forget it! If you want to see any of it, forget it!" On January 12, 2013, Lewis appeared at a Cinefamily Q&A event at the Los Angeles Silent Movie Theatre. He was asked by actor Bill Allen, "Are we ever gonna get to see The Day the Clown Cried?" Lewis replied in the negative, and explained the reason the movie would never be released was because "in terms of that film I was embarrassed. I was ashamed of the work, and I was grateful that I had the power to contain it all, and never let anyone see it. It was bad, bad, bad." He then jokingly added, "But I'll tell you how it ends." At Cannes while promoting Max Rose, Lewis was asked about The Day the Clown Cried and said, "It was bad work. You'll never see it and neither will anyone else." In October 2012, Australian-based film production company Traces Films recorded one of the most candid and emotional interviews with Jerry Lewis about The Day the Clown Cried. He states in his own words his motivation for taking on the project and his feelings during filmmaking. Shearer's conjectures aside, Lewis states his motivation for the project as such, He further went on to say regarding the emotional toll and difficulty of the subject matter, "I had a talk with myself in the mirror and I said 'Understand one day you'll feel great and the next day you'll want to throw up because reading it disgusts you but playing it is a double disgust'." He said to The New York Times, "There's something about the risk, the courage that it takes to face the risk. ... I'm not going to get greatness unless I have to go at it with fear and uncertainty." In a 2013 interview with Lewis, Chris Nashawaty of Entertainment Weekly wrote, 'When asked about all the speculation surrounding the film, he (Lewis) said, "I think it's like bad advertising. Still, Lewis seemed to relish being the keeper of one of Hollywood's biggest mysteries. "The more I hear about it, the more I enjoy it." Legacy According to Richard Brody of The New Yorker, the film's grim portrayal of the holocaust "was, at the very least, unusual and original". In the 2016 documentary The Last Laugh, which explored the limits of humor regarding the Holocaust, comedian David Cross reflected Lewis was "too ahead of