Fiasco: A History of Hollywood's Iconic Flops

By James Robert Parish

A longtime industry insider and acclaimed Hollywood historian goes behind the scenes to tell the stories of 15 of the most spectacular movie megaflops of the past 50 years, such as Cleopatra, The Cotton Club, and Waterworld. He recounts, in every gory detail, how enormous hubris, unbridled ambition, artistic hauteur, and bad business sense on the parts of Tinsel Town wheeler-dealers and superstars such as Elizabeth Taylor, Clint Eastwood, and Francis Ford Coppola, conspired to engender some of the worst films ever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: May 2, 2008
• ISBN: 9780470358641

James Robert Parish

James Robert Parish is the author of dozens of books about Hollywood and show business, including The Hollywood Book of Death, Fiasco: A History of Hollywood's Iconic Flops, and biographies of many celebrities, including Mel Brooks, Whitney Houston, and Jason Biggs.

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Introduction

I don’t know anybody honestly financing a picture to be a flop unless they’re a complete knucklehead. Their interest is getting butts in seats. That doesn’t mean that some actor or director might not take a payday to make the picture, or some producer has a secondary agenda. I can’t argue that. The picture may be a flop, or, in hindsight, ill-advised, but I posit to you that inside every disaster is a hit film, and inside every hit film are the seeds of a disaster. It depends how they’re cultivated whether you get Howard the Duck [1986] or [Who Framed] Roger Rabbit [1988]. The whole process, from the epiphany to the eureka ... has a lot [that] can be lost in translation.

—FILM PRODUCER PETER GUBER, 2003

The Old Hollywood System

For more than a century U.S. moviemakers have been turning out big-screen product to entertain and/or inform audiences. Among these many thousands of entries—including feature films, documentaries, and short subjects—there have been a goodly number of commercial and/or artistic failures.

Back in the era of the silent cinema, the pioneering American film director D. W. Griffith (1875–1948) had great success with his highly controversial feature film, The Birth of a Nation (1915). He followed up this enormous undertaking with an even more ambitious project—Intolerance (1916), an immense 197-minute offering that depicted bigotry in four historical eras. Produced for a then mammoth $386,000 ($6.69 million in 2004 dollars), the epic failed to find its audience or recover its tremendous production costs. The picture’s unfortunate fate was a staggering setback for Griffith. However, like Hollywood, he continued to turn out more movies, convinced that his next entry would grab the public’s interest and lure people into buying tickets.

During Hollywood’s golden age (the 1920s through the 1940s), the American film industry perfected a generally efficient studio system for making pictures. Major companies like Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Bros., and, later, Twentieth Century-Fox and RKO churned out an average of one new feature film each week. To achieve such productivity, the studios made most of their films on a mass production basis, similar in many ways to any industry’s assembly-line process. Each studio lot had a stable of contracted cast members and crews who made pictures on the firm’s sound stages to be distributed throughout America in theaters usually owned by the film company. By controlling production, distribution, and exhibition, the big-film enterprises could apportion the overhead of running their operations among their hits and misses.

Even in these decades, when most Americans were avid moviegoers and attended picture shows two or three times a week, there were still many significant box-office flops. These included 1924’s Greed, 1928’s The Wind, 1934’s Nana, 1935’s The Devil Is a Woman, 1936’s Sutter’s Gold, 1937’s Parnell, 1940’s The Blue Bird, 1944’s Wilson, 1947’s Desire Me, 1948’s Arch of Triumph, and 1949’s Beyond the Forest. Fortunately for the studios, the financial setbacks from these recurring commercial missteps were, by and large, offset by profitable releases.

By the 1950s, however, the Tinseltown studio system was crumbling. The once smooth-running Hollywood factory structure was suffering from, among other things, the repercussions of a late-1940s consent decree. That U.S. government ruling required the Hollywood film companies to divest themselves of movie theater ownership. Suddenly, exhibitors had far more leverage in their dealings with the studios over movie rental fees. In addition, the now empowered theater owners no longer had to blindly accept a string of average (or worse) entries from a studio in order to book the company’s surefire product into their venues. Adding to the film industry’s plight was its need to cope with the spread of free commercial television. With more and more Americans having TV sets in their homes, the public’s enthusiasm for paying to see entertainment at a local cinema diminished dramatically.

These developments forced the studios to slash their overhead. As a result they turned out increasingly fewer pictures annually and dramatically reduced the number of personnel under long-term contracts. However, even with the compacted output from Hollywood, the industry still provided an ample share of box-office duds (e.g., 1951’s The Red Badge of Courage, 1953’s Scandal at Scourie, 1956’s The First Traveling Saleslady and The Vagabond King, 1957’s Saint Joan and The Spirit of St. Louis, 1958’s The Barbarian and the Geisha, and 1959’s The Scapegoat). Given the way studios now operated, it was far harder for a movie lot to offset (or even hide) losses from major screen failures, because its much-reduced number of releases contained far fewer entries that proved to be profitable.

