Ishtar is so famous for being terrible that even people who haven't seen it know it's terrible. It's always included on lists of epic Hollywood failures, next to Howard the Duck, Gigli, Heaven's Gate, and Leonard Part 6. It's so synonymous with expensive flops that when Waterworld proved disastrous, people called it Fishtar.

And yet there is something unusual about Ishtar, which was released 22 years ago this week, on May 15, 1987. Despite its reputation, it is not a bad movie. It's actually a fairly good movie. And I'm not just being contrarian. I'm not one of those people who try to get attention by choosing famously bad movies and claiming they're great. (I hate it when people do that.) I watched Ishtar and laughed a lot. Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty, playing a pair untalented songwriters who get tangled up in Middle East political intrigue while performing in Morocco, have comedic chemistry that cannot be faked, and the screenplay slyly satirizes both show business and politics. The film gets mired in the mechanics of its plot halfway through, but overall I'd still give it a B.

I'm hardly alone in this, either. There are non-ironic fan sites devoted to the film, and most references to it nowadays -- by people who have seen it, anyway -- call it something to the effect of "unfairly maligned" or "under-appreciated." You don't see many people saying that about Howard the Duck, which most people agree actually is as awful as its reputation.

So why did Ishtar get such a bad rap? Because movies aren't made in a vacuum, that's why. Audiences are eager to know what happens behind the scenes, entertainment journalists are eager to report it, and sometimes this background noise gets so loud that it drowns out the film itself. Ishtar starred two actors who weren't just Oscar-winners but Hollywood royalty, and they had never worked together before. They each got paid $5 million, which was almost unheard of at the time. The filmmaker, Elaine May, had had a long career as a highly respected comedy writer, which included penning the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Beatty's Heaven Can Wait.

All of that made for a lot of built-in scrutiny and high expectations, which only increased once word got out that it was a "troubled production." Shooting on location in Morocco, coupled with May's perfectionism, caused the budget to skyrocket, eventually hitting anywhere from $30 million to $55 million, depending on whom you ask. (The Washington Post ran two reviews on the film's opening day, one citing $40 million, the other $45 million. These reviews probably ran side-by-side on the page.) Reshoots delayed the film's release, and May's obsessing over the editing delayed it further.

But there may have been another factor, too: Sabotage. After a 2006 screening of Ishtar sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, May and her longtime friend and collaborator Mike Nichols discussed the part that studio politics played in the sinking of the film. There was a regime change at Columbia Pictures midway through the production, and the new boss, David Puttnam, had a longstanding grudge against Beatty. (Grudges against Warren Beatty were not then, nor are they now, hard to find in Hollywood.) May says Puttnam leaked negative stories about the film to the press, some of them not entirely true. Nichols called it a case of "studio suicide," where a company intentionally damages its own product. (For a more recent example, see Fox's sabotage of Mike Judge's Idiocracy.) The film had performed well at its three test screenings; now, all of a sudden, if you believed the stories, it was a disaster. By the time it hit theaters that was the prevailing opinion.

Yet, the widely held belief that Ishtar got nothing but bad reviews when it opened is false. It got average-to-good notices from the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Variety, The Chicago Tribune, and Time magazine, none of which were exactly minor voices in film criticism. Rotten Tomatoes didn't exist yet then (most of the reviews it catalogs now were written well after the fact), so it's hard to find enough contemporary reviews to determine what the positive-to-negative ratio was. But it clearly was not a bloodbath. The New York Times' Vincent Canby included it as a runner-up in his list of the best films of 1987.

Nonetheless, the buzz was bad enough -- and there were enough truly negative reviews -- that audiences either entered theaters expecting to hate it, or didn't enter theaters at all. Roger Ebert gave it half a star, and he and Gene Siskel savaged it on their TV show. Almost every review, including the positive ones, mentioned the film's budget and behind-the-scenes problems, even though that stuff has nothing to do with whether the film itself was any good. But like I said, movies aren't made in a vacuum. Movie critics are human beings, too (most of them), and it's impossible to completely divorce yourself from what you've already heard about a movie going into it.

Ishtar opened in first place at the box office anyway, then sank to fourth place the next weekend, when Beverly Hills Cop II was released. It eventually grossed $14.4 million, which would be $26.9 million in today's dollars -- respectable for a small-scale comedy, but not nearly enough to cover the out-of-control budget. (In 2009 dollars, the $30-$55 million it cost would be $56-$102 million.) I believe that if the same film had been made by unknowns, for a much smaller price, it would have been received for what it was: A good comedy, nothing special, light and simple and enjoyable. It was the off-screen baggage that doomed it.

FROM THE TIME CAPSULE: When Ishtar was released, 22 years ago this week, on May 15, 1987...

• It opened in first place, barely ahead of fellow newcomer The Gate (a horror film, starring Stephen Dorff, that surely no one remembers now). Recent films that were still on the charts were The Secret of My Success, Blind Date, and Creepshow 2, while older films Lethal Weapon, Platoon, and Raising Arizona continued to do well.

• The Fox network had gone on the air about six weeks earlier, followed shortly by the very first Simpsons cartoon appearing on The Tracey Ullman Show. Meanwhile, elderly people were glad to have a new sitcom, The Bold and the Beautiful, and a new primetime hero, Matlock. Long-running shows Gimme a Break!, Fame, and Hill Street Blues were all ending this month.

• U2's now-legendary Joshua Tree album had been released two months earlier, and "With or Without You" was about to spend three weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Other recent No. 1 hits included Starship's "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now," "(I Just) Died in Your Arms" by Cutting Crew, and Club Nouveau's cover of "Lean on Me."

• Sen. Gary Hart had dropped out of the Democratic primaries a week earlier after allegations he'd had an affair with Donna Rice. In one of the best you-can't-make-this-up twists of all time, the yacht on which they were photographed cavorting was called Monkey Business.

• Singers Jesse McCartney and Joss Stone were both about a month old. Actress Rita Hayworth had died the day before. Fred Astaire and Jackie Gleason would both pass away within the next five weeks.

* * * * *

"Eric's Time Capsule" appears every Monday at Film.com. You can visit Eric at his website, which also isn't as bad as you've heard.

Recommend (0)

|  Comments (0)

|  Email

|  Share

Share  Facebook Digg del.icio.us