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Unfinished masterpieces.

post #1 of 16
7/1/11 at 11:52pm
Thread Starter 

While procrastinating today I got to wondering how many Classics out there sit just one final step away from being completed or were hijacked out from under their creators, re-edited and then released for a quick buck by studios or investors. Post the ones you think are worth a look and give a little history on its trouble past.

 

What spurred on this idea is the beautiful and tragically unfinished Richard Williams Masterpiece, The Thief and the Cobbler, an independent animated feature which started production in 1964. For years it was animated in pieces when Richard Williams could get funding. After doing the animation for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Williams was able to sign a deal with Warner Brothers to finish the film.

 

Later, when Disney announced Aladdin in 1991, Warner brothers dropped The Thief and the Cobbler fearing it was too similar and would fail at the box office.  After failing to meet a deadline the film was taken over by investors and released in heavily re-edited form by Majestic films in 1993. Then in 1995 it was re edited again and released by Miramax.  Williams's original work-print has 15 minutes of footage left to complete  and only worn out bootleg videos of it remain.

 

Richard Williams last attempt to restore and release his vision was shelved by Disney in 2003. In 2006 a fan recut of the film began. Through the use of sketches, storyboards, workprint bootlegs, and footage from the earlier edited versions, the Recobbled cut is the closest the world will get to the masterpiece Williams envisioned. Sadly Williams has given up on the project and refuses even to watch the fan edit which is available in it's entirety on youtube.

 

Here is the first of 11 parts.

 

The only thing i can say is WOW. I'm on part 4 of 11 now and the animation in the fully finished sections is sublime. As hand drawn stuff goes, there are things here (like moving camera shots) that I thought only computers could achieve. There is nothing I really can compare it to. It must be experienced to be believed. I really wish someone at Pixar or another studio would fund a full restoration on the film.

 

If nothing else watch it for Vincent Price, who voices the villain.

 

 

 


Edited by Tim K - 7/2/11 at 12:10am
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post #2 of 16
7/2/11 at 3:56am

The animation really is beautiful.  I'd kill for this thing to get finished.   Another original work of art that Disney completely lifted from.  Not even hiding it a lot of it, either...

 

Hell, if you combine Genie and Jafar from Aladdin...

 

Jafar%20(102).gif

 

You're gonna get ZigZag...  

 

600full-the-thief-and-the-cobbler-screenshot.jpg

 

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post #3 of 16
7/2/11 at 6:29am

Yeah, the Recobbled Cut is pretty awesome, even when the image quality goes from "really good" to "clearly bootleg". What's even more incredible is that the guy who made it actually reanimated some parts himself, such as painting out Tack's mouth in scenes where he talked in the butchered versions.

 

As far as other unfinished classics go, I can't think of any off the top of my head.

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post #4 of 16
7/2/11 at 7:24am

Don Quixote has had a tough time making it to the screen. There is of course Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Anyone who's seen Lost in La Mancha knows how close we were to seeing that film with Johnny Depp. It seemed we would finally see it when last year it was announced that Ewan McGregor and Robert Duvall would be starring in it but financing never came through. 

And then there was Orson Welles version that was never officially finished. 

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post #5 of 16
7/2/11 at 7:43am

There was also a Disney animated version back in Walt's day that never got past concept art and sketches. The same goes for a movie about Chanticleer and Reynard the Fox, which almost got made a couple times but was turned down for cheaper alternatives.

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post #6 of 16
7/4/11 at 12:17am

By cheating and looking up the topic on other sites, I could list quite a few films here but I'll try to be brief. It's tough to say what is and isn't a "masterpiece" in the eyes of the beholder, I will say.

 

Of course, it may not be considered a masterpiece (allegedly it's God-awful) but the obvious answer is The Day The Clown Cried; I'm sure all of us here know the story behind that one. I'm one of the many that would love to see it one of these days, even though that is highly unlikely.

 

There's the Ken Annakin movie Genghis Khan, which started filming in the early 90's but allegedly because the movie was so bad, it was never completed. However, as this site mentioned almost two years ago, some people wanted to try and get the movie edited to where it could be released. There was much laughter in the article that even though the movie featured the likes of John Saxon, Pat Morita, and even Charleston Heston, the lead role was played by the guy who was the main heel in Kindergarten Cop.

 

Much along those same lines was the story from a few years ago about the unreleased sci-fi movie Thunder Riders of the Golden West which got attention as none other than John Wayne had a small role in it. The dude behind the movie said he was finally getting the money to release it on DVD, and... of course it never happened and who knows if it ever will. It'd be interesting to see The Duke in that kind of role, even if the movie itself is terrible.