By the 1960s—where the focus of this book begins—the major Hollywood plants were experiencing frequent changes of regime (unlike in the old days, when a studio mogul such as Louis B. Mayer, Darryl F. Zanuck, or Jack L. Warner might reign for decades). This constant turnover of decision makers destroyed the once consistent management policies of a continuous leadership—which had allowed the film lots to focus thoughtfully on their production lineups and finished products.

Further upsetting the applecart, international conglomerates were now gobbling up film companies. Often these newly acquired subsidiaries were drastically restructured to promote synergy with other divisions of the parent corporation. In this fresh setup the once powerful, often privately owned studios lost even more control of their fates. Company policies frequently were being dictated by corporate headquarters—by executives and managers who had no real knowledge of, or interest in, filmmaking. As the movie lots became pawns in global big business, their profits and losses came under intense scrutiny from Wall Street stock analysts and shareholders—as well as their latest corporate owners. All of these groups were quick to condemn a studio’s hierarchy when the lot’s revenues slipped because too many of its new pictures were unsuccessful in distribution. This situation only increased the pressure on studio bosses to make guaranteed box-office hits.

Doing Business in the New Hollywood

In their desperation to survive the changing economy and the altering structure of the film industry, the Hollywood studios of the 1960s sought salvation in manufacturing oversized road-show releases as part of their mix of big and small pictures. (These special, key movies were designed to be released initially in big urban theaters with reserved-seat ticket admission for the film’s one or two daily showings.) Studio bigwigs reasoned that these prefabricated blockbusters would provide the lot with great industry prestige, stellar public notice, and, they hoped, large box-office returns. In lavishing such tremendous attention and budgets on these occasional superspectaculars, the film companies’ executives often failed to pay proper attention to their lineup of everyday pictures. Having so fervently invested in and promoted their latest colossal offerings (e.g., 1960’s Exodus, 1961’s Judgment at Nuremberg, 1962’s Mutiny on the Bounty, 1963’s Cleopatra, 1965’s The Sound of Music, and 1967’s Doctor Dolittle), the studios’ administrations frequently rose or fell on the basis of the commercial fate of such high-profile, big-budgeted fare.

In 1975 the remarkably huge success of Jaws, Universal’s adventure thriller, prompted other Hollywood studios to institute new rules for marketing mainstream movies. They now appreciated that an action picture could become a tremendous hit even if it was released in the summer—a season exhibitors once dreaded because so many people were more focused on taking vacation trips than on seeing movies. The film companies also accepted the wisdom of opening pictures in saturation bookings in thousands of theaters all at the same time (a tactic made far more feasible with the building of so many multiplexes at malls throughout the United States). Moreover, the studios’ hierarchies came to value the use of a tremendous promotional campaign targeted to this simultaneous wide release of pictures, a targeted volley that could be extremely cost-effective. In addition, the Hollywood studios learned that extensive merchandising tie-ins could ensure significant secondary profit streams and promotional outlets for appropriate pictures.

Hollywood quickly adapted to mass marketing its important pictures, earmarking substantial resources for these special do-or-die ventures. At the same time, Wall Street and financial and trade journalists took an even keener interest in monitoring the resultant successes or failures of these expensive, make-or-break features. It wasn’t long before the general media got into the game, reporting on box-office winners and losers in the weekly battles among film releases competing for consumer dollars. Prior to this new availability of information, the public at large had never been much aware of—let alone interested in—the cost of a particular movie and the breakdown of its expenses and profits. Now a large number of nonindustry people were citing statistics about the past weekend’s grosses, excitedly noting which films had legs to grab more income and which were turkeys already in free fall.

With this change in public perceptions and increased enlightenment about the business of moviemaking, the studios had to step up their promotion of forthcoming releases. Now they not only had to tout the new entries’ supposed spectacular entertainment value, but they also had to assure potential moviegoers that these upcoming pictures were guaranteed financial winners. Furthermore, they had to convince filmgoers that they would feel left out if they missed seeing these essential event movies. Then too, with many theaters charging $10 to $12 or more for admission, moviegoers required a lot of prodding to pay such steep ticket prices. Thus the studios’ promotional machinery had to strive even harder to make them believe that buying tickets to the lots’ releases was a good investment. (Once inside the cinema multiplex, patrons had to pay hugely inflated prices at the refreshment stands, where exhibitors now made most of their profits.)

As the new millennium began, fresh technology was producing increasingly strong competition for motion pictures in the race to gain the public’s attention and dollars in the entertainment arena. By 2003, at a time when the U.S. population had nearly doubled from its late 1940s total, the number of theater tickets purchased in America had declined to 1.4 billion annually from 4.7 billion in 1947. Thus filmmakers had to depend increasingly on new revenue streams—foreign sales, pay and cable TV, DVDs, video games, and other merchandising—to provide the bulk of the profit on their new movie releases. Such had become the complex ways of Hollywood in the 21st century.

