The number one film in heaven.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008 | 11:33 AM

At the Guardian, Sean Michaels writes that "Somewhere in heaven there's a cinema playing movies that never were, films that existed solely in a producer's, an actor's, a screenwriter's imagination." And the one everyone would be lining up for would be a version of "A Clockwork Orange" that was bandied about pre-Kubrick.

Michael reporters that a recently discovered letter from exec producer Si Litvinoff to John Schlesinger (of "Midnight Cowboy"), who was looking into directing the film, reveals that Mick Jagger was dying to play Alex and the Beatles wanted to do the soundtrack. Schlesinger, of course, turned the film down, saying the material wasn't "the sort of subject I particularly want to tackle," and he was probably wise — as conceived, the Beatles/Jagger/droog combo would have been a fantastic era novelty, but it's hard to imagine it also being any good. Though who's to say?

At his blog at Premiere, Glenn Kenny points out another movie never made:

I learn from Richard Brody's new book Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, that prior to settling on Alphaville with him, Godard wanted American expat tough-guy portrayer Eddie Constantine to play the lead role in an adaptation of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend.
The mind fairly boggles at the notion: Jean-Luc Godard's I Am Legend, starring Eddie Constantine.

[Photo: Jagger picks cleanliness over ultraviolence in "Performance," Warner Bros., 1970]