The Adventures of Baron Munchausen got fired, and all these deals were oral deals. ... Columbia's new CEO, Dawn Steel, said 'Whatever David Puttnam "[has]" said before doesn't interest me'". Regarding the new regime's apparent animosity towards all of Puttnam's projects and "Munchausen", Gilliam added in the same documentary, "I was trying very hard to convince Dawn Steel that this was not a David Puttnam movie, it was a Terry Gilliam movie." Similarly Kent Houston, head of Peerless Camera doing the film's special effects said in "Madness and Misadventures" that they were promised a bonus if they would finish the effects in time, but when
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen just a story, was it?" The Baron grins, rides off on Bucephalus, and then disappears. Tall tales based loosely on the German adventurer Hieronymus Karl Friedrich Freiherr von Münchhausen, or Baron Munchausen, were compiled by Rudolf Erich Raspe and published for English readers in 1785 as "" (or "Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia"). The tales were further embellished and translated back to German by Gottfried August Bürger in 1786. These tales were frequently extended and translated throughout the 19th century, further fictionalized in the 1901 American novel "Mr. Munchausen". The stories were adapted into