Amph When Good Directors Go Wrong: ?The Wiz? (1978) - Sidney Lumet

This is from IndieWire:

"Even the greatest of auteurs in cinema generally take one or two big missteps in their careers, either early on?as happened to a lot of the Easy Riders/Raging Bulls generation of American filmmakers, bringing their hirsute hubris down to earth with a bump?or later, when poor judgement and a degree of fossilisation can cloud a director?s vision?see Quentin Tarantino?s remarks, for example, about not wanting to be a ?geriatric? filmmaker, making films deep into his old age because this is when filmmakers generally lose their mojo, or Steven Soderbergh?s early retirement plans, which he hopes will see him exit filmmaking at the top of his game.

The latter factors were at play in Otto Preminger?s ?Skidoo,? a wacky ill-conceived project meant to capture the ?60s counter-culture zeitgeist, that instead, like an embarrassing Dad trying to be hip, possibly demonstrated the early symptoms of senility it was so out of touch. This week finally sees the release of ?Skidoo? on DVD? a film that is long-awaited by those who have heard about its legendary awfulness, but haven?t to date had a chance to witness it first-hand. Preminger was, on balance, a wonderful journeyman of a director whose oeuvre we covered last week, but this thing is so hilariously bad, it borders on ironically, hilariously good; if you?re in the mood and have copious amounts of alcohol and some like-minded friends to hand, its sheer, whimsical dreadfulness can turn out to be an absurdist treat.

A film we loathe and perversely love in equal measure (though some may just want to skip the metaphorical masochism and go straight to stabbing their eyes and ears out instead), it got us thinking about other venerable directors? cinematic indiscretions, missteps, gigantic blunders, and outright colossal failures: from those that threatened to derail hitherto promising careers (and in the cases of people like Peter Bogdanovich or William Friedkin, gaffes serious enough to ensure their careers never fully got back on track), to those that came later in life due to complacency or, in some cases, the failing cerebral functions of old age. Thus, we present to you ?When Directors Lose the Plot,? a by-no-means definitive collection of interesting left turns, mistakes and flat-out failures by some of cinema?s greatest auteurs."

Re: Preminger, also check out: "Hurry Sundown" (1967) and "Rosebud"(1975), not to mention "Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon" (1970)

Sometimes the bad film is a temporary problem, sometimes it's the symbol of terminal decline, as it was with Preminger.

 

I've never heard of Skidoo until now, but man, reading the cast list is like stumbling into a reunion of the Dean Martin show:

Jackie Gleason
Carol Channing
Frankie Avalon
Frank Gorshin
John Phillip Law (Pygar from Barbarella!)
Peter Lawford
Burgess Meredith
Cesar Romero
Mickey Rooney
Groucho Marx

I'll definitely have to check it out.

But in the case of Preminger, how much of his "decline" after Skidoo came out is simply the result of natural aging, and not the result of any specific gaffe? Priminger directed his next film after Skidoo when he was 65 years old. But his films were still well received after Skidoo came out. The Man with the Golden Arm is probably his most recognized film, but certainly, The Human Factor is on par with it, and there is a span of 30 years between the 2 movies.

 

?1941? (1979) - Steven Spielberg

?I will spend the rest of my life disowning this movie,? reportedly confessed legendary filmmaker Steven Spielberg to the New York Times, thereby admitting his film?s failings with honesty and a smidge of regret. But how bad is this 1979 war-comedy, featuring the stacked cast of Dan Aykroyd, Ned Beatty, John Belushi, John Candy, and many others? That depends on your tolerance for comedies that aren?t funny. Proceedings kick off with a parody of the director?s own ?Jaws,? in which a skinny-dipping woman discovers a Japanese submarine lurking in American waters. Then, following a decision to bomb Hollywood (one can almost hear the in-jokey off- camera laughter), the narrative is immediately carved into myriad tiny little stories: Wally (Bobby Di Cicco) would rather dance than fight and hopes to prove himself at an upcoming dance; Captain Birkhead (Tim Matheson) pines for the loins every woman he sees; Ward Douglas (Beatty) is forced to house an anti-aircraft millitary weapon; Wild Bill Kelso (Belushi) accidentally blows up a gasoline station? and so on and so forth. The set up is ripe enough for the respective narratives to take on their own tones and beats, but Spielberg shoots them all in his signature style, using as few cuts as he can and moving the camera whenever possible. Unfortunately, nothing ever meshes together, comic timing is seemingly absent, and the filmmaker?s penchant for theatrical set pieces and explosions only makes things worse?we maybe could have accepted the unamusing direction had he not insisted on throwing things in our faces for an alarming 2+ hours. But without berating it too much, the film was only a ?flop? in comparison to its preceding films (which would be ?Jaws? and ?Close Encounters of the Third Kind,? try to follow that) and it is, by all means, a very competently constructed movie?it?s not like the man had a lapse in skill for a year. Even so, its ?cult status? is a little too forgiving (and, at worst, delusional), with most giving props to its lack of sentimentality, in counterpoint to the usual criticism of the director?s gooey-centredness. But we like when Steven makes us feel all warm and fuzzy, don?t we? The Academy-friendly director is welcome to dabble in schmaltz so long as he means it. That said, if he ever again gives us anything as awful as the opening which involves a Japanese-native soldier proclaiming an American woman?s bare-ass to be ?Hollywood!!?, we shall devise an appropriately hideous punishment."

