Few things intrigue me more than movies that never wind up getting made or do get started and never see the light of day (I’m actually working on a piece compiling the most interesting of those…stay tuned for that just as soon as I can will myself to finish it), and of those projects David O. Russell’s political satire ‘Nailed’ is chief among them. News on its front has been quiet for a while now, but notoriously it was shut down on the last day of shooting after numerous fits and starts due to money problems. Now, it seems that new details have come out on its troubles and Collider is reporting here that according to producers Doug Wick and Lucy Fisher the flick will likely never see the light of day. The Playlist goes a little further in analyzing the story here, and after the jump you’ll see some of the choice quotes. The healthcare satire is slightly out of date now, but I’d still love to see it if at all possible. Details can be found below on the state of ‘Nailed’…

Here’s the meat of the story from The Playlist:

“…oddly enough the last scene that we had scheduled—partly because we thought this way [the financier will] have to finish the movie—is the scene where Jessica Biel gets a nail in her head. That’s why it’s called ‘Nailed,’ she doesn’t have insurance and she can’t get the nail out. So the last two days were getting the nail in her head, and we shut down so we didn’t have the final scene that was the scene that was the premise of the movie,” Wick explained. “There was no way to cut the movie together without that scene, so I don’t know what he was thinking by shutting us down then. At that point everybody was like, ‘We can’t cut the movie together, there isn’t a movie.’ And then [the financier] never came through with the rest of the money.”

That’s not entirely true. The sequence was shot and was present in the assembly version that was shown, but what we were told is that it’s poorly lit and confusing, and indeed, in that screening last spring, it appeared with a title card at the bottom that said “to be reshot.” At any rate, it’s a key scene and unfinished to say the least. And moreover, the material itself needs to be shaped by a director with some vision, and Wick doesn’t see an anonymous third party coming in and making it work — even with key sequence.

“Particularly in this kind of comedy that’s finding a specific tone, the post-production is sort of a third of the whole process. So I think there was just a little bit of a sense from a financier point of view, ‘Well just glue it together and put it out, we’ll just skip that process who needs it? It’s just indulging creative people.’ Obviously post is a huge part of the process and so many movies come alive in post,” Wick says. And ultimately, the fractured process and the time that has since passed — now that Obamacare has been signed into law, a healthcare comedy seems out of date — doesn’t make it seem like the movie will ever be completed.

“I think everyone’s lives have moved on, I don’t foresee particularly, in the polluted circumstance, anyone just coming in and doing the careful three or four months of work,” Wick says realistically. And we’d have to agree. Russell has completed “The Fighter” and “Silver Linings Playbook” since then, and moves on next with “American Bullshit” and as Russell himself told us at the end of 2010, the experience hasn’t made him eager to return.

“I think you kinda keep going and stay with the forward moment. That’s kinda what you have to do. So that’s what I’m doing,” he said, adding: “There was a lot that was going on that I liked, but it was kinda a stillbirth, you know? So when that happens, the whole thing gets kinda weird.”

-Thoughts? Discuss in the comments!

About Joey Magidson

When he’s not obsessing over new Oscar predictions on a weekly basis, Joey is seeing between 200 and 300 movies a year. He views the best in order to properly analyze the awards race/season each year, but he also watches the worst for reasons he mostly sums up as "so you all don't have to". In his spare time, you can usually find him complaining about the Jets or the Mets. Still, he lives and dies by film. Joey's a voting member of the Internet Film Critics Association as well. Today the IFCA, tomorrow the world!

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