 

To be more traditional, I'll mention a guy who just HAS to be mentioned somewhere more than once, and that is Orson Welles, who has more than one or two unfinished projects. I'll mention now The Other Side of the Wind, which is about a Hollywood figure not unlike Hemingway. As it's a Wells self-financed movie, it took a LONG time to film and boy, in hindsight his decision to use money from the brother in law of the Shah of Iran (!) caused a whole lot of problems, not to mention other problems with ownership rights to the movie being complicated after he passed away and some family members fighting over it with his later in life love Oja Kodar. As of now, allegedly sometime in the future the movie WILL be released with funding from Showtime, but that is not 100 percent certain and Kodar wants to make sure it's not like what was the released version of his Don Quixote movie. It does sound interesting as I understand it was filmed in a unique way.

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post #7 of 16
7/4/11 at 9:28am

David O'Russell started filming something called 'Nailed' some time ago. I remember reading the plot and it sounded a bit like A Dirty Shame and I Heart Huckabees. It starred Jake Gyllenhaal and Jessica Biel as a nymphomaniac which any red blooded male would love to see. The nympho gets shot in the head by a nail gun and then goes round shagging everyone, Jake Gyllenhaal meets her and takes advantage (as you would) and it ends up with the nympho going to congress to bring the plight of the bizarrely injured to their attention. The film started filming but fell through due to financing problems so O'Russell moved on to The Fighter instead.

 

May have been a disaster but at least sounds different....

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post #8 of 16
7/4/11 at 6:53pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lloyd Dobler View Post

David O'Russell started filming something called 'Nailed' some time ago. I remember reading the plot and it sounded a bit like A Dirty Shame and I Heart Huckabees. It starred Jake Gyllenhaal and Jessica Biel as a nymphomaniac which any red blooded male would love to see. The nympho gets shot in the head by a nail gun and then goes round shagging everyone, Jake Gyllenhaal meets her and takes advantage (as you would) and it ends up with the nympho going to congress to bring the plight of the bizarrely injured to their attention. The film started filming but fell through due to financing problems so O'Russell moved on to The Fighter instead.

 

May have been a disaster but at least sounds different....

 

And, hilariously, James Caan walked off the film due to him and Russell getting into a violent argument over the aspects of Caan choking on a cookie in the most "realistic" manner.
 

 

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post #9 of 16
7/4/11 at 8:04pm

We got a Chanticleer knock off in Rock-a-doddle.

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post #10 of 16
7/20/11 at 5:45pm

Also, Kubrick's Napoleon. 

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post #11 of 16
7/20/11 at 8:24pm

Screenwriter Mike Dougherty talking about plans for the third X-Men movie if the crew of the second one had stayed on:

 

Quote:
The idea was that you open up with Alkali Lake but it's completely barren and dried up and there are these odd reports of strange phenomena going on around the world accompanied by bright lights in the sky.

The idea would be that both the X-Men and the Brotherhood realise that essentially a very god-like force had entered their reality and that it was causing disruptions around the world, you know mutant prisons being decimated, I had pitched an idea about a fleet of cargo ships getting torn apart in the Atlantic and you found out that they were shuttling mutants as slave labor.

You found out, was that Phoenix was going round the world taking things into her own hands and that she had basically returned as a god, which they did in X3. She had viewed herself as above the conflict, that she was here to end things on her terms, she was sick of the fighting and she was going to take things into her own hands and she did not give a shit what the X-Men or the Brotherhood had to say about it.

And ultimately the way it was going to end, at least the version I was pushing for, would be that Phoenix was kind of like the Starchild at the end of 2001, she didn't just get stabbed and die again, but she kind of chose to leave.

The one idea that I loved, that I really wanted to do, was that Cyclops would build the Danger Room. He felt guilty that because the X-Men were too weak, they weren't strong enough or fast enough, that was the reason Jean died. If they were a little bit better at fighting, then she might still be alive. It was all about this guilt he had about her death and he built the Danger Room to train them to be better. In the end it really was about him not being able to let go of her and that causes the chaos and disruption in the movie and in the end it's about him letting her go.

Ultimately she kind of becomes that cosmic force that Phoenix is known to be, she leaves Earth and becomes a god or at least a higher level of intelligence and she goes into the cosmos possibly to kick-start life somewhere else. The final scene for me would have been her telling Cyclops or her telling the X-Men 'I'll be watching.'

