The goal of documentary filmmakers Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe was to create a film on the making of Terry Gilliam's film, "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote."
What they ended up with was the complete opposite.
"The Man of La Mancha" is an often-funny - though eventually painful - account of the unmaking of Gilliam's film version of Cervantes' classic novel, "Don Quixote."
UB professor and filmmaker Bruce Jackson and Dorthea Braemer, executive director of Buffalo's non-profit arts center, Squeaky Wheel, were at the Market Arcade Monday night to introduce a screening of the film.
"There are very few films about how films get made," said Jackson. "I know of no film that is about a film that didn't get made, which is what tonight's film is."
Gilliam has directed such films as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" and "Monty Python and The Quest for the Holy Grail."
Though the making of "Munchausen" is infamous in the film world for its string of problems during production, nothing compares to the tribulations and tragedies that befell "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote."
"Artists rarely tell us about their failures, and we certainly rarely see them in the making," said Jackson. "And that is one of the exciting things about this film."
Filmmakers Fulton and Pepe were asked to make a "making of" film on Gilliam's "12 Monkeys" back in 1996, after Gilliam saw one of Fulton's documentaries on Philadelphia's community of Benjamin Franklin impersonators.
So when Fulton and Pepe approached Gilliam about making a documentary of his film version of "Don Quixote" in 1999, he granted them an unbelievable and uncommon amount of access to his cast, crew, producers and life.
"You don't get access unless you've earned it," said Jackson. "And access is of no use if you don't know what to do with it."
The special part of the screening was that co-director Fulton flew into Buffalo to discuss and answer questions about his film with the audience.
He first talked about the difficulty of acquiring funding for a "making of" documentary, and the eventual unusual investors he did find.
"Our funding came from two people in England who were considering buying a home, and instead invested in our film," Fulton said. "They were the parents of our lawyer at the time, and it did well for them," he added.
He also discussed how the face of their film changed drastically as they made it.
"Neither my partner nor I really realized this film wasn't going to happen until we were already packing our bags and leaving Madrid," Fulton said. "Even when we left, at the end of our film here, we thought the film might keep going."
Gilliam's obsessive tendencies are some of the reasons that eventually forced the film to close production until an undetermined later date. A big sticking point of the film was Gilliam's refusal to use a different actor for the part of Don Quixote when Jean Rochefort, the famous French actor, was injured.
"In a normal situation where the director might have been willing to consider other people playing that role, there might have been another actor standing by to play the role," Fulton said.
"Terry was very narrow-minded in a sense. He was absolutely intent that this was the man that was going to play the role."
Extremely bad luck is the other force responsible for the failure of Gilliam's project. It came in the form of screaming NATO jets flying over the set, rainstorms turned hailstorms turned flashfloods and a little bit of miscommunication between the major players responsible for the film.
"This project has been so long and miserable in the making that someone needs to get a film out of it, and it doesn't look like it's going to be me," said Gilliam.
Fulton and Pepe's documentary about the curse of Don Quixote is available now on DVD.
