From Disney and Dali to Fincher and Spielberg, cinema history is littered with masterpieces that have never seen the light of day. The Greatest Movies You'll Never See unveils the fascinating - and frequently heartbreaking - stories of these projects' faltering steps from green light to movie graveyard, and assesses the chances of them ever being completed and released in the future. Opening at the dawn of contemporary cinema with Charlie Chaplin's Return from St. Helena and finishing with the potentially brilliant vision of Charlie Kaufman's Frank or Francis, this riveting book reveals exactly why more than fifty films by the world's greatest directors never even made it to the cutting-room floor. Discover why Ray Harryhausen's War of the Worlds and Kubrick's Napoleon were never finished; learn why projects by Francis Ford Coppola, David Lynch and Orson Welles fell by the wayside; and read about the unrealized dreams of sometimes ill-fated auteurs, Tim Burton and the Coen Brothers. The Greatest Movies You'll Never See details all the obstacles encountered, from unsympathetic studios and preposterous plots to the untimely deaths of stars.Alongside these compelling tales from development hell are script extracts, storyboards, stills from the sets and frames of surviving footage. Original posters by acclaimed designers, including La Boca (Black Swan, Heart of Darkness) and Heath Killen (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Never Let Me Go), accompany all of the unmade movies, each one remaining true to the visions of the original film-makers and the era in which they were working.

An engaging and entertaining post-mortem of the great unmade works of cinema history, The Greatest Movies You'll Never See is a must-read for cinephiles everywhere.