THEY NEVER LET ME FINISH IT - unfinished documentary

[Harvey Chartrand]

At one time, the Great Orson was working on a documentary entitled THEY NEVER LET ME FINISH IT with producer Harry Alan Towers and interviewer Wolf Mankiewicz. Ironically, it was never finished. Does anyone on the board know if fragments of this documentary exist or have been recycled in other films?
In the current issue of Scarlet Street, Towers says that, in his later years, Orson wouldn't let himself finish anything. So it's pretty clear that Towers bought into Charles Higham's 'fear-of-completion' argument vis-à-vis Orson's rather limited output as a director.

[ChristopherBanks]

Interesting that one never hears the fear of completion argument levelled against Kubrick, who had an equally small number of films to career length ratio, but yet spent most of his life with a major studio at his beck and call.

[Harvey Chartrand]

Especially in the case of EYES WIDE SHUT, which was years in the making (1996-99) and looked so 'worked on' that it seemed frozen in amber. EYES WIDE SHUT isn't the bomb it's been made out to be, but it would have had more of an impact if filmed in the 60s instead of the 90s. Kubrick wanted to adapt Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle into an erotic thriller in 1968, right after 2001, inspiring Terry Southern's hilarious novel Blue Movie, about a genius director who wants to make the greatest porn film in history, with a big budget and first-rate production values.