The Haunted Screen
The Haunted Screen is an antifascist project using film, history, and experimental storytelling to understand our authoritarian present. The first season—"From Caligari to Hitler"—investigates the chaotic, creative world of Weimar Germany. New episodes are tackling new topics.
The Haunted Screen
Cinema Oblivion: Lost Films, Haunted Histories
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As many as 90% of silent movies are lost to the ages, and many from later eras have vanished as well. How do these holes distort the story of film? This week: reel infernos, missing monsters, Jerry Lewis'... Auschwitz clown debacle, and a little hauntology as a treat.
Intro
Speaker 2As.
Speaker 1I look at you, a thought goes through my mind what a marvelous find you to make up on the screen. I am proud that I have you right by my side, but I'd be satisfied to lend you to the public to be seen.
Speaker 4It's July 1937, and New Jersey is sweltering During the day, temperatures hit triple digits. The nights aren't much better, and this is an era before air conditioning. Just a couple years earlier, the town of Little Ferry had built a massive film storage facility that it rented out to 20th Century Fox. We are literally a continent away from Hollywood, I know, but in its earliest days, from the turn of the century on, through the 19-teens, the American film industry was based just four miles away in Fort Lee, new Jersey, so Little Ferry. It seemed a convenient place to store Fox's troves of prints from the silent era. Convenient, but not all that safe.
Speaker 4Around 2 am on July 9th, one of those gross, hot, sweaty nights, a truck driver named Robert Davison was on his way to work at a local market when he saw a burst of flames exploding from the Fox Vault, some as tall as 100 feet, and, shockingly, the facility was located in a residential area, a neighborhood. Davison quickly alerted the fire department and then hurried to wake up anybody nearby who'd slept through the explosions. A mother and her two sons wound up severely burned, with one child ultimately dying from his injuries. Five homes were consumed by the conflagration, though it wasn't recognized at the time, the damage done to film history was immense as well.
Speaker 4Representatives from Fox assured the press that only old films had been destroyed. But so many old films. Every single one of the 40,000 reels in storage was destroyed, many of them irreplaceable. The only known prints of most Fox productions from the silent era went up in smoke, never to be seen again. As the film curator at the Museum of Modern Art put it, there are entire careers that don't exist because of the Fox fire. Take Theda Berra, american film's first femme fatale. Berra starred in over 40 films, establishing herself as the era's foremost dark gothy sex symbol.
Speaker 1According to the records, you vamped your way through 44 pictures and left a trail of broken men in each one of them. I guess that probably makes you the wickedest woman of your time, does it? Well, I was no Shirley Temple.
Speaker 4Think early career Angelina Jolie, back when she was wearing a vial of Billy Bob Thornton's blood around her neck. Thanks to the 1937 blaze, only two of Bera's films exist in their entirety. Only about a single minute of footage from her signature performance in 1917's Cleopatra has survived. The Fox Inferno is a particularly dramatic example, but it represents one of the larger tragedies of film history. But it represents one of the larger tragedies of film history. Estimates vary, but somewhere between 75 and 90% of silent films are lost to the ages. When it comes to sound movies, a full half of those made before 1950 are gone. So today we're going to conduct a little seance for these lost films. We'll explore the reasons why so many of them vanished and consider what holes their absence leaves in the story of film, and we'll spend some time with the industry's most mythical missing movie, a slapstick dramedy about, about well, about a clown's exploits in Auschwitz. Jesus Christ.
Nitrate Kindling
Speaker 4I'm Travis Mushet, and this is the Haunted Screen so is it true?
Speaker 5he has the only existing print of that lon chaney film.
Speaker 1That's an urban myth like bigfoot or roswell or Sandy Duncan having a glass eye. So what made archives of old films?
Speaker 4infernos just waiting to happen. If you've seen Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards, you might remember this handy little explanation from Samuel L Jackson 35mm nitrate film was so flammable that you couldn't even bring a reel onto a streetcar.
Speaker 1You can't bring those there in a public vehicle. They're films, ain't they? Yes, then they're flammable, going off off.
Speaker 6Because nitrate film burns three times faster than paper. Because nitrate film burns three times faster than paper.
