There was a time, way back in the simpler, more innocent mists of the early 2000s, when Tulip Fever was a very hot Hollywood property. Deborah Moggach’s bestselling novel, a historical romance set in 17th-century Amsterdam, put dollar signs and golden statuettes in the eyes of producers seeking a period hit in the vein of Shakespeare in Love. Tom Stoppard, that film’s Oscar-winning screenwriter, did the adaptation; Jude Law and Keira Knightley were cast, only for the UK government to seal off the tax loophole enabling its funding.
Nearly a decade later, with the mighty Harvey Weinstein on board, Tulip Fever bloomed again, albeit with slightly diminished prestige: director Justin Chadwick (The Other Boleyn Girl) and stars Dane DeHaan and Alicia Vikander weren’t quite on the A-list in 2013, though Weinstein juiced up the ensemble’s awards cred with the likes of Judi Dench and Christoph Waltz. (Three years before Dunkirk, he also tried for Harry Styles, but no dice.) One way or another, by the end of 2014, the film was shot and cut and ready to go.
Cut to late summer 2017, and Alicia Vikander is an Oscar-winning industry princess, Dane DeHaan is headlining pricey blockbusters and Cara Delevingne, then cast in a minor role, is a wall-to-wall mega-celeb. And they have all achieved this upgrade in status without a lick of help from Tulip Fever, which is only this week limping its way into US cinemas. The box office prognosis is not good, but it’s already an industry punchline, following a farcical few years of repeated rescheduling and abruptly pulled release dates on the part of The Weinstein Company. (Even an industry screening for Writers Guild members was cancelled at the very last minute, once befuddled attendees had already turned up.) For its risen stars, the film is now the largely estranged, embarrassing ex-schoolmate who turns up awkwardly at the wedding.
The embargo for reviews lifts, ominously, on the day of release – though advance word from colleagues who have seen it suggest it’s an attractive mediocrity rather than an outright catastrophe. The Weinsteins evidently realised long ago that the once-gilded project was no longer a prize pony, so why has it taken them nearly three years to send it to the (probable) knacker’s yard?
The words “Tulip Fever” are set to become industry shorthand for the once-promising, high profile project that somehow hits a wall between completion and release, though it’s far from the first example. Remember Serena? You’re forgiven if you don’t. The misbegotten Depression-era melodrama starred Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, and was shot by Oscar-winning Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier months before Silver Linings Playbook made a mint from that particular star combo in 2012, winning Lawrence an Oscar in the process.
Coming on the heels of that glory, Serena had it made, right? Wrong. For the better part of two years, the film floated waftily across the release calendar, skipping major festival dates before quietly premiering (in a non-gala slot, to boot) at the London Film Festival in October 2014. A well-acted but tonally mangled curio, the film delivered on its sunken expectations; it bowed in 30th place at the US box office the next spring, an object lesson in the fact that even at the zenith of their careers, white-hot stars can’t sell absolutely anything.
Tulip Fever and Serena are practically success stories, however, relative to the ignominious fate of Accidental Love – the very title of which even industry insiders might fail to recognise, given that the film was known for nearly seven years as Nailed. Small wonder its cagey distributors practically put it in witness protection. The loopy political satire, starring Jessica Biel and Jake Gyllenhaal and directed by David O Russell, began shooting in 2008, only to run into repeated financial roadblocks; Russell finally abandoned the project, unfinished, in 2010, shortly before The Fighter kicked off his Oscar-approved career revival. Attempts to get Russell back on board for reshoots failed, though they went ahead anyway, just before the production company went bankrupt; finally, in 2015, a haphazardly assembled, retitled final cut debuted on VOD, with Russell now credited as “Stephen Greene”. It’s every bit as good as you think it is.
The cautionary tales continue, from the mishandled horror All the Boys Love Mandy Lane – another Weinstein problem child that only saw the light of day in the US seven years after its festival premiere, and five years after its UK release – to a notoriously bungled, still-unreleased 2015 adaptation of Martin Amis’s London Fields, plagued by legal battles between the director, producers and star.
Don’t let these disasters sully the name of all films that get a little lost on the way to the cinema, however. The poster child for delayed cinematic gratification is Kenneth Lonergan’s sprawling, glorious New York morality meditation Margaret, starring Anna Paquin and Matt Damon. Shot in 2005, scheduled for 2007, it got tangled in litigation for years after, with perfectionist Lonergan agonising over an elusive final cut while an exasperated Fox Searchlight snapped at his heels. Finally, in 2011, the impasse broke, with a finished cut (not Lonergan’s preferred one, though that would come to DVD) doing the arthouse rounds: what was expected to be a curate’s egg instead became a passionately advocated critics’ cause, now routinely listed among the new century’s greatest films.
It’s the happiest rescue of a film from pre-release purgatory since John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, an electric, upsetting character-study-as-horror that made its acclaimed festival debut in 1986 but scared off distributors until, with the hefty critical endorsement of Roger Ebert, it went on release in 1990. In the UK, the road was longer still: with cuts insisted upon by the BBFC, the film hit screens in 1991, though an uncut version was only approved in 2003. At least it reached the UK at all: Bong Joon-ho’s roaring dystopian adventure Snowpiercer has never received so much as British DVD exposure, adding insult to the injury of its year-late US release in 2014 – the victim, once more, of opaque Weinstein Company strategizing. (At least it’s in good company: another fine film given the runaround by the Weinsteins, and seemingly forever nixed in the UK, is James Gray’s gorgeous, operatic Ellis Island tragedy The Immigrant.)
Delays have become an essential part of the underdog narrative for films like Margaret and Henry, though in other cases, the stigma falls away: not everyone now remembers that Bennett Miller’s Cannes-honoured, Oscar-nominated Foxcatcher was tardily whipped from the 2013 release slate and released a year later, or that Joss Whedon’s self-reflexive horror ride The Cabin in the Woods was passed around and messed around by studios for two years between its planned 2010 release and its eventual, enthusiastically received 2012 arrival.
The holy grail of all unfortunate, endlessly detained films, meanwhile, returned to the cultural conversation last week, with the passing of Jerry Lewis. The Day the Clown Cried, a 1972 Holocaust drama that marked the comedian’s first, cursed attempt at serious film-making, remains unreleased to this day – dismissed by Lewis himself as “poor work” and described in terms of awestruck revulsion by the precious few who have seen it.
Lewis donated the one existing print to the Library of Congress in 2015, stipulating that it not be exhibited before June 2024. Should the Congress duly unveil it then at their Virginia premises, ending decades of feverish speculation as to just how bad it can possibly be, a Margaret-style redemption seems unlikely to ensue – though Tulip Fever’s problems will at least be put in proportion.
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