The other week I went to Phoenix Comicon with some family and friends.
On the train ride home, my uncle commented that cons aren't like in the old days -- it used to be this was your only chance to connect with other fans, your only chance to see the movies that were screening. Now, he said, everything's on the Internet.
I got to thinking -- are there any famously obscure movies that are so obscure they aren't on the Internet?
Yes. The Day the Clown Cried is not on the Internet.
Appropriately, I first heard of the movie from TV's Frank Conniff, in his blog on the Cinematic Titanic site. (I'd provide a link, but the old blogs don't appear to be up anymore.) CT is, of course, dedicated to mocking bad movies, and Clown is something of the Holy Grail of bad movies.
It's a Jerry Lewis flick about a clown in a concentration camp. It's supposed to be a Serious Film. It spent years in development hell and, when the rights reverted to the authors of the book it was based on, they refused to allow its release.
Lewis has a copy. He screens it for friends sometimes. Harry Shearer saw it in '79 and said, in a 1992 Spy Magazine article,
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 presense of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. 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! - thats all you can say.
Aside from that, there are some tantalizing bits about the film on the Internet. There's a Wikipedia page, of course, and Film Buff Online has a review of the script. The most exhaustive fan site appears to be Subterranean Cinema, which has multiple revisions of the script, footage from the set, the above-linked Spy article, and pretty much everything there is to satisfy your curiosity on this curiosity.
I can't help thinking that some day, the complete film will be on the Internet.