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 walls in a hot air balloon constructed of women's underwear, accompanied by Sally as a stowaway. The balloon expedition proceeds to the Moon, where the Baron, who has grown younger, finds his old associate Berthold, but angers the King of the Moon, a giant with separate minds in his head and body, who resents the Baron for his romantic past with the Queen of the Moon. The death of the King's body, and a bungled escape from the Moon, brings the trio back to (and beneath) the Earth, where the Roman god Vulcan hosts his guests with courtesy and Albrecht