Fiasco: A History Of Hollywood’s Ironic Flops
By James Robert Parish, John Wiley & Sons, 2006

Everyone loves a good box office flop. People don’t necessarily like to watch unsuccessful movies, but they do enjoy talking about what a disaster an over-hyped movie has become. It’s the thrill of watching the mighty fall, the notion of poetic justice, the just desserts for the mega-egoes of Hollywood stars and the ridiculous budgets of blockbuster-hopefuls. That’s why James Robert Parish’s Fiasco seems like such a fun idea for a book: a detailed, behind-the-scenes examination of some of the most famous cinematic miscues in Hollywood history should be nothing but a mean-spirited good time. The actual end result is something short of the snarky party that it should be, but the book is an entertaining read nonetheless.

Parish collects all the biggies in his quest to find historic film stinkers, from 1963’s Cleopatra to 2001’s Town & Country, providing us with backstory about each film’s genesis in the Hollywood film industry context; meticulous details about the preproduction, production and postproduction of each project; and finally the always disappointing reception of the finished film. Parish, whose main claim to fame is as an on-camera film “expert” on Biography and E! True Hollywood Stories, writes in the venerable spirit of the Hollywood gossip columnist, never hesitating to make scathing accusations about the reputations and behavior of the players in his stories. He’s rarely nice, and he leaves no doubt with whom he thinks the blame for each film’s failure lies. His tone may be crass, but it’s not entirely out of line with the silliness he’s writing about.

It’s initially difficult to get a handle on precisely how Parish defines a Hollywood fiasco. Not all of the movies he’s included failed in the same way, and not all of them could remotely be considered in the same cinematic class. Some of the movies were not financial disasters; Cleopatra, for example, eventually turned a profit despite its horrendously inflated budget. Not all of the movies were critically reviled; Roger Ebert loved Popeye, and The New York Times was kind to Ishtar. But Parish doesn’t consider a fiasco a film like Titanic, which was a critical flop and a budgetary nightmare, yet went on to make gigantic profits. Nor does he mention any of the countless relatively small films made each year that fail to make a big box office splash (although he does provide a very long list of such films in an appendix).

So what it comes down to is hype. Parish’s definition of a fiasco is a film that doesn’t live up to its preproduction buzz, a film upon which way too much money is heaped without a realistic hope of return on investment, and, most of all, it’s a film that was pegged in the entertainment press long before its release as a disaster-in-the-making.

What really ties all the films in the book together, though, is each project’s inability to keep the usually well oiled Hollywood moviemaking machine running smoothly. In each case, the process gets wildly out of control, and once the train is off the tracks, no one can stop it.

Sometimes the movie stars are to blame; Elizabeth Taylor’s outrageous diva behavior and irrational demands made Cleopatra cost many times more than it should have, and Marlon Brando messed up The Chase. Sometimes directors are the problem; Robert Altman made a mess of Popeye, Elaine May overspent on Ishtar, and Francis Ford Coppola broke the back of The Cotton Club. Sometimes producers and executives are the culprit; shady financial dealings haunted The Cotton Club, and most of the films were sabotaged by bad decisions at the top.

Mostly, however, the films are almost universally terrible ideas from the beginning. Robin Williams as a singing, dancing Popeye. Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty as talentless cabaret singers in the North African desert. Madonna and Sean Penn in a romantic comedy. Clint Eastwood in a musical western. John Travolta as the hero of a Scientology-based alien shoot-’em-up extravaganza. Kevin Costner as a postapocalyptic mailman. Elizabeth Berkley as a cat-fighting stripper (okay, maybe this last one wasn’t such a terrible idea, but it probably shouldn’t have cost $40 million).

Fiasco points to the surprisingly fine line between Hollywood hits and misses. Yes, Marlon Brando deliberately undermined the production of The Chase, but he did the same thing on the set of Apocalypse Now, and that movie was a success. Coppola’s maniacal directorial habits ran up the cost of The Cotton Club, but he also behaved similarly on Apocalypse Now. Waterworld and Battlefield Earth were lame vanity projects of their movie star-producers, but so was Braveheart - yet Mel Gibson doesn’t make the book.

It’s all about expectations and results; in the minds (such as they are) of Hollywood, all the movies in Parish’s book should have made more money than they did. That fact alone makes them fiascoes. While the book tends to get a little dry as the lengthy film histories begin to sound very much alike, the missteps and misdeeds are fun to read about, and if nothing else, the list of movie flops makes a good program for a potentially interesting film festival.

Copyright 2006 Ad Media Inc.