
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Breathtaking images
"I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content," Kubrick once said in a Playboy magazine interview. His aesthetic concept attracted viewers and critics alike.
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A visual trip
In the third segment of the film, "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite," Kubrick ignited a psychedelic firework of images that some people in 1968 interpreted as an acid trip. The final scene is set in a mysterious white room, where death and birth meet — a symbol for the eternal cycle of life.
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The magician: Stanley Kubrick
The filmmaker born in New York directed many of his most famous films in the UK. When his pioneering epic "2001: A Space Odyssey" came out in 1968, Kubrick was 40 years old. This masterpiece and many more ground-breaking works make him one of the most influential directors in cinematic history.
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