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Case 39

Comedian Jerry Lewis still had some box office muscle, even though it had been sixteen years since Dean Martin and he had parted ways. Even though he was middle aged, he could still get away with the man-child routine. He was enjoying the benefits of a huge, long term, contract at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. In fact, a whole new generation of kids found fresh enjoyment of his antics by altering their minds with drugs. Then one day, producer Nathan Wachsberger approached Jerry about starring in a movie that Dick Van Dyke, Milton Berle and Bobby Darin had turned down. The premise, okay, sit down, Jerry would play Helmut Dorque, a clown for Ringling Brothers in pre-World War II Germany. Oh, those wacky Nazis. It gets better. Helmut is sent to a concentration camp for mocking Hitler. Jerry Lewis in a concentration camp. Oh, the humorous adventures to be had. It gets better. After getting beat up in the camp, Jerry begins performing comedy routines for the Jewish children found there. Yes, fully fledged Jerry. The voices, the shtick, the aging clown has a new audience to appreciate him. Oh, it gets better. The commandant of Auschwitz starts to use him in a Pied Piper like fashion to lead the children to the gas chamber. If he does this he will gain his freedom. Now here is the feel good ending. Jerry, in full clown makeup, filled with remorse, goes into the gas chamber with the crumb crunchers and they all die together. On a positive note, the children are so delighted by his performance that they die quietly from the Zyklon B. It was never released and it would take more than a decade before Jerry would get a chance to star in another movie.

Hollywood films cost millions of dollars to make. Even the B level films cost more than most people will make in a lifetime. So when a studio chooses to take a movie and shelve it, sometimes for few years, sometimes forever, there has to be a good reason. It can be because the studio executives do not understand it. Mel Brooks’ The Producers was such a film. A movie featuring singing and dancing Nazis! MGM executives took one look at it and about passed out. It took the muscle of the biggest comedian at the time, Peter Sellers, to get it released. Sellers, to entertain guests, decided to liberate a copy of it from the studio’s vault. Nothing is more entertaining than bad cinema at a party. He loved it. So did America and the Academy Awards, five nominations, two wins. The same thing happened to Mike Judge’s (“King of the Hill,” Office Space) Idiocracy. Studio executives had no clue what they were watching, and feared he was making fun of the audience, and more importantly, major corporations with whom they had good relationships. The Producers is now a cult classic.

There are other reasons films are shelved. Sometimes it is because events outside the studios’ control make it unseemly to release the film at that time. The assassination of President John Kennedy caused the studios to pull from theaters the just released Frank Sinatra film Suddenly, about a man who was about to assassinate a politician. Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was pushed back until 1964 because of what happened in Dallas. After 9/11 the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, Collateral Damage, about a Los Angeles firefighter who sets off to Colombia to kill the terrorists who killed his wife and son got put on the backburner. Movies about hijacking aircraft and bombing large buildings might not be in good taste at the time. O, a high school version of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth was put on hold for a couple of years after the massacre at Columbine High School.

There are still other good reasons that films are delayed or never seen. There are times movies get made to retain the rights to a character or to take a tax loss with no intention of having the public ever see it. The 1994 Fantastic Four movie was slapped together simply so the producer could keep the rights to the Marvel characters. Often a film receives a poor reaction when given a test screening before an audience and needs some fine tuning or some reshoots. Last year’s Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise, is just such a film. There are times that a movie is simply a victim of a turnover in studio regimes. The executive coming in does not want the previous occupant of his or her chair to get credit for a successful film, or wants to put things on hold until they figure out what is what. Robo-Cop 3 sat in a can for two years after Orion pictures declared bankruptcy. There are times that movies go over budget, and must wait until new sources of revenue are found. There are even a limited number of cases where issues of legal rights and lawsuits have caused huge delays. 2010, with the exception of Iron Man 2, is nearly superhero free due to lawsuits brought by the creators of the characters (Superman, Captain America, any Marvel character created by Jack Kirby). The 1986 film version of the comic strip Brenda Starr, starring Brooks Shields, took three years to be released due to litigation. Legal wrangling between studios or producers has almost caused numerous James Bond films to almost miss their release dates. Finally, there are cases where the leading man or lady has another film coming out within a few weeks. Rather than overload audiences and limit the amount of publicity the star could give the film, it is best to push back the release date of one of the projects.

Still, most of the time, if a film is canned or shelved it is because it is awful. Every year finds a couple of dozen films that Hollywood quietly changes the release date and then tries to slip it into a month like September (when kids are going back to school) or January and February (Oscar buzz) when no one will notice. The bomb can go off with limited damage and pop up on DVD before anyone notices. Films like Warren Betty’s Town and County and Eddie Murphy’s The Adventure of Pluto Nash are the most famous examples. If a studio has hidden a film away for two or three years it should be a giant neon warning sign telling people to stay away, or, as I call it now, Case 39.

Renee Zellweger in 2006 might have been the hottest actress around. Chicago, Cold Mountain, Bridget Jones, Cinderella Man, and Jerry Mcguire, in many ways she had replaced Meg Ryan as America’s sweetheart. Women like her because she plays strong and plucky heroines and is not so beautiful that they cannot identify with her. Men think she is cute. People are going to give anything she stars in a chance… except Case 39.

Premise: Renee is Emily Jenkins a heart of gold social worker. One day she finds herself investigating the case of 12-year-old Lilith Sullivan (Jodelle Ferland). It seems that mommy and daddy want to send their baby girl to hell, yes HELL, the place that resembles a Republican convention in Las Vegas. When the system lets her down and her boss (Adrian Lester) refuses to investigate, what is a fiery girl, who weighs a buck-o-five, to do, especially when they save the little darling from being baked in a kitchen oven, death by Betty Crocker. With strange mommy and daddy cooling their heels in prison, Emily decides to let the doe-eyed child live with her. Now if Emily started getting drunk we might have the perfect country-and-western song, but no, people in Emily’s life start to turn up dead. Hit the Omen music. Maybe the parents were not so crazy after all. Murders, accidents, suicides and Barack Obama becoming President, is the little demon seed behind all this? Now all third graders seem like the devil to me, but is this child particularly evil? The Hello Kitty kind of evil? Should I care when even the actors do not? (There is one scene involving a dog attack where I saw a look in the actor’s eye that said thank God I am out of this film, kill me dogs, kill me, please make it faster.)

Verdict: Run, Run, Run Away From This Film