Speaker 4This type of film stock the industry standard until the early 1950s. It was so unstable that when housed at high temperatures, like say in a cramped, poorly ventilated warehouse during a New Jersey heat wave, it was apt to spontaneously combust without so much as an ignition flame. To the best of our knowledge, this is what happened in the Fox Vault in 1937. A reel of film near the northwest corner of the building spontaneously ignited and with no sprinklers installed in the facility. The fire spread, exploding each of the vault's 42 chambers, one at a time. Of course, an open flame will work even better. As Arthur Warehan, a curator at MoMA, explains, something as small as the lit tip of a cigarette can, and too often did, send whole archival collections up in smoke.
Speaker 2Most nitrate fires and there were quite a few in the 20s, 30s, 40s, right up until the 70s was that workers who were doing work on the heating system or working on the racking or something would smoke and ignite a fire and that would set off a chain of events.
Speaker 4It's a pretty badass trick if you're looking to burn down a theater full of Nazis.
Speaker 4Otherwise, if you're hanging around with an old film collection maybe use a Juul rather than smoke Camel Lights, but it was an electrical short that kicked off American film's other most notorious vault fire at MGM in 1965. Archivists, they learned some lessons in the intervening three decades, though. While sprinklers and AC units were rare until the 1970s, mgm's facilities were spread out enough that the explosion in Vault 7 didn't set off a chain reaction like the one at Fox. Even so, the only known copy of an early movie starring Greta Garbo was lost, as was London After Midnight, a 1927 team-up between director Todd Browning, who would go on to make the original Dracula with Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney, who starred in some of the earliest Universal monster movies like the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Phantom of the Opera. Chaney was so proficient at doing his own makeup that he earned the nickname of the man with a Thousand Faces, and even if the film no longer exists, promotional photos from London After Midnight are still around and are still surprisingly influential on the world of horror. I used one as the art for this episode. Go ahead, check it out. Look familiar the hat, the pointed teeth, the unnaturally wide grin. Yep Filmmaker Jennifer Kent says that the design of the Babadook was inspired by Chaney's character in the Lost Film. The actor himself even appears in a short clip when the struggling mother played by Essie Davis is drifting in and out of sleep in front of the TV. Trust me, chaney's face is on the screen when you hear that organ chord.
Speaker 4But even with the loss of potential classics like London After Midnight, mgm's catalogue of old films fared better than any other studios. Over two-thirds of MGM's silent productions survive to the present day. This is partially due to the efforts of Roger Mayer, an MGM executive who made film preservation into a personal mission. This included a project to copy all of MGM's nitrate reels onto safety film, a material that lacked the combustibility of the older stock. But as tragic as the vault fires were these 20th century equivalents of the burning of the library at Alexandria, the likes of which may have been depicted in Theda Bear as Cleopatra I mean, who the fuck knows. The movie is lost. But these fires were not the main reason that so many old films are now inaccessible to us.
Speaker 4In the 19-teens, 20s and 30s no one was that worried about preserving film prints. In their earliest years, movies were considered more of a novel amusement than an art form, as a drama critic at the LA Times wrote in 1934, quote making pictures is not like writing literature or composing music or painting masterpieces. The screen story is essentially a thing of today, and once it has had its run, that day is finished. So far, there has never been a classic film in the sense that there is a classic novel or poem or canvas or sonata. Last year's picture, however strong its appeal at the time, is a book that has gone out of circulation.
Speaker 4So, with that kind of attitude, the idea of archiving films, it seemed to most people, even those inside the industry, kind of a ridiculous notion, like building an archive of TikToks or Instagram Reels, would seem. Today, and after the arrival of synchronized sound with 1927's the Jazz Singer, silent films seemed to be instantly rendered obsolete. Who would want to go back and watch these old movies and read title cards when you could hear actual dialogue? Add to this that those old prints contained a small but non-negligible amount of silver, and there was an actual financial incentive to destroy those prints and salvage the precious metals inside them. The 1937 Foxfire, for example. It yielded $2,000 worth of silver, close to $44,000 today. Occasionally, though, movies aren't so much lost as they are actively hidden from us.
Speaker 2Now, how bad is it?
Speaker 7Well, you know, if you say Jerry Lewis clown in a concentration camp and you make that movie up in your head.
