There are three words that should never, ever go together—holocaust, clown, and movie. And yet, in 1972 Jerry Lewis attempted to combine the three in The Day The Clown Cried. He quickly regretted the decision, and the film was never released.

Despite Lewis’s insistence that the film will never be seen, buried within a recent Los Angeles Times article about lost films came the news that what may be the sole copy of the film was acquired by the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., as part of a larger collection of Lewis’s work. (Vanity Fair contributing editor Bruce Handy wrote the definitive article about the unmade film for Spy magazine back in 1992.)

The Holocaust drama stars Lewis as a German clown with the Mel Brooks-ian name of Helmut Doork. When Doork mocked Adolf Hitler, he was punished for his crimes by being given the job of entertaining children before they were sent to the gas chambers.

Unsurprisingly, the film was considered too tasteless to release for years. Lewis himself despised the movie, which was a far cry from his work in films like 1963’s The Nutty Professor, and was convinced it would damage his reputation. In 2013 he told reporters at the Cannes Film Festival, “It was bad, and it was bad because I lost the magic. No one will ever see it, because I’m embarrassed at the poor work.”

Don’t start planning your screening parties just yet, though, because according to the article, the Library of Congress has agreed not to screen the film for at least a decade. As Lewis is 89 years-old, he may not be around to suffer the media and Twitter commentary that would come from a screening of the mysterious film.

In a fascinating 2009 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Lewis addressed the cinematic curiosity that surrounds the film, saying: “It’s [either] better than Citizen Kane or the worst piece of shit that anyone ever loaded on the projector.”

In ten years time we might settle the debate once and for all. For now, clips will have to do: