Ishtar (Elaine May, 1987)

I guess at the time people just couldn't tolerate the idea of a comedy that expensive.

I think Elaine May might have had some talent as a comedic director too bad she never got to develop it... bah, she probably would have turned into the female Barry Levinson anyway. BANDITS anyone?

ISHTAR is the scarlet letter of 80's hollywood.

and the songs really are great.

telling the truth can be a dangerous business....

lol

"Shut it down."

i saw a cd-r someone was selling on ebay that had the music from waiting for guffman and ishtar on one disc. it wound up selling for $96 or something obscene like that. so the recordings exist.... i guess somehow they've made it outside of the studio vaults, at least to get on that cd-r - unless the cd-r was just ripped directly from the video.

i don't know what hoffman has to be so ashamed about - the songs are the best thing about it! paul williams wrote them all and the parts where hoffman and beatty are improvising lyrics are totally amazing.

The Heartbreak Kid > The Graduate
A New Leaf > The Fortune
etc.

BluRay is coming....

and Elaine May in a postscreening discussion in NYC!

http://www.92y.org/shop/event_detail.asp?productid=T%2DLC5AE33

"When the movie came out, we had three previews, and they went really well. And [former Columbia owner] Herb Allen said, ‘This is fantastic! Thumbs up!’ So I went to Bali, because I thought everything was fine. I hit Bali, and Warren calls and tells me that the day the press came, an article came out in the Los Angeles Times in which the head of Columbia wiped us out — David Puttnam. It was the same thing he said before: That we should be spanked, that there was too much money, that he was going to reform Hollywood! Because the British film industry made so much money? I had no idea. I was pleased to hear he’s now in Parliament. He’s running England, which is doing so well.

“But it was really sort of unforgivable what he did. He attacked his own movie; he was the head of the studio. And Mike Nichols, my partner, said it was like an example of an entire studio committing suicide. They all just went with him.

“So when the press junket came, the next screening of this movie, which had sort of gotten really good word-of-mouth, there were no laughs, and people kept saying how much money it cost. Because he — David Puttnam — had done something that no studio had never done: He actually released the budget, or his version of it. So Charles Grodin, who plays the CIA agent, was at a screening. I was told about this: The entire audience was saying, ‘It cost so much money! It cost so much money!’ And he finally said, ‘What do you care? It’s not your money! It’s not like if it didn’t cost that much money they’d give it to you. It’s [corporate parent] Coca-Cola’s money! Coca-Cola would keep it! What do you care? Your tickets don’t cost any more. Your tax dollars didn’t go to it. Why are you — you people in cloth coats — complaining about how much money in costs?’ And it occurred to me that that’s sort of true, when people complain like that.”

http://www.movieline.com/2011/05/ishtar-revelations-from-director-elaine-may.php

The only section (besides the making of Reds) that I finished in Biskind's Beatty bio was about Ishtar, and I still couldn't understand why it acquired the aura of a flop (#1 its opening weekend too). May's line -- "people kept saying how much money it cost" -- probably answers the question.