Speaker 2It's so much better than that. By better I mean worse. Do you sit and laugh at it, or is it so? You're stunned? You're just, oh my god.
Speaker 4You might remember a few years ago, in 2022, when Warner Brothers abruptly pulled the plug on a $100 million Batgirl movie that was already in post-production, with one inside source calling the product quote irredeemable.
Speaker 9So pulling the movie with that price tag may seem like a bad business deal, but Variety reporting it comes down to taxes. It was too costly a movie to bring to streaming and instead of pumping more money into the film for a theatrical release, scrapping it could mean a tax write-off for the losses.
Speaker 4And this is the studio that put out Black Adam. So it boggles the mind to think about how bad Batgirl must have been. But there is one movie whose burial has reached legendary status, the Holy Grail of Hollywood. Humiliation this. This is the Day the Clown Cried, an unreleased 1972 film starring Jerry Lewis, directed by Jerry Lewis with a script written by Jerry Lewis. To lay my cards on the table, I fucking hate Jerry Lewis. He's got the energy of that wannabe class clown from 7th grade who chatteled an unquenchable thirst for attention into dumb faces and stupid voices that weren't so much funny as they were desperate pleas for acknowledgement. Bit of a controversial take. But I fucking hate Jim Carrey for the same reason.
Speaker 1Somebody stop me.
Speaker 4Gladly you freaking heck. Anyway, back to our story. In the mid-1940s Lewis established himself as one half a comedy duo with Dean Martin. They worked in radio, tv and film together. For over a decade they even hosted the Colgate Comedy Hour, if that means anything to you. Okay, this one's easy. He's got the freak lips. He can hit the high C all night long. By the 1960s Martin and Lewis had split up and Jerry, he was doing his own thing like making stupid faces and voices in the Nutty Professor.
Speaker 7There was a botany explosion that I had in one particular school. I had decided pre-med botany, whatever.
Speaker 4I would much prefer the sciences, in other words and stupidly pantomiming like he was playing a stupid flute in the Aaron Boy and starring in movies with stupid titles like Cinderfella, get it. But for reasons that are beyond me, people loved this guy so much that in 1959, paramount signed him to a 14-film $10 million contract. It's the equivalent of $108 million today, plus plus 60% of the profits of those films. This was literally the biggest contract in Hollywood history to that point, and one that gave him tremendous creative control, letting him write, direct produce and even have final cut over the movies and look. Personally, if I were forced to choose between watching a Jerry Lewis film or being waterboarded, I would probably need a minute to make up my mind. But there are people who I respect who respect him Martin Scorsese, for example.
Speaker 7Visually and cinematically, I think he really broke new ground. So for us it was not only the antics of Jerry. For us it was not only the antics of Jerry but his pretty much surreal avant-garde technique of making films. This was a major advance, you know, in filmmaking I thought.
Speaker 4I don't blame you if you trust Marty's opinion over mine, but either way, by the early 70s there's no doubt that Jerry Lewis's opinion of Jerry Lewis was sky high. So high, in fact, that in 1971, when he was shown a very unusual script titled the Day the Clown Cried, he decided that it was his destiny to direct and star in it. The premise Okay, In Nazi Germany. Lewis plays a down-on-his-luck clown named Carl Schmidt in the original script, but who Jerry himself rechristened Helmut Dork, that's Helmet with a U and Dork with two O's, but a clown who gets tossed into a work camp for drunkenly insulting Adolf Hitler.
Speaker 5To you, my Fuhrer, a better dressed version of Herr Schmidt. Here's to you both.
Speaker 8Heil Hitler and Schmidt.
Speaker 4Flawless German accent there, jerry. These clips, by the way. They were uncovered by the filmmakers behind From Darkness to Light, a new documentary about this whole fiasco. But at the camp, the SS guards noticed that Dork, himself apparently a Gentile, has built up a fan base among the camp's Jewish children.
Speaker 1Do trick helmets, do trick helmets, do trick helmets, please speak.
Speaker 4So they promise him his freedom if he'll just use his comedic chops to persuade the kids to board the train to To fucking Auschwitz.
Speaker 5So this is where you've been hiding. It's him, it is, it is.
Speaker 4Helmet, helmet. One thing leads to another, and Dork is overwhelmed with guilt. This is where the clown cries, and he walks hand-in-hand with the children into the gas chamber. What's wrong now, Helmut? Where are we going this time?