What Qualifies as a Noteworthy Film Flop?

As a perusal of this volume’s appendix B reveals, over the past decades Hollywood has produced many box-office disappointments. In some instances the economic repercussions from the flops were relatively minimal, while in other cases the losses were staggering and involved major screen personalities. The involvement of stars in box-office bombs is the first requirement for consideration as a significant movie fiasco. (After all, most filmgoers are more impressed when mighty superstars are toppled from their lofty career pedestals and know-it-all executives are tumbled from their high-salaried thrones of power.)

Another criterion for a movie to be included in the pantheon of film failures is moviemakers’ becoming so crassly and blatantly intent on turning out a hit picture that nothing else seems to matter, such as the quality of the script, the use of appropriate talent in front of and behind the camera, the integrity of the marketing blitz, or the degree of entertainment value in the finished product. Columbia Pictures’ 1993 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, Last Action Hero, is an excellent illustration of this self-serving, narrow-minded attitude, which led to an artistic and commercial disaster.

The intricacies of financing such expensive, big-scale movies often cause those authorizing them to make strange creative and/or financial decisions. For example, the 1970s government tax shelter laws in particular seemed to foster the reckless making of dangerously expensive pictures whose losses provided advantageous business write-offs for their cagey participants. Sometimes these available tax shelters prompted studios and producers to take gigantic economic (let alone artistic) chances on celluloid ventures that should have died in the planning stages. Later in the 20th century, most of the loopholes in tax shelter laws were sealed shut. This turnabout prompted mini-major Hollywood studios such as Carolco, Vestron, and Franchise to develop the art of selling foreign distribution rights to their way-in-the-future productions to bring immediate capital into their coffers. These wheeler-dealers negotiated wildly lucrative deals based on the merits of high-concept movie packages that they promised would feature big-name (action) stars spotlighted in special effects–driven showcases that couldn’t miss with moviegoers around the globe.

Under this highly creative financing system, a tremendous amount of cash flow was generated and loan guarantees were achieved—usually long before the picture in question even began pre-production. With such a setup it seemed to matter little to these crafty studio money wranglers how or on what they spent the investors’ money when it finally came time to make the presold entries. This bizarre way of doing business encouraged producers to display enormous hubris and indulge tremendous egos as they galloped from one superhyped movie project to another, almost inevitably at the expense of gullible foreign exhibitors, international banks, and other prey with ready checkbooks.

At other times the drive to make a particular expensive film came directly from a star. For example, Bruce Willis (with 1991’s Hudson Hawk) and John Travolta (with 2000’s Battlefield Earth) were both so blinded by vanity about their ability to bring a pet film project to realization and box-office success that they were unable or unwilling to objectively evaluate the showcase’s merits. This self-deluding attitude led to several such ill-fated vehicles being made, often at unrealistically high costs and initiated only because of the celebrity’s industry clout. A similar situation occurred when a powerful filmmaker or producer became so enamored of a topic and so challenged by the naysayers who rejected a favored script that he or she devoted years—and eventually millions of someone’s dollars—to getting the picture made. A recent example of this trend was Academy Award–winning director Oliver Stone’s fierce determination to bring the story of Alexander the Great to the screen. He finally succeeded, and the historical epic Alexander (released in 2004) proved both a creative and financial bust. On a production budget of more than $155 million, along with domestic marketing costs of well over $40 million, this Warner Bros. saga grossed only $34.3 million domestically, with another $125 million from foreign distribution.

Yet another key factor in determining whether a particular screen flop really stands out from the run-of-the-mill box-office losers is the amount of promotion lavished on building up the public’s expectation for its release. (Think of such promotional hype as If you never see another picture this year, see ..., Five years in the making ..., or On December 12 experience the movie of a lifetime ... ) Such high-pressure, saturation marketing campaigns, which may get under way even before the movie in question starts production, often create tremendous expectations among moviegoers and reviewers. Having inspired so much anticipation, heaven help the picture if, after all the barrage of huckstering, it does not measure up to the advance buildup about its stellar cast, wonderful director, exotic locales, remarkable script, and mind-boggling special effects.

Should the highly touted picture fail to meet the lofty standards promised by publicity flacks, irritated critics and disappointed filmgoers tend to pounce on it with a vengeance. The former will write scathing reviews dissecting every flaw in the once guaranteed hit, while the latter will gleefully spread bad word of mouth (an especially easy task today with the use of the Internet).

