King Lear (1988)

He tried to hire Richard Nixon to act in his modernized KING LEAR (1987). Nixon turned him down.

It opens with a voicemail from Menahem Golan, begging director Jean-Luc Godard to finish the film in time for Cannes. It features Peter Sellars (the theatre director) as William Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth, trying to reassemble his ancestor's plays in a world where art was erased after Chernobyl.

Burgess Meredith, replacing a truant Norman Mailer, plays gangster Don Learo. Molly Ringwald is Cordelia. Godard himself portrays Professor Pluggy, wearing a wig made of electrical cables. Woody Allen turns up in the last scene.

Godard later said Allen's and Ringwald's contracts stipulated their names could not be used on the film or in publicity. Cannon had paid for two of the most sellable people in American movies at the time and was legally bound not to mention either.

Godard's King Lear ran under a week in New York and disappeared. France did not see it in a cinema until 2002.

The whole thing had been agreed upon at Cannes two years earlier, on a cocktail napkin.