Jerry Lewis talks about his preparation for ‘The Day The Clown Cried’ (11 min. interview)

I’ve been covering Jerry Lewis on the Funhouse TV show since we began back in Sept of 1993 (yes, it was the 30th anniversary last month!). He’s definitely "the Man You Love to Hate to Love to…" Thus, I’ve tried to show the oddest artifacts of his career. In recent years these have been French texts which have praised him to the heavens, but also the trying-to-forgive-him-but-it-was-so-hard memoir by his first wife Patti and the two atrocious French farces he starred in in the 1980s (but then later claimed starred a “lookalike”).

This year I think I hit the jackpot in terms of finding a true gem (thanks goes to superior cineaste Paul Gallagher), and thus I sat at my computer one night watching the very rare doc in question and creating English subtitles for this interview, which was conducted in English but then was overdubbed in French. I won’t mention here who the interviewer is or who directed this particular unseen-outside-of-France doc, because all of that is gone through in my onscreen intro.

If you’d care to jump right to the interview with Jerry, go to 6:30. It will interest diehard fans, though, to know the background details of the documentary, who was involved in its making, and what Jerry had done the preceding day in France to promote the forthcoming filming of his never-finished, never-released masterwork of something or other, “The Day The Clown Cried.”