This movie is a misfire. Even directors as good as Spielberg have them, and this is not the only one, either. ("Always" anybody?) Like Hitchcock, his movies are full of humour, but an outright comedy genre seems to defeat him.

 

What'dya mean? I thought JAWS was slapstick at its best...


Standing by for your critique of Kevin Costner's WATERWORLD. Opening a film with a close-up
shot of your own butt as you're urinating into a water filter is not the measure of greatness.

 

?At Long Last Love? (1975) - Peter Bogdonavich

"At one point, Peter Bogdanovich looked to be the most bulletproof of the 1970s gang. He followed taut B-movie ?Targets? with three back-to-back critical and commercial hits: ?The Last Picture Show,? which picked up ten Oscar nominations and launched the careers of Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd (who would become the director?s lover), screwball comedy throwback ?What?s Up Doc?,? a giant hit, and ?Paper Moon,? a funny, touching Depression-era father-daughter tale. But then things to started to unravel. 1974 brought ?Daisy Miller,? an ill-conceived Henry James adaptation with a disastrously miscast Shepherd in the lead role, but that was nothing compared to ?At Long Last Love.? Once again paying homage to the Golden Age of Hollywood, it was a full-blown 1930s musical, using a whole series of classic Cole Porter tunes, and getting stars Burt Reynolds, Cybill Shepherd and Madeline Kahn to shoot the numbers live, rather than syncing to playback. Bogdanovich was never a rebel like his 70s compatriots, and that was his undoing; critics loathed the film (particularly singling out Reynolds and Shepherd, with many claiming neither could sing), it tanked at the box office, and until this year, when it was made available on Netflix Streaming, it had barely been seen. In fact, it?s nowhere near as bad as its reputation suggests: it?s fluff, certainly, but so was ?Top Hat,? and the superficiality of the characters and their relationships is part of Bogdonavich?s point. The star?s voices aren?t helped by the on-set singing, but compared to, say, Pierce Brosnan in ?Mamma Mia,? they?re fine, and Reynolds and Kahn are actually quite good in the film, hitting the right tone (Shepherd, less so). And the ending, without spoiling it, is kind of fascinating. Was it a folly, out of step with the times, and one big enough to more-or-less permanently derail the director?s career (he sort-of-apologized for the picture in a trade ad)? Sure. Is it one of the worst movies ever made? Absolutely not. It wasn?t even the worst musical of the year it was released??Funny Lady? is a much more painful sit."

 

?Bonfire of the Vanities? (1990) - Brian De Palma

"In retrospect, ?Bonfire of the Vanities? is the perfect swirl of hubris, cultural intrigue, and creative compromise that makes for the boldest, most fascinating flops. You have a director (Brian De Palma)?coming off ?Casualties of War,? a bleak but very good film that was a personal triumph but a commercial flop?desperate for a studio smash, taking on the hottest and most talked-about property in the country, Tom Wolfe?s 1987 bestseller. The studio (Warner Bros), almost immediately became skittish about some of the book?s more questionable passages and began a series of crippling concessions, notably from a casting point of view where we get Bruce Willis as a John Cleese-esque English novelist, and in an effort to ease the more offensive, race-bait-y material, a blowhard Jewish judge becomes, in the name of good taste, Morgan Freeman. Maybe most disastrous was the film?s release date ? by December 1990, the class politics of the 1980s that the book so savagely skewered had begun to seem musty and dated. While the film does contain a handful of brilliant moments, mostly thanks to De Palma?s unparalleled visual prowess (like the opening, unbroken shot that follows Willis into a reception and the famous shot of the Concord landing), it?s an absolute slog to try and sit through again, wrongheaded and tone-deaf on almost every level. The one good thing that the movie did produce, though, was one of the all-time great making-of film books, Julie Salamon?s ?The Devil?s Candy.? De Palma had agreed that Salamon could meticulously chronicle the making of his next film, not knowing the fiasco she would ultimately end up capturing. It?s fascinating, insightful, probing, and proves that sometimes, everything that can go wrong, does. (De Palma would arguably never recover, either. Sure, he made the brilliant ?Carlito?s Way? and still holds sway over his adoring cult of fans, but in the years since has largely been ignored by critics and audiences.) Even more LOL-worthy than Salamon?s book is a segment from the documentary ?Boffo? (about surprise box office hits and disasters), wherein Freeman is asked about the failure of ?Bonfire of the Vanities.? His answer is so wry, so deadpan, and so clearly annoyed ? he says he knew it was happening and that it was so rotten due to a series of poor decisions. You can tell, after all these years, that this horrible movie is still nagging at him. It?s still nagging at us, too."