Speaker 5We're just uh, we're just going to another building that's all.
Speaker 4We will have more room to play right Like holy fucking, fuck the project. It was a shitshow more or less from the beginning. The European producer who'd signed Lewis. He lacked two important things First, the rights to the script, his option which legally entitled him to make a movie based on the screenwriter's work. It had lapsed and he hadn't paid the writers everything they were owed to begin with. And second, the producer didn't have the money to finish the damn project. He just kind of checked out partway through production and left Jerry holding the bag. Oh and Jerry, oh and Jerry. Well, the 1972 shoot was smack dab in the middle of his 13-year addiction to Percodan, the mid-20th century analog to Percocet. It's a habit he shared with another famous clown.
Speaker 8It wasn't my fault, it wasn't Percodan.
Speaker 4Now I don't want to be wholly unsympathetic to Jerry here. I've seen opioid addiction up close and it sucks, but it is difficult to imagine that it didn't cloud his judgment during the whole clown-cried debacle. And even with the pill popping he threw himself into the project. Jerry Lewis was born Joseph Levitch, the son of Jewish immigrants. This story was personal for him. According to Lewis, he lost 35 pounds for the role on a grapefruit-based diet.
Speaker 4He toured Auschwitz and Dachau and he spent $2 million of his own money to finish the production after his producer bailed. He knew that he didn't have the rights to the script, but he was convinced that the writers would happily work things out with him once they recognized the genius of his footage and it would be a signal that he was finally getting the movie back on track. Listener, they didn't, but it would have been. He showed co-writer Joan O'Brien his rough cut and when Spy Magazine asked her about it two decades later, she said quote it was a disaster. Just talking about it makes me very emotional. Parentheses Her voice trails off this verdict that Clown cried was an absolute train wreck. It's the consensus from people who've seen the rough cut the actor and comedian Harry Shearer, who encountered the film in 1979, he memorably described it like this it's sort of luxuriated in this mawkish sentimentality which just made it ludicrous.
Speaker 2I think I said that it was like seeing a Tijuana velvet clown painting of the Holocaust.
Speaker 4And by the end of his life, Jerry Lewis himself freely admitted that the movie was God-awful.
Speaker 5And in terms of that film, I was embarrassed, I was ashamed of the work and I was grateful that I had the power to contain it all and never let anybody see it. It was bad, bad bad.
Speaker 4Okay, before you start to feel too bad for Jerry, just remember that he wasn't just a sad old man who hosted the muscular dystrophy telethon. He was a well-known piece of shit. I don't want to get too deep into this because it's not the point of the episode, but you should know that Jerry had a Matt Lauer-style button to lock women up in his dressing room and that this is the message that one actress who worked with him in the 1960s had for him.
Speaker 5I would say go fuck yourself, you motherfucker. I'd like to kill you.
Speaker 4So go ahead and mock his shitty movie. He deserved much, much worse. All that said, clown Cried has its defenders, after some previously unseen clips surfaced in 2013, richard Brody of the New Yorker described them quote as profoundly moving. But this is also a guy who put Eddie Murphy and Norbit on his list of the best performances of the 21st century.
Speaker 6Say the best piece for you. What's that? Turkey ass Eat up sucker.
Speaker 4Bon appetit. So you know your mileage may vary here. And Benjamin Charles German Lee, a professor and grandson of Holocaust survivors. He watched the five hours of raw footage that became available at the Library of Congress just last year. Lee wrote that he wasn't offended by what he saw, comparing it favorably to another Holocaust comedy. Life is Beautiful. Comedy, life is Beautiful If you haven't seen it. It's a 1997 film about an Italian Jew who makes a game out of life in a concentration camp to shield his son from the horror of what they're enduring. And you know that movie was received a little bit better than Clown Cried.
Speaker 1And the Oscar goes to Roberto Benigni in Life is Beautiful.
Speaker 2Roberto Benigni is the first actor to win an Oscar for a performance in a foreign language film since Sophia Loren won for two women almost 40 years ago.
Speaker 4The Academy's perspective, though, wasn't universally shared. Here's Mel Brooks.
