Hello Everybody, I recently finished teaching a couple of intensive six-week summer courses. This means that I finally have time to do things like comment on SCREEN-L messages from a few weeks back. The failure of ISHTAR occasioned one of the most interesting exchanges on the list-serv of late and I'd like to add my two cents. The respondent who referred to "negative momentum"--bad publicity stemming from tempermental stars, perfectionist directors, script problems, difficult locations, and cost overruns resulting from all of these and making good copy for some journalists, surly preview audiences, jittery studio execs--what have you--is surely right in the case of ISHTAR. It did have that much advance baggage to overcome. The problem is I think it's simply incorrect to say that awful, even embarrassing advance publicity results in box-office failure all of the time or even most of the time. APOCALYPSE NOW, REDS, TOOTSIE, RAINMAN, and DANCES WITH WOLVES all suffered from advance reports at least as devastating as those that preceded the release of ISHTAR. And all of those pictures wound up as commercial, critical, and award-winning triumphs. Chaotic productions don't always produce terrible films, just as smoothly running, happy shoots sometimes result in unwatchable movies. If audiences like a film, they quickly forget the advance "buzz." In the film business the end does justify the means. William Elliott's two postings raise the key points about the film's failure, I believe. ISHTAR failed because it didn't meet expectations, as the latter word is used in reception studies. Half of those troubled productions I mentioned above were projects of either Dustin Hoffman or Warren Beatty. The reason they overcame bad advance publicity is that they delivered what audiences expect, in different ways, of these two stars and that is some kind of significance that justifies the expense, the time, and the perfectionism. Hoffman's career high points--starting with MIDNIGHT COWBOY, the "sophomore effort" that established Hoffman as a character actor-star with serious aspirations--have mostly involved feats of acting, such as playing a woman in TOOTSIE or an autistic man in RAINMAN. Hoffman is the sort of star who would deny having a consistent persona; his reputation (rather than persona) is as the contemporary exemplar of the angst-ridden Method actor who eats up time and budget trying to determine his character's motivation. Fair or not, this became so much Hoffman's reputation that, like a good Strasbergian actor, he started "using" it in his films, a fact much noted by the reviewers when TOOTSIE came out. Hoffman's infamous Oscar acceptance speech in 1980, in which he voiced his reluctance to accept awards for acting when most actors were driving cabs and waiting tables struck many as the worst kind of hypocritical self-indulgence, a rich and famous actor trying to prove his solidarity with the forgotten masses. However, that speech started finding its way into the subtexts (if not the texts) of Hoffman's performances. His Michael Dorsey in TOOTSIE not only waits tables and struggles for work, but worries over the motivations of his characters, even when what he's playing is a bunch of grapes in a Fruit of the Loom commercial (if I'm recalling the film correctly). This combination of Hoffman's self-flagellation, his reminder to himself and to us of how lucky he is to have become a successful actor, with open self-parody is relieved, again for him and us, when he immerses himself into the created character of Dorothy Michaels. As Dorothy he is able to discover the joy of acting, which is both self-denial and self-expression. As remarkable an achievement as Dorothy is, for Dorsey/Hoffman, Hoffman himself is really not a comic actor; his intensity and Method interiority are too behavioral and introspective for the timing and mimesis that comic acting requires. I recall Peter Sellers telling an interviewer that he always began conceptualizing a character with the voice first; once he had the voice the rest of the characterization would follow. How different this is from the Method techniques of relaxation and affective memory. The most excruciating moments in ISHTAR come during the Hoffman character's crisis of self-confidence. You can see Hoffman getting in touch with the parts of himself that fear failure and mediocrity. You can see him drawing on memories of the early days as struggle, trying again to become one of those failed performers he managed to conjure in the midst of the glamour of the Academy Awards. This wrecks the tempo of the comedy, introduces a jarring tone into farce, and never lets us forget Dustin Hoffman. Method actors have excelled at comedy only when they managed--as Paul Newman has on several occasions--to forget Stanislavsky and take up Brecht, making comedy out