I was looking over the thread about movies that were released long after production was completed. This led me to wonder what completed movies have not been released. Two that comes to mind are: The Day the Clown Cried, a movie by Jerry Lewis. From what I understand, the movie will eventually be released. Batgirl, which was stopped from being released.
The original Fantastic Four movie from 1994. Legend has it that it was made only so the studio could retain the rights and was never actually planned to be released.
Nothing Lasts Forever - 1984 - Dan Aykroyd & Bill Murray. It Circulates after some tv showings and a couple of film fests. No physical release.
The New Jersey Turnpikes, a basketball mockumentary starring Kelsey Grammer and Orlando Jones. The story: "The New Jersey Turnpikes," the ABA Mockumentary Universal Studios Buried Forever
Get Crazy (1983) by Allan Arkush comes close. It only played in one or two theaters for a few days and then buried for a tax write-off. It got one VHS release a few years later and then nothing until it hit blu ray in 2021.
If unfinished films count: Midnight Rider: The Gregg Allman Story - stopped after a terrible accident with a train. Broadway Brawler - unfinished Bruce Willis hockey romantic comedy. Willis was in deep with the studio after they had to pull the plug a couple of weeks into shooting. And one lost: Uncle Tom's Fairy Tales - Richard Pryor destroyed the only complete negative of the film. It was never widely seen. Some short clips exist.
I have had the theme song 45 from this by Sparks on my want list for some time now! Maybe I should just opt for the full album. There are lots of good artists there with obscurities.
Thank goodness it did. The movie is hilarious, and deserves to be seen. For fans of Rock and Roll High School, Get Crazy has a similar flavor. Plus, you get Lou Reed doing a very funny and mean-spirited impression of Bob Dylan.
The first Marx Brothers movie, Humor Risk, was never released and is presumed lost. The four brothers weren't exactly a team in this one; it was a comedy short where all four had roles. It's not entirely clear why the film wasn't released, but the most popular story suggests Groucho disliked the movie so much he bought it and destroyed the negative. Many stories about the Brothers that have traveled over decades aren't entirely true, sometimes not true at all, so the reason may be lost to history.
It’s too bad that there isn’t a lost film featuring Gummo that could resurface. That would be cool to see.
I've heard that for some ardent cinephiles, the search for Max Castle's infamous lost film has become their holy grail.
Orson Wells last movie ‘The Other Side of The Wind’ took years, even after his death in 1985, before it was finally finished in 2018 by Peter Bogdanovich based on Welles editing notes. It can be viewed on Netflix.
That’s the same basic story as George Romero’s short film “The Amusement Park”. It can be seen on Shudder.
The two films aren't really comparable. Other Side of the Wind was never actually finished in the sense that there was a little bit of footage missing and most of it had never been edited. There was about 45 minutes of locked picture, plus dozens of hours of negative, and no soundtrack except for the set dialogue. Bogdanovich had to pull all that together, complete the missing footage, and cobble together a soundtrack to make the release happen. The Amusement Park was 100% finished and shown at a festival in 1975, and was shown off and on at festivals afterwards in completed form. It was originally an educational film financed by the Lutheran church in Pittsburgh, meant to be distributed to schools and be shown in churches and such. The Shudder restoration was taken from an old 16 mm print.
I think it was about as "finished" as any Romero film, particularly in the '70s. They always look rough around the edges. In any case he delivered it to the Lutherans in a completed state as ordered, and that's the version we have.
It seemed to me that there was something wrong with the audio. It needed more looping as there were one or two shots that were clearly supposed to have dialog added but didn’t. But I guess it was good enough, or they just ran out of money.
The story I've read is that the Lutheran church rejected the movie, as they thought it was too morbid or scary for the message they wanted to convey (taking care of the aged). It's possible that they may have seen a near-completed version of the film when they rejected it.
It's possible that the 16mm version that was struck for the 2001 showing in Italy (the basis for the recent restoration) had incomplete or damaged audio. The film was definitely finished in 1975, but any prints (I believe they were 35mm prints) that were struck for the initial festival showing and subsequent retrospectives were lost. Generally speaking, if you see a film that has a completed edit but the audio seems "off" or there is missing dialogue, that wouldn't be an indication that the film wasn't completed -- it's more likely the audio track was damaged or lost, or it's simply a mistake due to limited budget or time. (For example, in 2015, Straight Outta Compton went to theatres with a shot & dialogue repeated two edits apart -- I'm not sure if that was corrected for home video. Looked like a copy/paste error on a digital timeline.)