An early storyboard for Jurassic Park. It was originally a script written by, and starring Woody Allan, with comedic riffing supplied by Jerry Lewis. The Script was written when Woody was in an especially Continental mood. Jerry, who was by this stage familiar with what French people loved in a great comedian, worked with Woody on the script, which was originally set in Central Park.

Clockwise from top left:

a) The original Alan Grant was to be played by Woody. Grant was a food critic, seen here digging into a menu in a harsh New Jersey cultural desert, for research. This scene featured Grant pulling a large mud crab claw from his pocket and using it to sexually harass a waitress. Jerry Lewis really knew how to bring Allen’s hilarious side out.

2) John Hammond, entrepreneur, had built a theme park featuring resurrected dinosaurs. To be played by the guy from QOTSA’s dad, Benny.

3) The lawyer. Allen’s nemesis, threatening to flush his food critic career down the toilet.

4) & 5) the kids, played by ingenues of a legal age that Woody had known for a few years.

6) Ian Malcolm, chaos mathematician, brought in by Hammond to assess how well his theme park was doing before it opened to the public. Malcolm was to be played by Jerry Lewis. Here he is seen with some Velociraptor eggs, that were going to be hatched by ostriches that had been injected with iguana pheromones. In the script bones, Jerry got injected too, which was to result in hijinks.

But with no computers to sabotage, no solid science for how the dinosaurs came to be back, no smart and lovely paleobotanist Ellie Sattler, a lecherous and useless food critic with a crab claw and a bunch of self-referential lines, Jerry eating all the melons, and far too much thinking involved about all those things, the project was shelved in favour of something better suited to the two stars’ mammoth talents: Star Wars.

Fortunately Nic Cage bought the rights to the script, even though he was two years old, and the rest is history. the working title – a classic Jerry level New York topical pun – was beyond awful, too. Thank goodness Saint Nic spared the world that.