After Hamster Factor, a documentary about the post production of Terry Gilliam's film Twelve Monkeys, Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe approached him again to document the pre production of Gilliam's adaptation of Don Quixote. Fulton who appeared at the Mill Valley Film Festival premiere last night says "Lost in La Mancha is a documentary about how films get off the ground."

Or rather, how they sometimes don't. It's also a film about trying to make a Hollywood-scale film without Hollywood. And most of all, it's a film about a mysterious and persistent hex. All those who try to adapt the Cervantes story to film fail. (Orson Welles tried and failed in 1957.) That Gilliam was in good company is about his only consolation. After he spent ten plus years swimming in the imagery and allegory of Cervantes, it is painful to watch Gilliam's talent for cinematic majesty thwarted by things completely beyond his control.

It's almost as if God himself wanted to squelch this project. Located next to a NATO bombing range, the set was engulfed in the sound of F16s roaring above on day 1 of production. It's a funny moment as Johnny Depp does what an actor does on set: he waits and smokes, while looking up at the sky filled with fighter planes, bemusedly. What none of the crew knew was that this was only a warm-up warning. The floods that followed the F16s really lacked any cosmic subtlety at all.

Other films about making films have the fascination of watching a train wreck. This one is almost too sickening to watch. In particular, My Best Fiend, a film about the making of Fitzcarraldo, Warner Herzog's movie shot in the jungles of South America, and his unraveling relationship with the lead actor, the insane Klaus Kinski comes to mind. Lost in La Mancha makes Herzog in "...Fiend and Coppola in Hearts of Darkness (about the making of Apocolypse Now) seem like the luckiest men in the world. At least these films were actually made. The tragedy here is Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote died during the first few weeks of production.

After all the calamity (we almost expect a swarm of locusts next), causes the fiscal demise of the film, Gilliam sees it as a parable. Musing over the flood, the illness of his principal actor Jean Rochefort, and the other snafus, Gilliam sees it all as "the story of how reality won over Don Quixote." And he seeks solace in his storyboards, as he draws a cartoony Don Quixote shot through with bullets by the windmills/giants that are to remain fully dimensional only in Gilliam's head. Gilliam's adaptation of Cervantes, if it were ever finished, could be called Reality Killed Don Quixote. This is a fiasco picture that rivals none.