Otto Preminger's Missing Hippie Masterpiece in Madison

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir posted a list of the "10 greatest 'missing movies'". These are films that were never completed, never saw the light of day, or were promptly thrown into a vault after a theatrical run. Among them are Jerry Lewis' infamous The Day the Clown Cried which features the star as a clown at Auschwitz entertaining the kids before they become victims of the Nazi's Master Plan and what is likely the Holy Grail of cinephiles, Orson Welles' original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons.

Not making the list was Otto Preminger's Skidoo.





While Hollywood was not shy about jumping on the hippie/youth culture bandwagon in the late 1960s, I was rather shocked to learn several years ago that the director of The Man with the Golden Arm and Porgy and Bess had done so. For this escapade he recruited the likes of Jackie Gleason, Mickey Rooney, Carol Channing, and Groucho Marx in his last role.

Gleason plays a retired mob boss who gets out of the pokey only to go back in so he can off a snitch. Channing plays his wife and she lets a bunch of hippies crash at their pad. Marx plays God who likes a toke now and then. I've never seen the film but it is available via, shall we say, extra-legal means. From what I can glean off the Interwebs, Gleason accidentally ingests some acid in prison and hallucinates the Green Bay Packers playing naked while Channing does a musical number. In the end, everyone convenes on God's yacht.





Knowing about this odd footnote in Preminger's career, I was surprised the other day to find out that the Wisconsin Center for Film & Theater Research has art director Bob Smith's concept art for the film and I got a chance to see some of it.

There must be some kind of magic bus in the film because there was a blueprint for a psychedelic tie-dyed one amongst the papers. I also saw drawings, which were more like storyboards, of Gleason in prison. Most of it was just him in his cell but one bit was this polychromatic mish-mash which was presumably for his trip (see above). Far out, man.

The WCFTR also has 16mm film of an interview with Preminger about the movie at a press conference. Presumably this is some kind of proto-EPK.

So if you're researching Otto Preminger or Hollywood's reaction to late-60s youth culture, head over to the WCFTR. If you're simply curious about it, make up some story about a project because I believe the materials are available only to researchers.