Happy accidents are what filmmakers live for: those unexpected, unscripted movie moments when something going wrong results in something better than what all the best laid plans might have yielded. Talent will always be the filmmaker's best friend, but you won't find many directors foolish enough to undervalue luck and timing in doing what they do. That goes double for directors of documentary films, an arena where timing is almost always everything. It's not all that difficult to create a passable documentary (particularly if you've chosen an interesting subject), but making a really great documentary frequently depends upon being in the right place at the right time. It's unlikely that the Maysles Brothers' Gimme Shelter would have amounted to much more than a pleasantly intimate Rolling Stones performance movie had not the filmmakers been lucky enough to be present at a concert that spiraled out of control, culminating with someone in the crowd being murdered. Ditto for D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back, which just happened to be there when Bob Dylan started self-destructing during a 1967 tour. Or Sam Jones' I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, where cameras just happened to be pointed at the band Wilco at the precise moment the band began to disintegrate.
Another sort of disintegration is recorded in Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's Lost in La Mancha, and this time there's not even the glimmer of a happy ending provided by Jones' film. (It should be noted that I Am Trying to Break Your Heart shows us Wilco rising from its own ashes to release the groundbreaking album that its record company had been trying to suppress.)
Lost in La Mancha was intended to be a basic "making-of" documentary about visionary director/madman Terry Gilliam's latest film, a time travel fantasy about Don Quixote, starring Johnny Depp and the great French actor Jean Rochefort. On-set problems soon began to multiply like biblical plagues, however, and as one disaster after another descended upon Gilliam's production, Fulton and Pepe found themselves at the helm of something far more interesting than the simple promotional piece they had originally planned.
Lost in La Mancha tells a tale that should have been inspirational but winds up heartbreaking: the story of a great filmmaker who tries his best to will his dream project into existence, and fails. It is a blow-by-glow account of a film attempting to mold itself into some sort of shape and then evaporating before our eyes. In the truest sense, it is an un-making of a flick.
Terry Gilliam is one of those filmmakers whose reputations precedes him, for better and for worse. A wildly imaginative perfectionist whose credits include two of the most troubled (and brilliant) productions in cinema's history, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Brazil, Gilliam has been typecast by many in Hollywood as an over-ambitious troublemaker, out of touch with reality and forever chasing windmills.
What better subject for Gilliam, then, than the ultimate windmill chaser himself — Don Quixote?
Gilliam spent the better part of a dozen years laying the groundwork for his dream project (working title: The Man Who Killed Don Quixote), going to the lengths of securing financing exclusively from European sources so as to be free of the creative restraints of Hollywood. Shooting was to take place in Spain in the fall of 2000 but, as Lost in La Mancha all too clearly shows, the production's troubles were apparent long before the first camera rolled.
Several financiers backed out and the project's already small budget shrank to barely workable proportions at the point of no return. The crew was hobbled together from a variety of countries and communication problems began to surface. Actors didn't show up on the set and Rochefort, the film's star, insisted he had begun suffering from health problems that might make his participation impossible.
The first half of Lost in La Mancha documents the anxiety and eventual panic that ensue during the eight-week pre-production period of Gilliam's film. The second half of Fulton and Pepe's movie covers the shoot itself, a six-day act of anti-creation that encompassed a useless sound stage, actors in too much pain to act, inept extras, uncooperative "trained" animals and a steady barrage of noisy jets flying over the principal shooting site.
Just when you think that everything's gone wrong that can possibly go wrong, the mother of all storms appears out of the blue, resulting in all of the production's very expensive cameras and equipment being swept away in a devastating flash flood.
Even after the project is officially abandoned, there's no respect for the dead. The final sections of Lost in La Mancha detail the creepy haggling over the movie's corpse with the insurance companies finally taking ownership of the rights. Gilliam puts on a brave face throughout, but by the end, his familiar high-pitched giggle has taken on a hysterical, even desperate edge.
It's not all pain and suffering though, and much of the pleasure of Lost in La Mancha lies in the glimpses Fulton and Pepe show us of the movie that Don Quixote might have been. In between the anguished talking heads we're treated to some amazing footage from Gilliam's shoot, as well as screen tests and reconstructed sequences consisting of cleverly animated versions of the director's delightfully eccentric storyboards. Worth the price of admission alone are the movie's beautiful production sketches which rank right up there with H.R. Giger's designs for Jodorowsky's Dune in the category of best all-time unseen artwork for uncompleted movies.
Fulton and Pepe are not always the most subtle of commentators; a statement about the fragility of Gilliam's project is sure to segue into a shot of the strings attached to some life-size puppets. Likewise, their constant reminders of Gilliam's similarity to Don Quixote ultimately become more annoying than insightful. The filmmakers repeatedly hammer away at the notion that Gilliam and Quixote are both beautiful dreamers, both trying to remake reality as something more magical. The line between lunatic and visionary is a really fine one, the film continually tells us, and both Gilliam and Quixote qualify as both, seeing things that others can't or won't. OK, OK already. We get it.
Still, Lost in La Mancha doesn't really need to be profound because the story it documents is that in spades. Terry Gilliam's astonishing bad luck becomes Fulton and Pepe's good fortune, transforming Lost in La Mancha from a routine behind-the-scenes doc into a poignant account of the greatest film you will never see. Then again, each and every unseen, unmade film is potentially the greatest one ever, and if that sounds like somebody is trying to break your heart, so be it.
Everybody's favorite cult film showcase, The Sleep of Reason Cinema Series, returns this week with a double whammy of those jaw-dropping giallo thrillers from Italy. This will be Sleep of Reason's second major stab at acquainting the Bay area with Giallo films (or gialli, as they're known to Italian speakers and film geeks), a deliciously disreputable genre of Euro-sleaze known for its psychosexual excesses, super-stylish flourishes and mysterious, black-gloved killers lurking behind every lamp post. The fun and games take place this time on Saturday, April 19, at Covivant Gallery in Tampa's Seminole Heights.The main event of the evening is Delirium, a 1972 blast of bizarreness not to be confused with the film of the same name directed some years later by Lamberto Bava. The Delirium SOR is screening is so far over the top it's almost not of this world, an exercise in cinematic anti-logic that constantly threatens to break free of the natural world's orbit. What can you say about a movie with a hero — a respected criminal psychologist no less — who starts things off with the one-two punch of an attempted rape and successful murder? Directed by Renato Polselli (laboring under the Anglo-friendly pseudonym "Ralph Brown") and starring Mickey Hargity (better known as that guy who married Jayne Mansfield), Delirium is one of the kinkiest, most convoluted gialli ever, jammed to the gills with lurid sights, psychedelic interludes and a rockin' 1970s soundtrack.
Delirium plays at 8 p.m., followed by Luigi Bazella's disorienting trash masterpiece Nude for Satan at 10 p.m. Suggested donation is $5 for the first film and $3 for the second, with doors open at 7:30. Covivant is located at 4906 N. Florida Ave. in Tampa. For more information call 928-4661 or e-mail sleepofreasoncinema@ yahoo.com
Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lgoldenb@tampabay.rr.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2003.
