Chevy Chase Was Gonna Remake Jerry Lewis’ Holocaust Clown Movie

Among the films playing at this year’s prestigious Venice Film Festival is a documentary called From Darkness to Light, all about Jerry Lewis’ notorious 1972 Holocaust-set dramedy The Day the Clown Cried. The film was famously never released to the public, who, to be fair, weren’t exactly clamoring for a movie in which the guy from The Nutty Professor plays a circus clown who ushers children into the gas chambers. 

Lewis’ directorial catastrophe has become the stuff of legend. Hardly any footage has ever surfaced online, and reports that The Day the Clown Cried would be screened by the Library of Congress last month turned out to be false (Lewis simply donated “several unedited scenes” to the institution, not a complete edit of the film). 

But despite its pop-cultural infamy, this cursed project came close to being remade with another slapstick comedian with a reputation for being a huge asshole: Chevy Chase. 

This info comes from the great Patton Oswalt, who, back in 1997, managed to obtain a copy of the screenplay for The Day the Clown Cried. As Oswalt recounts in his book Silver Screen Fiend, he then decided to stage free live readings of the script at Largo in Los Angeles, enlisting his comedy friends, including Bob Odenkirk, David Cross, and Dave Foley, to fill out the cast.

For the lead role of Helmut Doork, the clown originally portrayed by Lewis, Oswalt cast Toby Huss. When Huss was unavailable, the role was played by Mr. Show’s Jay Johnston — and, in retrospect, it’s pretty wild that playing a Holocaust clown in a comedy show isn’t the most eyebrow-raising part of his Wikipedia page.  

One night Oswalt’s show was shut down by an angry producer who said he was trying to remake the movie, an “important story” that he claimed “needs to be told the way it was originally written.” He also added, “I’ve got Chevy Chase interested in it.”

“I wanted, more than anything in the world, to see that film,” Oswalt wrote. 

Weirdly, one of the backers of the proposed remake of The Day the Clown Cried was “former Republican mega-lobbyist and convicted felon” Jack Abramoff. In the 1990s, years before he did hard time for defrauding several Native American tribes, Abramoff was involved with a team of producers trying to mount a remake of Lewis’ movie. Abramoff later claimed that he didn’t even know Lewis’ original existed, he just “fell in love” with the script.

In 1994, producer Michael Barclay and August Entertainment, which owned the rights to the story, even announced that they were “on the verge” of making a new Day the Clown Cried — not with Chase, but with William Hurt as the titular jester. According to other reports, Robin Williams was actively sought after to play the role of Helmut. But none of these plans ever came to fruition. 

Incidentally, an original copy of the screenplay is currently for sale on eBay. And Chase’s contact info can’t be that hard to come by…

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