While theatrical distribution was being sought for the film, actor Milos Milos murdered Barbara Thomason Rooney (also known as actress Carolyn Mitchell, then wife of Mickey Rooney) and then killed himself following Rooney's discovery of their affair. Twelve days before the San Francisco International Film Festival premiere, actress Ann Atmar committed suicide. Two years following the premiere, Marina Habe, daughter of actress Eloise Hardt, was abducted and brutally murdered. The case remains unsolved. Domestic theatrical distribution for the film was never obtained, the film elements were stored away, and the film fell into total obscurity in the US.
In 1993, it was discovered that film processing and storage facility CFI had mistakenly destroyed the negative and all prints at some time during the previous 27 years. Three years later, a single print was discovered in the permanent collection of the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, a remnant of the French theatrical release 30 years earlier. From that sole surviving print, the film had been digitally restored with remastered sound.
According to Anthony M. Taylor on one of the DVD commentary tracks, the screenplay was written in English and translated to Esperanto. When the sole surviving French print of the film was remastered for release, English language subtitles were created based on the original English language screenplay, not from a translation of the spoken Esperanto dialogue back into English. This results in as strange situation for a foreign language film: discrepancies between the English language subtitles and the spoken dialogue are actually due to mistranslations from English to Esperanto, not vice versa, or else reflect late changes which were not back-ported to the original English language screenplay.
William Shatner grew up in Montreal, Canada, and probably because of this he keeps pronouncing certain Esperanto words as if they were like French. Listen for him saying "sen" (without) pronounced as if it were French "sans", or "sento" (feel) as if it were French "sentir" (to feel). For the record, Esperanto has no nasal vowel-sounds like French does.
William Shatner shot this shortly before he began working on Star Trek (1966).
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