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

I've never seen One From the Heart, but I love the soundtrack way, way too much. It's some of Waits' finest work, actually. Great, great album. Four Dot, what do you think of the song score? I love it.

 

Prior to POTC, pirate movies seemed cursed, mainly because of this one, "Cutthroat Island" and "Swashbuckler"

 

Loved it. Unnecessarily maligned film due Polanskis indiscretions as far as i can tell. Matthau and Campion are awesome.

 

?Saturn 3? (1980) - Stanley Donen

"When one remembers the great American director and choreographer Stanley Donen one thinks of the man dubbed "the king of musicals." Responsible for some of cinema's greatest song and dance films, "Singin' In The Rain," ?Damn Yankees!,? and ?Funny Face," plus comedies, and stylish thrillers with equal grace and pizzaz, ?Bedazzled,? ?Arabesque? and ?Charade,? no other flub is as egregious in Donen?s estimable career than ?Saturn 3.? As ill-conceived as they get, this oxygen-less and painfully suspenseless sci-fi blemish stars Kirk Douglas and Farrah Fawcett as two scientists (and lovers) whose remote utopian base in the asteroid fields of Saturn is intruded upon by an unstable sociopath masquerading as a fellow technocrat and scientist, played by Harvey Keitel, who has been sent from Earth to check up on the progress of their experimental food research studies (Earth has naturally turned toxic in this future). Horribly miscast, Keitel?s thick Brooklyn accent was redubbed by British actor Roy Dotrice in certain versions (who strangely enough adopted an American accent that doesn?t sound too dissimilar from Keitel?s own). Arriving just three years after the sci-fi boon of ?Star Wars,? this failure is riddled with terrible effects, while the malevolent robot in the picture -- hilariously named Hector -- is laughably constructed and excruciatingly non-menacing. Conceived by "Star Wars" production designer John Barry (who was originally tapped to direct) and scored by Elmer Bernstein, unfortunately no amount of talent could salvage the disaster that is this colossal tonal miscalculation. During the 1st annual Golden Raspberry Awards ?Saturn 3? was nominated for Worst Picture, Actor and Actress."

A guy's gotta work, I guess.

I wonder if the writer ever actually *saw* "Damn Yankees"? It's really terrible.

 

How old am I? I'm so old that I had a poster of Farah Fawcett on my bedroom wall in the mid 70s. And can I tell you that sneaking into the movies for that 1 second shot of Farrah's bewbs as she nestled up against the graying and saggy man bewbs of an aging Kirk Douglass was one of my cinematic highlights of 1980.

I recently tried to watch it again though and could not. And before I switched it off I laughed at Harvey Keitel who if Saturn 3 was Exhibit A at the trial would be convicted of being completely unable to act.

 

Nevertheless, there's one awesome scene in that movie where the robot Hector removes an object from Farrah's eye that is quite memorable.

True, not a great movie, but consider the weird casting...Farrah, Kirk Douglas and Harvey Keitel? Wow, what a trio. I'll bet Douglas took the job just so he could do the scene Jabba described.

We all know it's as important to "cast" the right director for a project as it is to get the right actors in the right roles. Well, Stanley Donen, while a very talented filmmaker, seems aboout as weird a choice for the director's chair on this project as one could imagine.

Like the earlier post said, "a guy's gotta work." Yeah, but the MOVIE needs to work too.

IMDB trivia on Saturn 3:

Stanley Donen on John Barry's abrupt departure "It was my fault, not John's. The truth is John had hardly ever been on a set, which I didn't realize. He was such a terrific talent, but he'd spent most of his time in an office. He knew next to nothing about staging a scene, or handling actors. And since nature hates a vacuum, the actors jumped on him. The film started floundering. Finally I had to tell him : 'it's not working. I'll have to be on the set with you'. I had a moral commitment, after all ; I'd make sure the film went all right. But when I did turn up on the set, John said he just couldn't work like that, so he left. There was no question of his being fired."

The fantasy sequence featuring Farrah Fawcett in a skimpy PVC jumpsuit was filmed but not used. Stills from the sequence were used extensively in publicity for the film on its original release.

Colin Chilvers modeled "Hector" on a drawing by 'Leonardo da Vinci'.

Elmer Bernstein wrote an hour of music for the film, much of it progressive and experimental, but most of it was unused after the opening sequences until the film's last half hour. Bernstein removed some of the cues himself after the film was extensively re-edited because they did not work in truncated form while others appear to have been removed by producer and replacement director Stanley Donen. The full score was released as a very limited edition CD in 2008 that is now deleted.

The budget for the production of this movie was reduced when the Lord Lew Grade / ITC production house's other production Raise the Titanic went over budget.

This was the first production that Farrah Fawcett was again billed as Farrah Fawcett and not as Farrah Fawcett-Majors after her separation / divorce from Lee Majors. Before this marriage, earlier in her career, she had previously been billed as Farrah Fawcett.

Harvey Keitel had one other film out in the same year as this movie, Death Watch aka Death Watch, and like this picture, it was also a science-fiction movie.

First film as a story writer for sci-fi specialist production designer / art director John Barry.


Penultimate theatrical feature film for director Stanley Donen.


Lord Lew Grade objected to two scenes he felt were distasteful and had them cut out of the picture. One scene had Hector mutilate Benson's corpse on a laboratory table whilst the other was a dream sequence where Alex and Adam murdered Benson.


The name of the robot Hector in this movie is taken from The Trojan Wars in Greek Mythology where Hector was the Trojan Prince and the greatest fighter of Troy.