I've seen the movie (what I could sit through). I've also read the book, which is 159 times more entertaining.

 

I can't remember exactly where I read it, but to De Palma's credit he's taken responsibility for the movie and it's failure. He regards it as a lesson in
what can go wrong when a director is indulged and no one will tell him he's on the
wrong path.

He talked about reading the book about the making of the movie and how it hit
the nail on the head: it was an emperor has no clothes type of situation. It's
as if while the movie was being made he was isolated, like being in a protective
bubble in the calm eye of a terrible storm, only he as the director has no
awareness of the storm because no one would tell him anything or give him any
honest feedback. Too much insulation, too much deference to a a director who
had total creative control but couldn't see the forest for the trees, or perhaps
in this case, the flames.

And he certainly wasn't the first, or the last director, to have this kind of
experience.

 

No; Spielberg had one on "1941". But the article is right that it basically ended his career as a seriously regarded director.

Part of the problem was that the material was very ill-suited to him; the trailer makes it looks like a comedy.

 

?Buddy Buddy? (1981) - Billy Wilder

"Can we just settle on something now: Billy Wilder is one of the three or four greatest filmmakers ever to work in Hollywood, a man who knocked out classic after classic across a forty-year career. But while there were a few misfires along the way, including the Bing Crosby musical ?The Emperor Waltz? and the troubled production of ?Kiss Me Stupid,? none was as painful as ?Buddy Buddy,? the 1981 comedy that would prove to be Wilder?s last film. In theory, it was a home run: Wilder had a script, a remake of a French hit, with longtime collaborator I.A.L. Diamond, who worked on most of the director?s best pictures, and reunited with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, with whom he?d had much success with ?The Fortune Cookie? and ?The Front Page.? But it?s a shadow of their finer work by all involved, unfortunately. Matthau plays a hitman, whose latest job is impaired by a suicidal TV inventor, whose wife has fallen in love with a sexual therapist (Klaus Kinski, who would later deny being in the film at all). But the darker tone feels uncomfortable: Wilder would later tell Cameron Crowe, in the latter?s must-read book ?Conversations With Wilder,? that the film ?was not the kind of comedy I had an affection for? Here is the problem. The audience laughs, and then they sort of resent it. Because it?s negativity. Dead bodies and such. If you hold up a mirror too closely to this kind of behavior, they don?t like it.? Of course, Wilder was behind plenty of very black comedies that worked like gangbusters, but there?s something sour and charmless?not an easy feet with Jack Lemmon around?about ?Buddy Buddy? and, more importantly, it?s rarely funny, bar a few good lines (Kinski?s ?Premature ejaculations means always having to say you?re sorry? being a stand-out). The film?s critical and commercial failure clearly hit Wilder hard: he flirted with other projects, including ?Schindler?s List,? but never made another picture. Having said that, it is still better than ?The Emperor Waltz?..."

There is always a streak of vulgarity in Wilder's movies--this is not necessarily a criticism. But after "Some Like It Hot", he started losing control of the tone, too.

