Recent viewings:

Lost in La Mancha Documentary chronicle of a film production gone horribly, abortively wrong. Terry Gilliam, the Monty Python alumnus and director of films like Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, seeks to create a modern film adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes' classic satire of knight-errantry, Don Quixote. Unfortunately, according to LILM, the production of the latter film has won Gilliam a reputation as a spendthrift, which limits his access to funding. Minor obstacles snowball into disasters: scheduling conflicts, ailing actors, torrential flash floods, the Spanish Air Force....

It's hard to tell what the finished Gilliam film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, would have been like. It would have featured Johnny Depp as a modern-day advertising man somehow transported into the medieval Spain of Cervantes' story, much like the protagonist of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. A couple of scenes discussed in LILM suggest that the Depp character would have been -- at least initially -- sarcastic and dismissive of Quixote's tales of chivalry. Other scenes suggest that the giants and other fantastical elements of Quixotes' tale would have been portrayed as real, or at least experienced as real by characters including Depp's cynical modern protagonist. The French actor selected to play Quixote seems well-suited to the part of the Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha, but appears in too few completed scenes for the viewer of LILM to draw any further conclusions.

I was struck by the degree to which Gilliam's production effort seemed to be slapdash and disorganized from the beginning. He seems to have started production without any firm scheduling commitments from key actresses, with inadequate scouting of exterior locations, and (incredibly) without confirmed access to any professional-quality indoor sound stage. The various disasters that are visited upon the film crew might not have stopped a better-prepared team. I wonder -- is this kind of seat-of-the-pants flying typical of professional movie production?

I would love to see what Gilliam would make of Don Quixote, but based on this documentary, the failure of the production seems to have been the result of poor organization and preparation, not an Act of God. Let's hope he's better prepared if he ever essays it again.