It beat Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs for the Grand Jury Prize at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival. Then it disappeared for twenty-five years. The reasons were almost too on-the-nose for a comedy about the disastrous pursuits of a struggling screenwriter.

The distributor folded within a year. The film's beautiful look came from a rare Kodak black-and-white stock so costly that only one projectable print was ever struck, and that print was later chewed to pieces in a repertory theater's projector. Kodak had stopped making the stock. There was, almost literally, no film left.

Then strangers saved it. A distributor named Matt Grady found the movie nearly gone, launched a Kickstarter, and close to 800 people funded a 4K restoration that premiered at Tribeca in 2018 with Steve Buscemi and Jennifer Beals in the room.

IN THE SOUP (1992) stars Buscemi as Adolpho, a broke New York nobody sitting on an unfilmable 500-page screenplay. Desperate, he advertises it for sale, and in walks Joe, a cigar-chomping con man played by Seymour Cassel, who promises to produce the movie and instead drags Adolpho through a string of petty crimes. Critics adored it, and it vanished anyway.

A film about a man who cannot get his movie made had itself become a movie almost no one could see, until the people it was about refused to let it go.

---

After winning the Grand Jury Prize at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, the movie was acquired for domestic theatrical release by Triton Pictures; however, Triton notoriously went bankrupt and folded almost immediately after the film opened, stranding its distribution and leaving the master materials in limbo for decades until its 2018 4K restoration and re-release by indie distributor Factory 25.