of the very act of performance. TOOTSIE was funny partly because Hoffman was surrounded by funny people, from Bill Murray to Teri Garr to George Gaines to Dabney Coleman to Charles Durning. Hoffman could play off these comedians and also let them set the pace. Beatty, who is not intrinsically funny either, did the same thing in his comedy, HEAVEN CAN WAIT. Both forgot to do it here, with the unsurprising result that the best reviews went to the only comedian in the film, Charles Grodin. If Beatty, Hoffman, and Elaine May had remembered to write a range of funny characters around the two leads, ISHTAR might have been a totally different film. Beatty learned his lesson on his next production, DICK TRACY. That film's brief scenes with Beatty playing straight man to a totally immersed Hoffman as Mumbles is far funnier than all 107 minutes of ISHTAR. Mumbles, don't forget, was introduced into the DICK TRACY comic strip in the fifties, and was said to be Chester Gould's takeoff on "mumbling" Method actors! So once again, Dustin Hoffman takes his medicine--publicly and in art. Beatty's problem is more complex. Beatty comes from a Method background too, but he is much more the traditional personality star and romantic lead, whose considerable persona, moreover, is based as much on what the public knows about his real life as from his performances. Beatty is known as ladies' man, political activist, and go-getting film producer. His film roles nearly always speak to those extra-cinematic images in some way, usually negating them or lampooning them. McCabe in MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER is a ridiculously failed entrepreneur; George in SHAMPOO refers to all the personas: he's a womanizing hairdresser who men assume is gay; a terrible businessman; and an apolitical narcissist who worries about his own troubles the day that Nixon is getting his hands on the White House. REDS, which the advance publicity compared to the previous year's HEAVEN'S GATE as an out-of-control, possibly unreleaseable folly that no one would want to see, triumphed because of the undeniable seriousness and daring of the subject matter, the good acting, the innovation of having the real contemporaries of John Reed and Louise Bryant narrate the story from their variable memories, and the often plodding adherence to aesthetic of the "well-made film." Beatty's films were known either for social significance or for entertainments (like the gossimer HEAVEN CAN WAIT and DICK TRACY) that appeared to assemble the very best talent available and use it to the fullest--the traditional producer's package. The fact that Beatty made so few films and took so very long on them added to this expectation. ISHTAR was Beatty's first film since REDS, five and half years earlier. If one spends five years between pictures and then pays out many millions to shoot in the Sahara, the end result had better be LAWRENCE OF ARABIA or there will be a price to pay. I remember feeling after ISHTAR's failure that if the same script had been shot in the California desert (or even a backlot) with, say, Bill Murray and Dan Ackroyd, and somebody like Ivan Rietman directing, it would have come out, made a little money, gotten little attention, and taken its place in the video afterlife. It might even have been funny (but don't bet on it). Finally, Elliott said that the film's anti-American sentiment might have been poorly received during the Reagan era. Don't forget that ISHTAR came out at the end of the most politically retrograde period in American film history, when movies stepped all over themselves not to be "controversial." ISHTAR might indeed have even been hobbled by this timidity. The anti-Americanism in it seems quite tame, especially in comparison with PLATOON, the runaway surprise hit of winter 1986-87, and the film which THE NEW REPUBLIC at the time cited as marking the end of the Reagan Era in popular culture. By early '87, when the Teflon finally fell off Reagan and he was deeply mired in the Iran-Contra scandal, the media and to a certain extent, the public, were actually receptive to a break in the cheerleading jingoism of the Reagan period, which was never so monolithic as to squelch all anti-government sentiment; Reagan himself posed in opposition to the government and many of its positions, while manipulating them all behind the scenes. ISHTAR, in my judgement, was a miscalculation, albeit an interesting one. I rented it last week along with Jerry Lewis's THE NUTTY PROFESSOR. After watching ISHTAR for the first time since its release, the much-maligned Lewis looked like a genuine comic talent, someone who, at least for what is probably his best film, could conceive an original comic premise and execute it fully and brilliantly. Enough said? Dennis Bingham ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]