Then too, the initial onslaught of hype about an important picture going into production may prompt the media to follow diligently each step of filmmaking, with revealing stories of just how things are going (or not going) with this feature on which so many millions of dollars are being expended. Sometimes, as with Heaven’s Gate (1980), Ishtar (1987), and Waterworld (1995), the studio’s promotional blitz before and during production backfires. The publicity furor that is generated leads a curious press to go to great lengths to uncover and then report on all the extravagant expenditures and wacky missteps that occur during the making of these movies. Such persistent negative coverage creates an intense backlash for these pictures. It causes the public—long before the actual films reach theaters—to perceive these entries as artistically hopeless and financially irresponsible. As with the trio of releases already mentioned, adverse news stories and commentaries tend to convince many potential attendees not to waste their money on buying tickets to see such fiascoes.

A twist on this type of backlash situation occurs when the public becomes fed up with a filmmaking celebrity in the wake of a nonstop media onslaught chronicling his or her private life. This can also damage a film’s potential box-office take. Such was the case with the frenzied reportage concerning the romance and subsequent breakup of Hollywood lovebirds Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. As a result of the tremendous press overkill, which wore out the couple’s welcome with the public, both of their costarring vehicles—2004’s Jersey Girl and, especially, the prior year’s Gigli—suffered tremendously at the box office.

On Choosing Which Film Fiascoes to Discuss

In selecting the 15 Hollywood box-office catastrophes presented within this volume, I was guided by several factors. First of all, I wanted to present the backstories of prodigiously expensive movies whose tortuous paths from start to finish and subsequent infamy were especially representative of the Hollywood system at the time of production. From among many likely entries I picked extremely colorful and contrasting candidates that well demonstrate how the combination of ill-matched personalities and tangled situations can result in chaos during the making of a must-succeed, extremely costly Hollywood feature. In each instance I sought to pick the most vivid example that explored the big question, "How in hell did this picture ever get made?"

No study of the pitfalls of Hollywood blockbuster mania—and its resultant excesses and legacies—could be complete without including Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s Cleopatra (1963). This massive historical extravaganza (which was shot abroad) nearly bankrupted a long-established, upper-echelon studio (Twentieth Century-Fox). The havoc wreaked in manufacturing this gargantuan epic changed forever how Hollywood (not to mention Wall Street, stockholders, and the public) regarded outrageously expensive, much-touted screen projects. This artistic clinker proved to be a shocking, yet intriguing, real-life illustration of how studio politics, self-indulgent stars, overwhelmed production talent, and greedy capitalists could convert a planned $1 million entry into a nearly $44 million nightmare.

Among other infamously (and needlessly) expensive Hollywood pictures of the 1960s that warranted inclusion in this volume is the prestige drama The Chase (1966). In the making of this Columbia Pictures train wreck, Marlon Brando and company were caught in an escalating web of overambitious artistic intents, unchecked and conflicting egos, and the lack of anyone powerful enough on the project to rein in the runaway production. Likewise, Paramount’s exorbitantly budgeted musical Paint Your Wagon (1969) provided an awesome illustration of a desperate Hollywood film plant scrambling to duplicate the box-office magic engendered by a competitor’s enviable genre success, The Sound of Music (1965).

The case study of American International Pictures’ The Wild Party (1975) demonstrates that it was not only the big-league Hollywood studios that embarked on recklessly chancy, (relatively) expensive projects in the hopes of creating box-office magic. In this instance, from the start of pre-production someone with common sense should have alerted everyone involved that such an arty, period vehicle could not be supported successfully on the shoulders of a fading 1960s’ cinema sex symbol (Raquel Welch). The making of this debacle and the bungling of its delayed distribution was a tremendous humiliation and a bitter lesson for the usually lustrous screen team of director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant.

United Artists’ nearly $40 million gross error of judgment, Heaven’s Gate (1980), led to the studio’s being sold off by its irate corporate owner (Transamerica) to MGM. As a result the film’s title became synonymous with large-scale box-office messes that generated catastrophic repercussions. (The complex account of misguided motives and bungled supervision of this completely out-of-control Western has already been fully detailed in Steven Bach’s excellent 1985 book, Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate.) Therefore, the history of this notorious misadventure—directed by Michael Cimino, who had won an Oscar for helming 1978’s The Deer Hunter—is not repeated here.

The bright idea to adapt the beloved comic strip character of Popeye, the Sailor Man, into a lavish screen musical was developed by onetime Hollywood wunderkind Robert Evans. His Popeye, released by Paramount in 1980, showed just how badly a foolproof movie venture can go afoul. It was also Evans, by then in desperate straits to regain his industry luster as a producer with a magic touch, who conceived another infamous high-concept picture, The Cotton Club (1984). This Paramount entry was touted as "The Godfather with Music." Instead, it evolved into an extravagantly costly screen dud and an artistic embarrassment for filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola and its other participants, including star Richard Gere. The making of The Cotton Club also involved the grisly murder of one of the picture’s would-be producers, which enhanced this flat song-and-dance gangland tale’s status among the landmarks of Hollywood’s many follies.

