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101 more uses of enchantment.

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LOST IN LA Mancha (2002) was a depressing (although none theless fascinating) documentary to watch. The film, directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, detailed the troubled pre-production and even more disastrous and aborted shoot of a film by Terry Gilliam called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. In it, a modern ad executive (played by Johnny Depp) slips through a time warp and ends up being mistaken for Sancho Panza by that squire's boss, the delusional old "knight" who calls himself Don Quixote (the role to be played by French actor Jean Rochefort).

Between budgetary woes, bad planning, and a string of mishaps that bordered on the biblical (floods and hail destroyed sets and equipment, the older leading man developed a double herniated disc and could no longer mount a horse, and on location, every time the cameras rolled, NATO fighter jets roared by, performing their sound barrier-breaking maneuvers), Gilliam's film seemed like a dream quest destroyed by the harsh realities of modern life and business practices.

Ironically, this isn't even the first time a Don Quixote film has floundered and failed to be finished. As the documentary mentions, earlier auteur Orson Welles was also obsessed with a troubled Don Quixote project. He began shooting his in 1955. And he was still talking about completing it when he died in 1985!

History repeats ... with a vengeance.

To call Terry Gilliam's saga of his aborted film poetic justice might be a cruel overstatement. Still, there is something oddly apt about the sad fate of this particular film and this particular director.

Gilliam, ever since he was weaned from the Monty Python troupe, has been more than a little quixotic in his approach to filmmaking. The conflicts and high drama related to the production, editing, and release of films like Brazil (1985) and The Adventures...

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