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
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