I have also discussed here the checkered production history leading up to the major failure of MGM’s Shanghai Surprise (1986). This box-office lemon verified the dangers of miscasting a film’s lead roles with two highly temperamental artists. (In this instance the coleads were, for the moment, wed to each other, and both of them suffered from the strains of adjusting to each other’s strong domestic and career demands.) Add into this tinderbox a light, rather than a melodramatic, script not suited to the chosen stars and a director immersed in constant battles of will with the warring talent on the picture. The unfortunate mix produced a box-office embarrassment of major proportions.

Next to Heaven’s Gate, 1987’s Ishtar has long been regarded as one of the most notorious A-list stinkers ever unleashed by Hollywood. As detailed in its chapter, its troubled making involved the lethal teaming of three difficult major personalities: writer/director Elaine May and coleads Warren Beatty (also the producer) and Dustin Hoffman. The badly miscast and mismanaged production—undertaken during a difficult changeover in regime at Columbia Pictures—well illustrated pivotal lessons of what not to do on a big-scale project. It revealed what bad things could happen when extreme perfectionists—all noted for their oversized egos and procrastinating natures—were packaged into an inappropriate venture that lost its artistic vision long before the cameras began to roll.

The 1990s began with the release of another milestone Hollywood misfire, The Bonfire of the Vanities. It was based on Tom Wolfe’s best-selling 1987 novel, which satirized life in status-fixated New York City. Warner Bros.’ movie adaptation underscored just how a cacophony of wrong creative and financial decisions—regarding talent, the director, the script’s tone, and the size of the budget—could make a $47 million feature sink at the box office with only a $15.7 million domestic gross. This landmark misfortune has been supremely well-documented—step by painful step—in Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood (1991).

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Last Action Hero (1993) and Geena Davis’s Cutthroat Island (1995) provide clear examples of how a studio’s intense preoccupation with producing the biggest, noisiest action spectacles imaginable can so quickly and dangerously cause mayhem. In these two cases, artistic considerations constantly were sacrificed to the whims of the large egos engaged on the productions and to the major hubris of the executives at the producing studios, who arrogantly thought they could foist most anything on an unwitting public if the blockbuster movie marketing formula was followed (and even surpassed).

The major box-office crashing of MGM’s Showgirls (1995) illuminates how a wildly misconceived screen project can emerge so creatively bad in every way that the resultant flop gains a remarkable afterlife as a campy illustration of fumbled moviemaking on a grand scale. Along with Heaven’s Gate and Ishtar, 1995’s Waterworld completed the archtrinity of the most outlandish (to date) examples of runaway filmmaking—Hollywood style. Its vain but, at that time, powerful star, Kevin Costner, was so totally convinced that he knew best what would please moviegoers that he, along with the studio, the film’s backers, and other talent involved, got sucked into a fantastic quagmire as production costs went colossally awry. That the movie eventually recouped much of its enormous costs in foreign distribution and through other revenue streams did not mitigate the fact that this Universal release racked up a wildly irresponsible production cost of nearly $200 million. Proving that Hollywood rarely profited from past mistakes, two years later, Costner starred in yet another post-apocalyptic big-screen saga, Warner Bros.’ The Postman. Once again, the ego-oriented, determined Costner did it his way—including directing the failure. The resulting picture bombed with critics and audiences alike.

It is often preached that faith can move mountains. However, that proved not to be so in the instance of John Travolta’s Battlefield Earth, Warner Bros.’ disastrous error of judgment, which quickly sank upon release in mid-2000. In this case the star’s fervent belief in Scientology (whose founder, L. Ron Hubbard, wrote the novel on which the sci-fi movie was based) did not prevent the disaster from happening. Travolta was so determined, for so long, to make this movie a reality that when circumstances finally allowed him to star in the much-rejected project, he recklessly galloped ahead full steam. Before, during, and after its making he seemed blind to the fact that his vehicle had neither the substance nor the execution to make it anything but a laughable mess. The debacle proved to be a sad tribute to the movie star’s spiritual mentor.

The most recent example included in this book of outrageously chaotic Hollywood filmmaking is New Line Cinema’s Town & Country (2001), a case in which a glib pitch from an industry veteran became the basis for a staggering film calamity. From the start it should have been recognized that headlining an aging Warren Beatty and other ensnared middle-aged actors within an overblown, thin comedy of midlife crisis and adultery was hardly a concept for commercial success in the new millennium. This was another example of an awful idea that should have been extinguished before even one dollar was wasted on production. However, as so often has happened in the Hollywood film business, once a go-ahead is given no one in a position of authority has the courage, conviction, or clout to halt a brewing A-list flop. As a result of this all-too-common problem, this particular major blunder kept a-goin’. It ran up a production tab of nearly $80 million during its extremely protracted (almost three years!), undisciplined shoot.