Speaker 6Life is Beautiful is the worst movie ever made. To make a comedy about a concentration camp and avoid what really went on there. Well, it's a great trick, but it's I mean, it's absolutely ludicrous.
Speaker 4The Day the Clown Cried will probably never be screened. The footage at the Library of Congress is raw and for legal reasons it can't even be widely released. Like Professor Lee, you have to go to Washington and literally watch it at the Library of Congress itself. That rough cut that people like Scheer saw, the one that was edited down to an actual story it's unclear if it even exists anymore. Who knows, though, sometimes, these lost films, they do turn up.
Speaker 6You don't think you're the first to look for this film, do you?
Speaker 8If you know so much about it, why don't you try to help me find it?
Speaker 6You can use my assistant's office next door, but it's not in there. You have to earn this movie.
Speaker 4Lost movies. They can sometimes be like lost keys or lost remotes or lost cell phones. You keep looking and eventually you find them, sometimes in weird places. We only have the final cut of Carl Theodor Dreyer's the Passion of Joan of Arc, which is, on the Mount Rushmore of silent films, one of the most important in history, but we only have a full version because a janitor at a Norwegian mental institution found it in a closet. More typically, though, when lost films do turn up, they're found by wonderful, beautiful nerds working in wonderful, beautiful archives.
Speaker 10Olivia Babler's painstaking work. Preserving films at the Chicago Film Archives is usually routine. That's a film, but sometimes Lightning strikes. She uncovered this 1923 Midwestern murder mystery, the first degree.
Speaker 9There's a villain with a great mustache and there's a great dog when, during the pandemic, she finally had time for long neglected reels that had come from a basement in Peoria IL.
Speaker 10In the film world, this is a pretty big deal, dog, when during the pandemic, she finally had time for long-neglected reels that had come from a basement in Peoria Illinois.
Speaker 9In the film world. This is a pretty big deal. There's a lot of folklore about lost films. There's something can I say, sexy. Yeah, it's pretty sexy to find something like this.
Speaker 4For film dorks like Olivia, like me, maybe like you, there is something sexy here which is likely why filmmakers, film dorks themselves, keep looking to them for inspiration. The horror genre in particular seems fascinated by the specter of lost movies. Fury of the Demon is a French mockumentary about a fictional lost George Malay film that sends its audience into fits of murderous madness.
Speaker 9It could be the most insane piece of cinema ever made. We can only hope that it's found and we can finally understand its true impact.
Speaker 4Then there's Antrim, an American mockumentary of sorts about a lost 70s slasher movie that sends its audience into fits of murderous madness. It's kind of the holy grail of underground cult films that no one has seen, except for a handful of film festival programmers who are now dead was who are now dead and who can forget John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns, a TV movie about an occult snuff film that sends its audience into fits of murderous madness?
Speaker 8Le Femme Absolute du Monde. The absolute end of the world. What do you know about it? I know it played once opening night premiere of the world. What do you know about it? I know it played once opening night premiere of the Festival International de Cinema Fantastique de Sitges. Violence erupted in the theater when Hans Bakovic, the director, tried to get it out of the country. The government seized it and destroyed it.
Speaker 4What really gets me about this one is how often this supposed film expert lights up while handling wildly flammable nitrate prints. Anyway, what's the draw here? Why does this trope keep recurring? Part of it, I think, is horror's general fascination with cursed objects the doll Annabelle, the puzzle box in Hellraiser, the box, you opened it we came the ceramic hand in Talk to Me. I'll let you in the Sumerian grimoire in Evil Dead, the Necronomicon.
Speaker 7The book is bound in human flesh and inked in human blood.
Speaker 4The idea that things are more than just things, that they have intentions and motivations of their own. It's ancient, even pantheistic, and in a modern, disenchanted world oriented around consumption and acquisition, the idea that the things we own or the media that we watch, that it has malevolent intentions toward us. It's unsettling and maybe even speaks to our anxieties about the toll that this lust for stuff is taking on our psyches and our souls. But there's also something special, something distinct about the pull of lost films, something hauntological. So we got deep into hauntology in the second Folk Horror episode late last year. It gets kind of complicated, kind of heady, which I mean the term was coined by the French theorist Jacques Derrida, whose writing is not known for its clarity. But in that episode I do my best to tease out some of the concept's strains and notions. The work of the English cultural critic Mark Fisher is really helpful here. If you want to know more, read him and not Derrida. But to review quickly, hauntology is a portmanteau of haunt, like you know, ghosts and ontology, the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of being. It's interested in the collapse of presence and absence, things that are both there and not there, ghostly traces of the past that continue to haunt the present. Lost films present a near-perfect case study. Their residue lingers.
