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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
For anyone who suffers from the wish to make movies, or who fears that this terrible condition may strike at any time, here is the cure. "Lost in La Mancha," directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, is a documentary account of Terry Gilliam's efforts to bring "Don Quixote" to the screen. That information alone should be enough to open up endless vistas of possible catastrophe. The level of activity inside the Gilliam brain, first registered in his animated work for Monty Python, is so giddily high that his disasters, such as "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen," seem to exist only inches away from victories like "Brazil" and "The Fisher King." Add to that the aura of magnificent hopelessness that hangs around Cervantes's tale, and you can already hear the windmills in the distance starting to creak, awaiting a maddened filmmaker at full tilt.
"Lost in La Mancha" begins in the year 2000. Gilliam, who has been pondering the project for more than a decade, has finally mustered the funding, although--and this is where American viewers will lick their lips, ready for a deep dish of intercontinental Schadenfreude--all the funds in question, some thirty-two million dollars, are European. That is, as Gilliam says, a big chunk of change, and it brings with it a set of European conditions that...
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