In examining the case histories presented here of monumental errors of artistic and business misjudgments by Hollywood film industry professionals, my hope is that readers will come away with a better understanding of (1) why moviemakers so often fail to recognize that their big-budgeted pictures are doomed to disaster from the start and (2) what some of the factors are that distract studio executives and filmmakers from heeding the egregious mistakes of their predecessors as they embark on what may ultimately become one more of Hollywood’s fiascoes.

1

Cleopatra (1963)

Cleopatra was first conceived in emergency, shot in hysteria, and wound up in blind panic, but any effort to saddle blame on Miss [Elizabeth] Taylor for the cost is wrong.... Miss Taylor may have had problems of illness and emotional problems, but she didn’t cost Twentieth [Century-Fox] any $35 million!

—FILMMAKER JOSEPH L. MANKIEWICZ, 1962

Few motion pictures made during the entire twentieth century received as much worldwide publicity as did Cleopatra. During its prolonged production (1959–1963) this overbloated biblical epic came under tremendous scrutiny. The press provided daily details of the film’s latest extravagant production expenditures and titillating tidbits about the real-life adulterous romance between the picture’s amorous costars, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. By the time this colossally expensive feature reached theaters in mid-1963, it had racked up a staggering $42 million cost—$259.8 million in 2004 dollars. Thus it became one of the most expensive cinema excursions of all time, if not the most expensive. Compounding the folly, much of the money lavished recklessly on the picture never translated into anything seen on the screen.

In retrospect, one has to be awed by the astounding degree of chaotic mismanagement, clashing egos, and incredibly self-indulgent behavior that occurred on Cleopatra. From start to finish, Cleopatra was a stupefying example of how, in the era of the rotting Hollywood studio system, a film could run so out of control because there was no longer an efficient studio hierarchy and machinery to guide the unwieldy production.

The fantastic account of Cleopatra reveals that no one at the once illustrious Twentieth Century-Fox studio could, or would, bring the elaborate production under fiscal—let alone artistic—control. Once the dubious screen spectacular was launched into production, the momentum built at an insane rate. While it was on its thorny path to completion, none of the changing Fox regimes was strong enough or sufficiently objective to put a stop to this project so full of staggering self-indulgence and foolhardy business decisions. As a result Twentieth Century-Fox nearly fell into total financial collapse, careers were made and lost, and, most notably, Hollywood was never the same again.

In the 1950s the once lucrative U.S. film industry was in a bad state, buckling under three devastating blows to its fiscal well-being. First, there was the 1948 antitrust consent decree in which the U.S. government required the major movie studios to divest themselves of their lucrative theater exhibition divisions. Second, the simultaneous spread of commercial television kept a growing number of filmgoers at home watching free entertainment on the small screen. Third, Tinseltown hysteria was spawned by the House Un-American Activities Committee’s investigation of the supposed Communist infiltration of the film business. (This witch hunt led the frightened studios and TV networks to blacklist anyone suspected of a Red taint and created a damaging talent drain.)

In 1950, as these factors were making themselves felt in Hollywood, the studios released 622 pictures in the United States to 19,306 theaters. The average weekly cinema attendance in America was 60 million, with the average admission price being 53 cents. By 1958 the number of Hollywood releases for the year had dropped to 507, and there were only 16,000 theaters. Average weekly cinema attendance in the United States had sunk to 40 million, and the average ticket price had dipped by two cents (largely due to the increase in the number of drive-in theaters, which charged lower admission than traditional cinemas). These developments accounted for the $384 million falloff in annual box-office receipts between 1950 and 1958.

In 1950 Paramount’s Samson and Delilah (which had debuted in late 1949) was the big box-office winner, with MGM having three entries in the top five earners, and Twentieth Century-Fox having one (the fourth-place Cheaper by the Dozen). Seven years later, Fox was represented by a single superlucrative entry (the second-place earner, Peyton Place).

A great deal had happened at the Fox lot since it was incorporated in 1915 by movie pioneer William Fox. The founder had been ousted in 1930. In 1935 the studio merged with the relatively new Twentieth Century Pictures and became Twentieth Century-Fox. Darryl F. Zanuck was placed in charge of the new studio’s production. In 1942 film exhibitor executive Spyros P. Skouras, who had participated in the 1935 Fox Films restructuring, was appointed president of the studio. During these decades the autocratic Zanuck remained fully in charge of the company’s production output (with the exception of his World War II duty supervising a documentary film unit).

In 1953, due to the push of the studio’s longtime president, Spyros Skouras, Twentieth Century-Fox released The Robe, which introduced CinemaScope, its patented wide-screen process. The biblical spectacle, which lured viewers away from their TVs and back into movie theaters, was an enormous hit. Made for about $5 million, it grossed more than $17.5 million in North American film rentals to theaters ($124.1 million in 2004 dollars). CinemaScope was anointed Hollywood’s savior in its war against the rival television industry. To profitable results, Fox licensed use of its wide-screen anamorphic lens to other Tinseltown studios.