 

?Deal Of The Century? (1983) - William Friedkin

"Something curious happened to William Friedkin after ?The Exorcist??no one wanted to watch his movies. The trio of films that followed the horror classic??The Brink?s Job,? ?Sorcerer? and the controversial ?Cruising??were all flops to varying degrees but quality-wise, they were good (acknowledging that yes, the sexual politics and themes of the latter are queasy at best). But in 1983, if anyone decided to stay away from ?Deal Of The Century,? we don?t blame them. Written by Paul Brickman (?Risky Business?) and starring a promising trio of Chevy Chase, Sigourney Weaver and Gregory Hines, if anything, the film proves that Friedkin doesn?t have a comedic bone in his body. One part ?Airplane?-style farce, mixed with a subtler, more sardonic attempt at ?Dr. Strangelove-type humor, patched together by a wandering, intermittent and unnecessary voiceover by Chase that finds him delivering quips better suited to a ?50s police procedural, ?Deal Of The Century? tries everything to get a laugh but doesn?t raise a smile. The plot, such at is is, sees Chase as a shady but successful arms seller (not unlike Nicolas Cage in ?Lord Of War?) who has the chance to close a $300 million dollar arms deal when a sales opportunity falls into his lap. This is of course, the simplified version. We?ve failed to mention that he gets the job thanks to his competitor, played by Wallace Shawn, committing suicide, or that his partner Ray (Hines) is a born-again Christian, or that the film opens on Christmas Eve and closes with Alvin & The Chipmunks singing ?Santa Claus Is Coming To Town? over the end credits for no discernible reason. We won?t even bother to explain how Weaver gets roped into the plot. The script fumbles desperately to try and make a statement about the inherent evil and emptiness of selling weapons, while painting the manufacturers as merchants of death, but the wildly uneven tone undoes the film at every turn, as politicians and military are as much the butt of jokes as they are part of it. Scenes that you think are supposed to be funny turn out to be dramatic, and then vice versa. And it certainly doesn?t help that after so much hand-wringing (particularly by Ray) about the consequences of their business, that the film?s climatic sequence is a (horribly shot and blue-screened) air battle that ends with a gigantic explosion. And that?s not to mention the casual racism that is peppered throughout, in particular aimed at South Americans. Perhaps in a bid to inject some kind of relevance, clips of Ronald Reagan making speeches about war are crudely inserted but it?s too little, far too late. Dull, and bereft of any wit, life or even a solid point, ?Deal Of The Century? explains why Friedkin has waited nearly three decades to give comedy another whirl and his upcoming ?Killer Joe? will let us see if he?s learned anything from past mistakes."

 

Comedy was never Friedkin's strong point and Deal of the Century confirmed that.
You have to wonder why he was given a comedy to direct when his successes were
in a police thriller and a supernatural horror movie. What were the suits thinking?

I haven't seen the film in a very long time, but that summary seems to indicate the
approach was a "throw in everything but the kitchen sink."

Friedkin's directed a number of operas the last few years...and done well with it.
I'm not sure a film comedy is a good career move.

 

That's interesting...I would not have thought of opera, but yeah, that might be a good use of his talents.

 

It's been a good change of pace for him, and he's been dedicated to it.

Toward the end of the article, there's an indication life has taught him not to be as arrogant as he was in his heyday.

The Friedkin Connection....to Opera

 

Interesting article...good for him.

 

Wow, I think that's the first time I've ever heard anyone say Cruising was good. Even qualified with 'queasy' that's high praise.

 

I kind of wonder what happened with William Friedkin, he had such an entrance with 'French Connection' and 'The Exorcist' and he just sort of fizzled out and never really made another film of that caliber again. You'd think just by those films he'd be a powerhouse in the business

 

Friedkin's openly talked about this many times. The huge success he had with those two films went straight to his head and he behaved horribly to
every major executive in the business for years. He became, by his own admission, a complete jerk. He burned bridges left and right.

If he'd played his cards right, he might have become a powerhouse like Steven Spielberg, but it was not to be. He has learned his lessons though,
and he's a much nicer, humbler person now.

 

David Lynch and "Inland Empire"

"For many years, I used to call ?Wild at Heart? David Lynch?s worst film. Yet even that movie has some degree of interest, some measure of watchability, and a few individual scenes that are among the best that Lynch ever directed. However, after what was likely his last great success with ?Mulholland Drive?, Lynch spent too much time puttering around on his personal web site, getting lost in his own head, and making dreadful short films and animated sketches that no one but his most fervently die-hard loyalists could possibly defend. The culmination of that time came with the astoundingly awful ?Inland Empire?, a three-hour rehashing of themes he?d previously covered better, and a regurgitation of all the worst ideas rattling around in his brain that had no other outlet.

?Inland Empire? is everything that Lynch?s critics had long (falsely) accused him of being. It?s tedious, repetitive, nonsensical, weird just for the sake of being weird, and wholly without point or purpose. Having recently split with his longtime girlfriend (and short-time wife) Mary Sweeney, who had edited all of his films for the previous decade and a half, Lynch?s work here suffers a complete lack of structure or coherency. It?s not so much a movie as it is a collection of random nonsense thrown together, and it drags on forever.

