film would not be lost, Lewis took a rough cut of the film, while the studio retained the entire film negative. On February 23, 1973, Lewis appeared as guest on The Dick Cavett Show, where he stated that the film would complete editing in six to seven weeks, that it had been invited to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and that it would be released in America after that. The film was never officially released and remains un-releasable due to the failure to secure the underlying rights from O'Brien. Criticism and changes The film became a source of legend almost immediately after its production. In May 1992, an article in Spy magazine quoted comedian and actor Harry Shearer, who saw a rough cut of the film in 1979: Shearer, who did not know Lewis during the latter's lifetime, gave his opinion why Lewis would make the film: he believed "the Academy can't ignore this". When asked to sum up the experience of the film overall, he responded by saying that the closest he could come was like "if you flew down to Tijuana and suddenly saw a painting on black velvet of Auschwitz. You'd just think 'My God, wait a minute!' It's not funny, and it's not good, and somebody's trying too hard in the wrong direction to convey this strongly-held feeling." The article quoted Joan O'Brien as saying the rough cut she saw was a "disaster". It also says she and the original script's co-author, Charles Denton, will never allow the film to be released, in part due to changes in the script made by Lewis that made the clown more sympathetic and Emmett Kelly-like. In the original script, the protagonist was an arrogant, self-centered clown named Karl Schmidt, who was "a real bastard", according to O'Brien. Her script reportedly had him trying to use his wife, who knew the ringmaster, to get him a better gig, and he apparently informed on nearly everyone he knew after being interrogated for mocking Hitler. She stated that the original draft was about the redemption of a selfish man, but that Lewis practically changed the entire story into a Chaplinesque dark comedy à la The Great Dictator. Had producer Wachsberger retained rights to the material, Lewis would have had the option to adapt the screenplay, reshaping the protagonist. Without the rights, he was forced to seek author approval. Historical