Lost in La Mancha

Last week, something historic happened. After eighteen years in the making, the first trailer for Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was released. For film nerds who follow the esoterica of troubled film productions, this is a big deal, and many of my movie buff friends are saying things like, “I can’t believe it’s finally happening!” My response remains the same. I will believe that Gilliam has finished and successfully released this remarkably fraught production when I am sitting in the theater and it plays all the way from the beginning to the end of the closing credits and not until then. Because with Gilliam’s luck on this project, it’s entirely possible every copy of the film will spontaneously burst into flame before anyone actually ends up seeing it.

 Gilliam, of course, got his start as an animator and cast member of Monty Python and was the co-director of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. After the group’s breakup, he moved into screenwriting and directing full-time, earning a reputation as both a fiercely independent visionary and sometimes a giant pain who couldn’t control his own artistic excesses. He clashed extensively with his studio over the brilliant and bizarre film Brazil, lost gobs of money on the overstuffed Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and then hit a hot streak in the 90s with The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. With that momentum behind him, in 1998 Gilliam then chose to take on The Man Who Killed Don Quixote with a fresh-faced young heartthrob named Johnny Depp in the lead. Unfortunately, after only a few days into filming, everything went down the tubes. The first shooting location was right next to a Spanish air base, and so nearly every shot was ruined by F-16‘s flying overhead or in the background. The French actor he’d hired to play Quixote himself had both prostate problems and a double-herniated disc, so riding a horse was pretty much out of the question, and that was before he had to fly home for hospitalization, never to return. Then there was the storm that caused the flood that swept away the sets. Investors were understandably nervous, the money got pulled, and Gilliam even lost ownership of his own screenplay in the deal. Since then, the film has become a kind of legend, famous for not ever materializing. There’s even an entry on Wikipedia about it under the term “development hell,” the industry term for a project that is always in the works and yet never reaching completion. Apparently, after the initial attempt, Gilliam tried seven more times to mount a production of the film.

Even with last week’s trailer, the film, which now stars Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce, has no official release date, so as I say, I’ll believe it literally when I see it. In the meantime, during that first attempted production, Gilliam hired filmmakers to record behind-the-scenes footage, and instead of ending up as some cute extra, it became the Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s award-winning documentary, Lost in LaMancha. The film is an agonizing and entertaining on-the-ground, as-it’s-happening document of the dissolution of a project. We see Gilliam’s zeal for his own vision as well as his frustration when it all blows apart. I often show Lost in LaMancha in my film classes when I want to demonstrate to students the realities of big budget film production. Rather than being glamorous, it often has more to do with the weather that day and what the accountant says.

Will The Man Who Killed Don Quixote come out sometime in 2018 as its new trailer suggests? It’s possible, but it’s equally possible Gilliam could lose a legal battle or the warehouse with all the film prints could fall into a sink hole and disappear forever. In the meantime, watch Lost in LaMancha and join me as I wait to see what’s going to happen next.