This picture has a sexually-aroused robot and was released just a few years after the similarly themed Demon Seed.


A few years after the release of the film, Farrah Fawcett was a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in which Mr. Carson casually poked fun at Fawcett's movie choices. "I remember you did a picture - I think it was called 'Saturn 3'." The audience laughed a bit as Fawcett squirmed, answering, "Originally they had a very good script, it was called 'The Helper', and it was a lot different from what we ended up shooting."

In his novel "Money" (1984) Martin Amis uses a great deal of his experience as the screenwriter for this film as the basis of the book. The director, John Se

 

A good idea and some unbelievable talent. Some unbelievable drugs too, it seems, that they couldnt even create something halfway decent.

 

?Popeye? (1980) - Robert Altman

"Cocaine: it's a helluvadrug. You want foolish and ill-conceived ideas from a hazy mind? There?s no coincidence between producer Robert Evans falling on hard times and ?Popeye? (Evans was convicted for attempting to buy bags of blow during production). Evans? bright idea was hiring iconoclast Robert Altman to direct a big-budget mainstream family film and musical. Altman hired Harry Nilsson to score the film, and rarely tempered his overlapping dialogue and cross-cutting style. Starring a mumbling Robin Williams as the titular sailorman, a diverting Shelley Duvall (whose futzing, puttering around, worried character might be the most enjoyable part), plus character actors Ray Walston and Paul Dooley, the biggest issue might be the glacial pacing and lethargic script by Jules Feiffer (?Carnal Knowledge?), not to mention a charisma-free villain in Paul L. Smith. Sporting the tone of a fully sated Altman on an all-expenses paid vacation in Malta -- where the film was shot on location to the tune of a cool $20 million (not sliced bread for 1980) -- ?Popeye? has its occasional jovial and whimsical moments, but there?s just so much fat around the meat, it?s hard to find the actual story: it's apparently about a fatherless sailor in search of his pappi (like the story really matters). Part of ?Popeye?'s biggest problem is that it seems like a rudderless narrative that is an excuse for Popeye to eventually eat spinach, kick Bluto?s ass and finally play the famous Popeye theme from the cartoon. But up to that point, the picture feels like rote and rather protracted foreplay (Leonard Maltin called it, ?astonishingly boring? at the time, and he?s at least half right). These days ?Popeye? is perhaps best remembered for featuring the song "He Needs Me,? which Paul Thomas Anderson appropriated for ?Punch Drunk Love.?

Musicals look easy. Musicals take technique, musicality, pacing, instinct. Musicals are hard. Better directors than Altman have come a cropper on them. And nearly every director is better than Altman, IMO. I just don't like him, and think the Emperor is naked as a jaybird.

 

Popeye is horrid, but how this is Altman's premier misstep rather than Quintet is beyond me.

 

There's loads of competition: "A Wedding", "Buffalo Bill and the Indians", "A Perfect Couple", etc. etc.

Never tell anybody he's a 'scathing satirist'; he may start to believe it, and worse, imagine that he's an American Bergman (cf. Woody Allen). Even the Swedish version can be hard to take.

 

?The Wiz? (1978) - Sidney Lumet

"One can safely argue that whenever the great Sidney Lumet left New York, his films felt unmoored, out of place or uneven (his Southern trip with Brando, ?The Fugitive Kind? never quite gels, for example). And while the 1978 musical "The Wiz," was still set in and around a magical Big Apple, this major detour for Lumet just didn't have enough Gotham grittiness to anchor the filmmaker. A famous disco, funk and Broadway-made soul remake of "The Wizard Of Oz," this ill-conceived fantasy musical stars Diana Ross as Dorothy, Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, a beguiling Nispy Russell as The Tinman (perhaps the finest of all the players) and Ted Ross as The Cowardly Lion. Composed in a variety of rather bland and wide master shots, Lumet never seems comfortable during the dance and musical numbers and thus most of these moments are rather flat. While Russell, Ross and Richard Pryor as the Wiz(ard) are diverting, Ross melodramatically seems lto be on the verge of tears in every sequence whether happy, sad or scary, and Jackson is so suited to play a childlike simpleton, it's almost scary. Joel Schumacher?s -- yes that Joel Schumacher -- script is enervating and by the numbers, and poor Quincy Jones, who only acted as a music supervisor as a favor to Lumet, can?t give this picture any cooking grease. While not as dismal as some of these failures -- there's a harmless sweet joy to some of the picture that's marginally charming in spots -- it?s certainly not Lumet's best work and would remain the only genre exercise the filmmaker would tackle in his career. A commercial and critical flop at the time, the film still managed to earn itself four Academy Awards nominations."

Another example of the Talented Director vs. Musicals Death Match. The miscasting of Diana Ross started the trouble, but the film is made by someone who doesn't know or understand musicals, and guess what? The film doesn't work, though there are bright spots.

 

I can't understand what Sidney Lumet was thinking when he became involved with
this ludicrous, box office bomb.



And poor Diana Ross - the wretched film put a bullet through the brain of any
chance of a future film career.

Worse yet, I'll have that nauseating Ease On Down The Road song playing in my
head for the rest of the evening.

 

It was another experiment in technique for him. His recollections of watching the dailies is hilarious - watching it with Joel Schumacher to start off with, who whooped up the cast and crew into a frenzy of excitement about what they had done. Lumet loved that, but then watching it again without Schumacher, well... he and Morris realised that they kinda had a disaster on their hands.