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Pop Culture

People are sharing the greatest movie, music and TV projects that never got made

beetlejuice 2, nic cage superman, day the clown cried
via lowesjersey/Flickr and @saidmitch/Twitter

Beetlejuice 2? Nic Cage as Superman? They almost happened.

It’s thrilling to wonder “what could have been” when we hear stories of great screenplays that were never shot, incredible musical collaborations that were almost recorded or TV pilots that sounded great on paper but never got the green light.

I sometimes daydream about what would have happened if John Lennon had got on the plane in 1975 and joined Paul McCartney for the recording of his Wings album “Venus and Mars.” Lennon had planned to join McCartney at the sessions in New Orleans for what would have been their first official reunion since the Beatles break-up in 1970, but was told not to go at the last minute by his wife, Yoko Ono.

I also wonder what if director Alejandro Jodorowsky (“El Topo”) had been able to make his epic version of “Dune” starring Mick Jagger, Orson Welles and Salvador Dali in the mid-’70s. That film looked so promising that the making of it became an award-winning documentary in 2013.

There was also a planned sequel to Beetlejuice where the ghost with the most goes to Hawaii.

Michael Jackson asked Prince to duet on his 1987 hit “Bad,” but His Royal Badness refused.

When it comes to TV pilots, a lot of folks couldn’t wait to see the Dwight Schrute-centered "Office" spinoff, “The Farm," that was never picked up by NBC. Or Judd Apatow's follow-up to “Freaks and Geeks” and “Undeclared,” called "North Hollywood," that would have starred Jason Segel as a struggling actor who worked as Frankenstein at Universal Studios.

There are also a whole host of films that could have been a whole lot different. George Lucaswas originally slated to direct Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 masterpiece, “Apocalypse Now.” Instead, he made a space movie called “Star Wars.”

TV writer Dan Chamberlain took to Twitter on Sunday and asked his followers about their favorite "pop culture white whale” meaning the "unreleased/unrealized stuff" they wished they could have experienced. He gave two examples, one "The Day the Clown Cried," an unreleased Jerry Lewis film about a clown during the Holocaust, and a Jay-Z “The Blueprint 3” track "Crispy Benjamins," which supposedly sampled Regina Spektor's "Chemo Limo."

The Lewis film, originally shot in 1972, is allegedly so bad that he donated an incomplete copy of the film to the Library of Congress in 2015 under the stipulation that it was not to be screened before June 2024.

Here are some of the best responses to the pop culture “white whales” people have been yearning to see and hear.

Some of the white whales mentioned seem so incredible that if they did materialize, it’d be hard for them to deliver on their promises. Sometimes it’s more fun to imagine what something would sound or look like than actually experiencing it in real life.

Comedian Harry Shearer claims to have seen a rough cut of the aforementioned Lewis film, “The Day the Clown Cried” and says that most of the time there’s no way these white whales can live up to their expectations. However, Lewis' film is the exception that proves the rule.

“With most of these kinds of things, you find that the anticipation, or the concept, is better than the thing itself. But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. This was a perfect object,” Shearer said.

“This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. ‘Oh, My God!’—that's all you can say,” he continued.

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