Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops
By Tim Robey
(Hanover Square Press, 334 pages, $33)
No institution in America takes itself as seriously as Hollywood — think George Clooney who hasn’t made a significant film in a decade telling the president of the United States to step down. Any book that exposes the self-importance of Hollywood thus is worth reading.
Tim Robey’s new book, Box Office Poison, tells the story of 25 of Hollywood’s worst cinematic disasters. His tale is sad and yet funny as we read of some of the greatest actors, directors, and writers making fools of themselves while spending huge sums of money — a classic example being Pluto Nash which almost ruined Eddie Murphy’s career, cost $100 million, and brought in $7 million. I must admit I experienced a strong dose of schadenfreude as I read the unfolding of these disasters but I also found some of Robey’s takes on them as funny as one of Evelyn Waugh’s comic novels. (RELATED: Farewell Mr. Waugh: Political Correctness and Censorship Continue to Wreak Havoc)
I am proud to write that of the 25 films Robey analyzes, I only saw four: Intolerance, Freaks, The Magnificent Ambersons, and The Land of the Pharaohs. My only excuse for the last is… I was a teenager. I recognized all the titles save one, Synecdoche, New York, which none of my friends ever heard of either when queried.
The first three analyzed by the way are special cases. Robey notes that while Intolerance lost a lot of money for its time and ruined the career of D.W. Griffith, the first American film genius, it is now considered a classic.
In the case of The Magnificent Ambersons, the film lost money but it is now remembered as a flawed Orson Welles masterpiece because it was sabotaged by a bankrupt RKO that had lost faith in the film.
Freaks was detested when it first opened and withdrawn as being too disgusting for American audiences. It was banned in Great Britain and not shown for years. Today it has developed a cult following as one of the first horror films.
As Robey asks while analyzing films like Cutthroat Island, Cats, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, etc: what were they thinking? And that is precisely what makes his book worth reading. How the truly talented people involved in these disasters thought that they understood the taste of the American public and yet were catastrophically wrong. Robey does a good job of explaining while sprinkling some wonderful detail.
It reveals that all but six of the flops date from the collapse of the studio system when hard nose bosses like Darryl Zanuck, Harry Warner, or even a known vulgarian like Harry Cohn had a sense of the public’s taste and held writers, directors, and even actors from running off in wild directions.
Some of Robey’s choices are apt. For Babe: Pig in the City (at a cost of $90 million with a U.S. gross of $18.3 million), Robey notes that the director, George Miller had quite a cast, along with 1200 extras, 600 crew members, and 50 animal trainers. He lined up 799 animals including 100 pigs, 130 cats, 120 dogs, and a half dozen mice serving as a Greek chorus while singing Edith Piaf’s version of “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” How could you go wrong?
Robey argues that many of the problem films were the result of directors out of control. Oliver Stone, whose ego was and is legendary, decided to make a film about the historical figure he most admired, Alexander the Great (price tag of $155 million and a U.S. gross of $34.3 million).
He insisted that Alexander was gay, but he still enlisted Nicole Kidman and Angelina Jolie for the non-gay audience. He also rewrote history by having Alexander, played badly according to most reviews, by Colin Farrell, die not of some form of dysentery but heroically by an arrow wound. It didn’t help that Stone also blamed the American audience’s “moral fundamentalism” for rejecting his masterpiece. The film received disastrous reviews.
It is difficult to tell which of the films Robey regards as most gloriously misjudging the public’s taste. In my reading it would be a toss up among Cutthroat Island or Dr. Doolittle with Terry Gilliam’s bomb, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen just missing the mark.
Cutthroat Island, which the Guinness Book of Records held was Hollywood’s greatest financial disaster, tried to capitalize on the popularity of pirate films and the blossoming career of Geena Davis, hot off the success of A League of Their Own and Thelma and Louise. Cutthroat Island, excuse the pun, sank her career.
Part of the problem according to Robey was a bad script and a spectacularly weak male lead, Matthew Modine. Also, Oliver Reed was hired and fired after a bar fight on his first day of filming or things might have been worse according to Robey. Nothing went right, the reviews were disastrous and Cutthroat Island sank like a holed ship and took pirate films with it until Johnny Depp refloated the concept in Pirates of the Caribbean.
Dr. Doolittle was hatched, according to Robey, to cash in on the enormous success of elaborate musicals such as My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, and Mary Poppins and the popularity of its star Rex Harrison. The story of a beloved animal doctor who could “talk to the animals” seemed natural. It wasn’t. It appeared just as the audience for musicals began to wane: Follow-ups like Star with Julie Andrews at the peak of her popularity flopped as did Hello Dolly, a huge Broadway success, seemingly made for Barbra Streisand, which just matched its production budget.
According to Robey, Doolittle’s fate was sealed by its star, Rex Harrison, who hated everything about it: the script, having to play second fiddle to the animals and even having to sing “Talk to the Animals,” which won an Academy Award. Harrison said, “A humorous song is meant to be funny. This isn’t funny.”
Nothing seemed to go right in making the film: the giraffe who was supposed to be featured in the film with Harrison riding it, held up shooting for days, reportedly after stepping on its own penis. A fawn had to have her stomach pumped after eating a quart of paint and a squirrel got drunk on some gin.
Dr. Doolittle recorded a loss of $11.1 million on a budget of 18 million, a small loss compared to later film disasters. Robey believes that the big-name musicals that started with My Fair Lady died because times changed. The Vietnam War, campus riots, and racial unrest made them seem irrelevant.
Robey’s book is a natural for film fans. It is richly researched and written with a verve as if he was chuckling to himself as he analyzed one film disaster after another. But it also has a heart as Robey’s genuine love for the movies comes through on every page.
READ MORE from John P. Rossi:
Farewell Mr. Waugh: Political Correctness and Censorship Continue to Wreak Havoc
The Soldier Poets Who Knew About War
John P. Rossi is a professor emeritus of history at La Salle University in Philadelphia
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