 

Nice call-back to the "We'll be watching" line at the end of "X2". I don't know if it would have necessarily been a "masterpiece", but I can see the potential there, especially if they maintained the quality of the first X-Men sequel. I love the idea that Cyclops was finally going to get his due as a character with a meaty role (even in the X-Men movie I loved, he was criminally underused) and I'm sure focusing entirely on a Phoenix story line instead of splitting that one with the cure plot would have resulted in a much tighter, more focused movie than "X-Men: The Last Stand".

 

Quote:
The whole point of Rogue's character is that she is supposed to come to terms with who she is and also I don't think it's good to tell girls 'Yeah you should change yourselves so you can get a guy.'

 

I love that little dig at what was done with Rogue in "X-Men: The Last Stand". With the upcoming "The Dark Knight Rises", we may have the first instance of a superhero trilogy that does not jump the rails in or by the third installment. Given the quality of "X2", I'm certain we would have got that years ago with the third X-Men movie had Singer and his "X2" screenwriters not decided to make their shitty Superman movie instead.

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post #12 of 16
7/22/11 at 7:51am

Orson Welles' THE DEEP (circa 1968), based on Charles Williams' brilliant suspense novel Dead Calm (later adapted as the Philip Noyce / Nicole Kidman film). Starring Welles, Jeanne Moreau, Oja Kodar and Laurence Harvey.

 

Wong Kar-wai's untitled sequel to DAYS OF BEING WILD, with Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung. Began shooting just as DAYS wrapped.

 

It was never going to be anything close to a masterpiece, but I would like to see the footage of Lee Grant's aborted BROADWAY BRAWLER (1997), starring Bruce Willis (who co-produced and fired Grant, replacing her with Dennis Dugan for one day) and Maura Tierney.

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post #13 of 16
7/22/11 at 8:04am

David Lean's Nostromo

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post #14 of 16
10/6/11 at 12:05am

Tony Kaye also has the still-unfinished action thriller called Black Water Transit (starring Karl Urban, Laurence Fishburne, Stephen Dorff, etc.) sitting on a shelf somewhere.  Probably isn't a masterpiece, but it does go to show (along with Nailed) that these things can still happen.  There's also that horror movie Sin-Jin Symthe that everyone was excited about a few years back that has yet to be completed.

 

Also, Rob Zombie apparently shot around an hour's worth of footage when he made his Werewolf Women of the SS trailer for Grindhouse.  Supposedly he wrote a script to turn it into a feature film and asked the Weinstein Company for the money to film enough extra footage to make it a feature, but has thus far been turned down.  Again, probably not a missing "masterpiece", but a fun anecdote nonetheless.


 

Quote:
Originally Posted by Naisu Baddi View Post

Screenwriter Mike Dougherty talking about plans for the third X-Men movie if the crew of the second one had stayed on.


I remember that, but I was always under the impression that would have been the plot for the FOURTH film.  The initial idea was that Singer & Co. would make X3 and X4 back-to-back.  X3 would have dealt with Sentinels and a potential mutant cure.  X4 would have been the return of Jean and the plot you posted.  The problem is that Fox drug their feet for so long when it came to deciding when they would make X-Men 3 that Bryan Singer got tired of waiting.  WB had been chasing him to do Superman for them and he finally said yes.  Fox then gets pissed, quickly greenlights X-Men 3, throws together a shitty script combining all of the elements that Singer & Co. were going to do for the next two films, and releases a half-assed sequel that effectively stomped the X-Men franchise into the ground.....................which it still hasn't fully recovered from (at least in terms of box office and public opinion).

 

Basically, Fox gave Singer the finger and wrecked one of the only good things they had going for them at the time.  Thankfully they seem to finally be putting Humpty back together again in the form of a great prequel (First Class) and a still-promising looking spin-off (The Wolverine, which will hopefully be good).  I don't know if they will ever repair the damage well enough to make an actual X-Men 4 someday.  At this point, I think they should just stick with spin-offs and First Class sequels.

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post #15 of 16
10/6/11 at 3:42am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Malmordo View Post

Orson Welles' THE DEEP (circa 1968), based on Charles Williams' brilliant suspense novel Dead Calm (later adapted as the Philip Noyce / Nicole Kidman film). Starring Welles, Jeanne Moreau, Oja Kodar and Laurence Harvey.


The reports from those who have seen the footage hasn't been all that positive.



Welles' THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, however, looks fascinating.

 

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post #16 of 16
10/6/11 at 5:01pm

I would've wanted to see Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis, but I read the script and jesus it could use some rewrites. I mean, the basic premise is interesting, but there's A LOT he needs to sort out. Honestly, I would take out the whole two mini cities thing and make it about rebuilding New York. But I think the closest we're ever going to something like that is Synecdoche, New York. 

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