Jedi_Keiran_Halcyon posted:

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Once upon a time, Kevin Smith was hired to work on a Superman script being produced by Jon Peters. Watching Smith tell the story on 'An Evening with Kevin Smith' is priceless, but this article covers the entertaining debacle pretty well.

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Michael Eisner committed an error apparent in 1995 when he hired mega-agent Michael Ovitz to run Disney, following the death of the number-two man, Frank Wells, and a public falling-out with then studio chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg. The marriage between the two Mighty Michaels ended in a nasty divorce after only 14 months, with Ovitz walking away with a severance package worth $140 million, and angry shareholders suing the Mouse House.

came to pass during the Labor Day break in 1921, when young actress Virginia Rappe was discovered passed out in his San Francisco hotel suite during a party. When Rappe died days later, Arbuckle (who was rumored to have been framed as her rapist by scam artists) was pilloried in the press during three manslaughter trials (with two hung juries). He was ultimately acquitted and was just getting to work again when, in 1933, he died of a heart attack at 46.

Zaz posted:

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I remember reading about this...all they found of the Duchesse d'Alencon was her head.

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Fox invested $44 million in the two-and-a-half-year shoot of 1963's Cleopatra, which still reigns as the most expensive movie ever made (when adjusted for inflation). Liz Taylor nearly died from double pneumonia, director Rouben Mamoulian dropped out, the production relocated from England to Italy, and the Vatican condemned Richard Burton and Taylor's love affair.

Directed by Michael Cimino, this 1980 western also cost $44 million to make (not quite Cleopatra, but still . . . ) and grossed under $2 million in an epochal flop that triggered the sale of United Artists to Kirk Kerkorian, who merged it with MGM. A career-hurter for everyone involved, and the signal that the auteurs of the '70s, like Scorsese, Friedkin, and Altman, would begin to lose power.