Hacker Cinema
Lost in La Mancha
2002 · Film · documentary · 93 min
Directed by Keith Fulton, Louis Pepe
Fulton and Pepe's 2000 documentary captures Terry Gilliam's attempt to get The Man Who Killed Don Quixote off the ground. Back injuries, freakish storms, and more zoom in to sabotage the project.
5 positive2 neutralfrom 7 commenters
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7 comments on Hacker News
Maybe a bittersweet documentary Lost under Force ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_La_Mancha
If I recall, Rushdie interviewed Terry Gilliam (Monty Python) in the dvd extras for the documentary “Lost in La Mancha” (2002). That’s a treat. I hope he recovers.
That said, this should remind us death threats are not to be taken..lightly.
Also very entertaining: Lost in La Mancha. Its a documentary about the making of this movie. It showcases some of the epic bad luck.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_La_Mancha
There's a marvelous documentary about the failure of this movie: Lost in La Mancha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_La_Mancha
BTW, I've ready the book other day. It is really fantastic.
You probably saw some of Lost in La Mancha, a documentary about the disaster that project was.
This is a revival of that project. They resuscitated the script and completely re-cast it (since, among other things, original lead Jean Rochefort passed away more than a year ago).
Thanks, I enjoyed that a lot more than I enjoyed the actual movie. (although I enjoyed that too) A bit like Burden of Dreams vs Fitzcarraldo[0]. In both pairs, the fictional story seems trivial in a lot of ways compared with the real story. Maybe that's often or usually the case? Well, I don't think it's likely I would've enjoyed Terry Gilliam's Quixote or Jodorowsky's Dune more than I did the amazing documentaries about them. (Lost in La Mancha and Jodorowky's Dune)
[0] Fitzcarraldo (1982) is a Werner Herzog movie about a guy who wants to build an opera house in the jungle, which plan involves hauling a ship over a hill between 2 rivers. Burden of Dreams is Les Blank's documentary about the making of the movie.
Documentaries for geeks or about geeks? The ones about geeks will probably be really boring. They'll leave out both the technical stuff and the potentially actionable war stories. "Revolution OS", for instance, was a well-crafted film, but pretty dull if you read Slashdot.
Branch out a bit. Off the top of my head:
"The Pleasure of Finding Things Out": Richard Feynman talks. (Danny Hillis pops up for a bit.)
"The Fog of War": a smart, reflective person discusses how he presided over a huge disaster.
"Lost in La Mancha": Terry Gilliam takes a bunch of risks to get a movie started and doesn't make it.
"Around Cape Horn": Captain Irving Johnson describes sailing around the Horn on one of the last windjammers.
"Walking with Dinosaurs": Woo! Dinosaurs!
"Apollo 13" is not an actual documentary, of course, but it's fun and reasonably faithful for a big-budget movie.