Speaker 4There are reviews by critics, like the one in the Brooklyn Eagle calling London After Midnight. Quote the outstanding mystery film of the year. Sometimes there are publicity photos that were taken on set, like the ones that Turner Classic Movies used to build a still-life version of London After Midnight, or that film historian Janet Bergstrom used to reconstruct Four Devils, a lost film by Nosferatu director FW Murnau. Sometimes the scripts still circulate. This is how Patton Oswalt um helped to carry on the legacy of Clown Cried in 1990s Los Angeles. Here he is reading from his memoir Silver Screen Fiend. My deal was simple I'd gotten my hands on a copy of the script.
Speaker 6I pared it down to a manageable length saving all of the most Jerry Lewis-ian scenes and started doing live readings of it at the Largo.
Speaker 4I would have loved to have seen those Included Bob Odenkirk and David Cross. Anyway, even though we can't access these movies themselves, they live on.
Speaker 8Even as references in kids' cartoons.
Speaker 1Dear friends, today is the day the clown cried.
Speaker 6And now back to the day the clown cried. And now back to the day the clown cried this movie always makes me cry the Wretched Clown.
Speaker 1the ending scene Takes 6,437.
Speaker 7The CEO, Mr Plot, sent us. I'm afraid it's over. You have to stop your movie.
Speaker 9Stop the move, the thing on, film the move. I can't. No, it's not finished, I don't have an ending.
Speaker 4I won't let you Folded into hauntology is the idea of lost futures, possible worlds that never came to pass. Would film history be different if those missing movies never disappeared? If all of Theda Berra's films survived, would she be in our top tier of silent film stars, up there with Charlie Chaplin, mary Pickford, rudolph Valentino, lillian Gish, clara Bow? Would she be an icon Rather than a sad little tidbit on a podcast like this one? Could the arc of the horror genre have bent, even subtly, if Wes Craven or Dario Argento or Ari Aster, if they could watch London After Midnight as easily as we can watch other early entries into the genre, like the Cabinet of Dr Caligari or Frankenstein? But it is very possible that the unattainability of these films only gives them more power than if we could just stream them on Netflix. If we could watch the Day the Clown Cried, then, yeah, it might have turned into a cult classic, a kind of Tommy Wiseau deal that would have its midnight screenings full of stoned cinema, studies, majors and unintended laughter. Or maybe it wouldn't be remembered at all. Maybe if Jerry hadn't been fucked over by his producer, he'd have had the resources to clean it up and it would have been fine, forgettable, whatever, but the campy mystique, the fascination, the mythic status. I can't imagine it being there. Instead, the day the clown cried is a cinematic Planet X, unseen, but exerting a gravitational pull on our culture and our imaginations.
Speaker 4Alright, thanks for listening everybody. We're back into rhythm now. I'm aiming to get out one episode a month at least. So yeah, here we go. We're off to a good start for 2025. But yeah, in accordance with the principles of fair use, we use clips from the Texaco Star Theater, the Sixth Reel, inglourious Bastards, the Museum of Modern Art, the Babadook, the Howard Stern Show, good Morning America, the Mask. I Think you Should Leave the Nutty Professor, the Errand Boy From Darkness to Light. The Day the Clown Cried, the Simpsons, arrested Development, the Last Laugh, covert Media Consultants, vanity Fair, norbit, the Academy Awards, cigarette Burns, an episode of the Masters of Horror series CBS Evening News. Fury of the Demon Antrim series CBS Evening News. Fear of the Demon Antrim, annabelle, hellraiser, talk to Me, evil Dead, silver Screen, fiend, batman, the Animated Series, angry Beavers and the Animaniacs. Music comes courtesy of Rudy Valli and his Connecticut Yankees, coma Media, count Basie and the Great Pacific Garbage Vortex. Till next time, everybody.