Three years later, even as the novelty of CinemaScope was wearing thin, Fox maintained an average annual profit of $6 to $7 million. Early in 1956 a restless Zanuck, one of the studio’s founders and its longtime production chief, resigned from Fox to undertake independent film production abroad and to satisfy his sexual lust with a series of shapely protégées. His replacement as Fox’s production chief was the experienced but low-key film producer Buddy Adler. Adler brought in Jerry Wald, a veteran production executive/screenwriter. (Wald was one of a team of independent producers now attached to the studio to help churn out product that would offset the company’s large plant overhead.) Among the new regime’s offerings were such box-office winners as The King and I (1956—begun during Zanuck’s reign), Anastasia (1956), Love Me Tender (1956), Island in the Sun (1957—one of Zanuck’s independent projects), Peyton Place (1957), and South Pacific (1958). (On the flip side were such costly financial misfires as 1957’s A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises, and 1958’s The Barbarian and the Geisha and The Roots of Heaven.)

As 1958 wound down, Fox’s front-office executives looked forward to the release of Ingrid Bergman’s The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. On the slate for 1959 distribution were a few prestige productions (i.e., The Diary of Anne Frank and Compulsion). Jerry Wald had in preparation The Best of Everything, The Sound and the Fury, Beloved Infidel, and Hound-Dog Man. Also set for distribution were the Clifton Webb domestic comedies The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker and Holiday for Lovers, a Jules Verne adventure yarn (Journey to the Center of the Earth), and Return of the Fly (a modest sequel to an earlier studio hit). But the remainder of Fox’s 34 pictures scheduled for 1959 debuts was slim pickings. It left a nervous Spyros Skouras vulnerable to increasingly dissatisfied stockholders and Wall Street investment firms, who were convinced he and his underlings were losing touch with public taste.

In 1958 the erudite Walter Wanger was 64 years old and suffered from a heart problem. The longtime film executive had served as chief of production at Paramount in the late 1920s and early 1930s, followed by similar stints at both Columbia Pictures and MGM. Thereafter he turned to independent production. His screen successes in the 1940s (including 1945’s Salome, Where She Danced) were offset by his tremendously expensive Joan of Arc (1948). This failed costume drama forced Wanger into near bankruptcy.

Back in 1940 the well-bred Walter had married his second wife, screen beauty Joan Bennett. The couple had two daughters. In 1952 the dapper Wanger was sent to prison briefly for having shot and wounded talent agent Jennings Lang the previous year. Walter had fired on Jennings because of the latter’s suspected affair with Bennett. Once paroled, Walter found it difficult to reestablish himself in Hollywood. However, he made a major career comeback with the late 1958 United Artists release I Want to Live! It won six Oscar nominations and earned its star, Susan Hayward, a Best Actress Academy Award.

In September 1958, a few months before I Want to Live! opened, Wanger visited Spyros Skouras at Twentieth Century-Fox. Skouras was deeply troubled over the company’s dim fiscal prospects: Fox would make a small profit in 1959, suffer a minor loss in 1960, and then dive into a major economic tailspin in 1961 and 1962, with losses of $22.5 million and $39.8 million, respectively. With this adverse economic situation under way, a frantic Skouras was looking for a tremendous picture that could restore the company’s economic luster as had The Robe a few years prior. He believed that the studio could still cash in on the biblicalpicture craze, a rejuvenated movie genre bolstered first by The Robe and then by Paramount’s huge commercial success with The Ten Commandments (1956). Such box-office winners had convinced MGM to undertake a costly remake of its 1925 box-office winner Ben-Hur. (The 1959 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer release, made for an estimated $15 million, would gross more than $70 million.) United Artists had Solomon and Sheba in production. (That 1959 extravaganza would soar to a near $5 million budget, due, in part, to the fact that its leading man, Tyrone Power, died midway through the shoot. His scenes had to be reshot with a replacement, Yul Brynner.) In this period Universal had green-lighted Spartacus, a saga of a slave revolt in ancient Rome, for 1960. (Made at a cost of $12 million, this Kirk Douglas vehicle brought in $14 million at the domestic box office.)

When Spyros Skouras met with Walter Wanger (who had an independent producer’s arrangement with Fox), the studio leader planned to assign Wanger to oversee a project he hoped would turn the lot’s financial tide. After examining the studio’s inventory of owned film properties, Spyros had settled on redoing Cleopatra. That 1917 silent feature had been enormously profitable for the studio. It was Skouras’s ill-conceived notion that the creaky old vehicle could be inexpensively updated and mounted as an upcoming Fox CinemaScope release. At the time, Buddy Adler, Fox’s production head, was unexcited by Skouras’s idea. However, Adler was too preoccupied with running the studio’s operations. He was also suffering from the early stages of the cancer that would kill him in July 1960 at age 51. As a result, in the fall of 1958 Adler reluctantly went along with making Skouras’s historical epic.

