The captain hired to deliver a pirate ship to the harbor was so drunk he drove it straight into the quay. Everyone stood on the dock and watched.

Peter Sellers, then one of the biggest comedians alive, asked his friend Peter Medak, fresh off The Ruling Class (1972), to direct a pirate comedy he'd dreamed up with Spike Milligan. They would shoot on real ships in the open Mediterranean, which no one had tried. For good reason, apparently.

Sellers lost faith in GHOST IN THE NOONDAY SUN (1973) almost at once and set about wrecking his own film. He fired the producers. He faked illness. He disappeared for days. He turned on Medak, who had come aboard as a favor. Columbia looked at the result and refused to release it. It never reached a cinema.

Forty-five years later, at past eighty, Medak went back to Cyprus and made a second film. THE GHOST OF PETER SELLERS (2018) is a documentary about the catastrophe of the first one.

He interviews the surviving crew. He opens the old production files. He visits Sellers' grave.

Some films haunt the people who made them.