With ?Inland Empire?, David Lynch not only jumped his own shark, he turned around and jumped it again for good measure." (Josh Zyber)

 

?Inland Empire? is everything that Lynch?s critics had long (falsely) accused him of being. It?s tedious, repetitive, nonsensical, weird just for the sake of being weird, and wholly without point or purpose. Having recently split with his longtime girlfriend (and short-time wife) Mary Sweeney, who had edited all of his films for the previous decade and a half, Lynch?s work here suffers a complete lack of structure or coherency. It?s not so much a movie as it is a collection of random nonsense thrown together, and it drags on forever.

That's David Lynch though. And it's always been Lynch.

The previous entry here, Friedkin, is the perfect example of "when good directors go wrong." I'm not sure if this applies to Lynch. His default setting is nonsensical, and then he has occasional flashes of goodness. Of course, this is why Lynch is studied so much in film school/art house circles, his "weirdness" isn't bad per se, but I think to be a great filmmaker, you have to make films that make sense to someone other than your own Id. Lynch also does seem to default to others way too often for whatever he is doing. I think Lynch is a concept man. He comes up with ideas, gets bored with them, and leaves the process to be finished by various teams of assistant directors, writers, and editors. But then again, I think Lynch's best work comes from when he comes up with general outlines, and then collaborates with someone else to actually finish it.

 

i think if lynch wants to rip himself off, that is just fine. inland empire is a sprawling work that could probably benefit from some trimming here and there, but i honestly couldn't bear to lose a single frame.

and i don't understand how anyone could dislike wild at heart. it's one of his most accessible films and is loaded with great moments.

 

Inland Empire: Wow, this one *was* totally incomprehensible on first viewing. Gave me a pounding headache and very nearly made me ill by the end because my mind was so knotted up. Probably one of the choppist films I've ever seen. Just as I attempted to puzzle out one thread it'd jump to another and the most *sane* seeming char in it, my signpost during viewing...ultimately proved not to be 'real' even within the context of the film!

I don't regret seeing Irons in this but it was just as morbid as his Dead Ringers and a 1000 times less cohesive!

 

I am a big fan of Lynch and have defended his work many times. However, I have pretty much had to throw in the towel on this one.
I own Inland Empire and I've struggled through it more than once, and I'm sorry but I need cliff notes from Lynch to "get this."
It's just too weird and incomprehensible. It's one thing to be daring and challenge your audience and experiment, but this one is
off the charts. It's proof that sometimes artists have too much freedom.

However, I love Mulholland Drive, which is awesome. But at least there are keys and symbols in that one which you can comprehend
and use to decipher a rich and interesting work, which is one of the best recreations of the dream state I've ever seen in a film.

 

?Death Becomes Her? (1992) - Robert Zemeckis

"Warning sign number one probably should have been that Robert Zemeckis, director of the warm-and-fuzzy "Back to the Future" trilogy, would be tackling a dreary black comedy. "But he co-created 'Tales from the Crypt!'" you exclaim. Yeah, well, those were thirty minute trifles that only needed a couple of gory exclamation points to rile up audiences, whereas a feature-length film, especially something as tricky as a dark comedy, requires a sustained, measured, perfectly punctuated sentence. Notorious for its poor test screenings and long-after-the-facts reshoots (which led to some creative last-minute editorial overhauls), "Death Becomes Her" sports an all-star cast (including Goldie Hawn, Meryl Streep, Bruce Willis, and Isabella Rossellini) in desperate need of better material. Ostensibly a farce about Hollywood's obsession with age and beauty, it's about two friends (Streep and Hawn) turned bitter enemies, who are assisted in their vainglorious pursuits by a mystic (Rossellini) offering the secret to eternal youth. Also, for some reason, Bruce Willis plays a plastic surgeon who spends much of the last act of the movie trying to kill everyone. Zemeckis, always searching for the opportunity to cram every movie he makes with some questionable cutting-edge technology, stages elaborate sequences where the characters nearly die but can't, due to the magic serum, so we get to see Meryl Streep with her head on backwards and Goldie Hawn with a shotgun blast through her stomach. The fact that these are arguably the movie's "highlights," should show you what pitiful material we're dealing with. The film's lone chuckle is coughed out during a sequence where Willis walks through a crowd of long-thought-dead celebrities (including Elvis). Funny that a movie obsessed with immortality should die such a quick death."

 

It's an awful movie no question. Every one of the main actors is capable of a lot more than this film asks of them.

 

Who wrote this?