When Skouras conferred with Wanger, he was well aware that Walter already had a strong interest in antiquity’s famous siren. Months after the 1957 publication of Charles Marie Franzero’s The Life and Times of Cleopatra, Wanger had taken a $15,000 screen option on the book. His immediate notion was that MGM’s Elizabeth Taylor would be ideal to play Egypt’s wily queen, who ruled from 51 B.C. to 30 B.C. (In her fight with her brother over who would control Egypt’s throne, the young Cleopatra sought and then seduced Julius Caesar, the great general/leader of the Roman Empire, after his army defeated the Egyptians. Thereafter, Caesar placed her in power and she had a son by him. Later, Caesar was killed by his opponents in Rome. To further support her claim on the Egyptian throne, Cleopatra made a romantic alliance with Mark Antony. The latter was in a fight of his own with Octavian Caesar, who was to become Augustus Caesar, the first emperor of Rome. After Antony’s defeat and death, Cleopatra reputedly committed suicide rather than surrender to Octavian’s invading Roman forces.) Wanger approached Taylor’s husband, stage and film producer Mike Todd, to discuss the casting. However, the gruff Todd, who micromanaged his wife’s career, vetoed the idea. Months later (in March 1958) Todd died in a plane crash, and Wanger’s Cleopatra venture stalled. Nevertheless, Walter still hoped to somehow convince Elizabeth to portray the Egyptian monarch.

From the start of negotiations, Skouras and Wanger were an ill-matched team. The crude, tyrannical 65-year-old Greek-born film executive, a father of four children, was a self-made man who had never mastered the proper use (or pronunciation) of English. A shrewd businessman, he understood how to sell movies to exhibitors and to the public. However, he had little appreciation of—let alone experience with—the moviemaking process or screen aesthetics. In contrast, the Dartmouth College–educated Wanger knew all facets of picturemaking and had substantial film credits to his name.

Thus, the battle of wills began. The Fox studio head envisioned Cleopatra as a $1 million production to be shot within a month on the company’s backlot. As a further cost-saver, Skouras planned to use talent already under contract to Fox. One possibility for the title role was Joanne Woodward, the Georgia-born actress who had won an Academy Award for The Three Faces of Eve (1957). An alternative was the comely Joan Collins. (The British-born performer had already played an ancient Egyptian princess in Warner Bros.’ 1955 spectacle Land of the Pharaohs.)

Countering Skouras’s concept, Wanger told Skouras that he wanted to shoot the film in Italy to give the project scope and that he hoped to use Taylor in the crucial lead. He

Reviews for Fiasco

[abvr_2 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

There’s a certain satisfaction to watching the best-laid plans of self-important people dissolve into messy chaos. If there wasn’t, there’d be a lot fewer movie scenes involving pie fights at fancy-dress banquets or dogs running amuck at snooty garden parties. Even if you like that kind of thing, though, a little of it goes a long way. A movie consisting of nothing but pie fights would get boring fast. Fiasco -- a series of stories about big-budget Hollywood films that went disastrously awry, losing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in the process – is, basically, that movie. The first chapter is fascinating, the second interesting, the third diverting . . . and then they all start to feel the same. Part of the problem is the way that Parish chooses his stories. All kinds of Hollywood movies fail, and they fail for all kinds of reasons, but – as he outlines in his introduction – he’s interested in big-budget pictures that went off the rails. All of his case studies, therefore, tend to involve similar kinds of failures: egotistical stars, finicky directors, producers who can’t say no, executives whose reach exceeds their grasp. The details change, but the underlying patterns don’t, and so repetition sets in. Films that failed because of artistic overreach (David Lynch’s Dune), a fatal misreading of the zeitgeist (Blake Edwards’ Darling Lili), or egregious executive meddling (Terry Gilliam’s almost anything) don’t make the cut.Parish’s narrative “voice” makes matters worse: His insistence on referring to his subjects by their first names makes the whole enterprise read like a gossip column or tell-all memoir, rather than a history – even an informal one – of troubled Hollywood productions. It’s an annoying, distracting choice, and – given that most of the people he’s implying first-name closeness to are being portrayed as egotistical jerks or clueless buffoons – a baffling one.

[m8c8wade · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

If you're a lover of bad movies, or if you're interested in movie history, or even if you're fascinated by tales of grotesque, ego-driven, money-burning excess, then you should enjoy this book. The author provides a good explanation behind the making of films from Cleopatra to Battlefield Earth. The story of The Wild Party was particularly intriguing, since I'd never heard of the film before. Recommended.