Matéria publicada na Première americana de Novembro de 2006.
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The 50 Biggest Hollywood DisastersFilmmakers love a good disaster, whether it's melting polar ice caps, a dinner party blowup, or a bank heist gone bad. So it's only fitting that the industry's movers and shakers would also be prone to catastrophes. But be warned: This list is like Nick Nolte's infamous mugshot. It might make you laugh. Or cringe. Or maybe shed a tear. Before you start writing letters about what we missed, though, understand that we steered clear of the Hollywood Babylon tragedies—the James Deans and Marilyn Monroes—which have been done to death (pun intended). So without further ado, here's a shotgun blast of the silly, the sordid, the sad, and the absurd.
50.The Matrix Reloaded's sweaty cave rave.
Maybe humanity will be partying at world's end, but let's hope there won't be any of Club Zion's dystopian-chic distressed-wear, or its awful, forced, multiculti primal gyrations. Just thinking about the Zion rave makes us want to take a shower. In bleach.
49. Commercials in movie theaters.
The ad industry's big-screen invasion leaves us wondering (a) why are we paying more than $10 for a ticket and (b) when's the goddamn movie going to start?
48. The tortured 1982 jungle epic that was Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo
It kicked off in the Amazon with Jason Robards and Mick Jagger in key roles, but health worries subtracted Robards, and a Stones tour claimed Jagger. Taking Robards's place was temperamental German thespian Klaus Kinski, who so alienated the natives that they offered to murder him. The longest drought in 65 years stranded the film's crucial steamship on a sandbar, and then torrential rains and a border war dogged filming.
47. Nipples on the Batman suit
46.Quentin Tarantino's acting career.
Great director. Crap actor. Even worse American Idol judge.
45.Foot in mouth disease:
A fairly rare condition in which a star or mogul loses the ability to stop self-destructive statements from leaving the mouth.
"It was the goal of these people to eliminate me . . . They wanted to kill Michael Ovitz. If they could have taken my wife and kids, they would have."—Michael Ovitz, in Vanity Fair (August 2002), talking about what he called the "Gay Mafia."
44.Why do bad things happen to good Saturday Night Live comedians? And vice versa?
Everything from drug abuse to cancer to a murder-suicide has conspired to take some of SNL's brightest and funniest stars, including John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Chris Farley, and Phil Hartman. While they were stolen from us too soon, other SNL alumni are dying a slow death, subjecting us to formulaic and not-funny (ha-ha or otherwise) movies. (For now, we'll forgive Will Ferrell for Anchorman.)
43.The incredible brain trust that was Pop.com.
Nothing encapsulates the misguidedness of the dot-com era like the website from Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, David Geffen, Ron Howard, and Brian Grazer, some of the smartest men in Hollywood. The DreamWorks and Imagine Entertainment partners spent $7 million developing the much-hyped venture, announced in 1999, which promised content from A-listers like Steve Martin, Drew Barrymore, Mike Myers, and Eddie Murphy. And then they pulled the plug before it even launched.
42.And come to think about it, online entertainment in general.
Remember all the millions wasted on websites that were going to revolutionize Hollywood? Apparently people didn't want to watch bad cartoons and short films on their computers. Go figure.
41. Former dry cleaner to the stars
Elie Samaha built Franchise Pictures largely on his ability to nuzzle up to big talent and find a way to bankroll their pet projects. Too often, the end result has been B.O. fizzle (remember Battlefield Earth?). Figure in the discovery that Samaha was bilking German distributor Intertainment by padding budgets, subsequent judgments against Samaha and Franchise totaling $106 million, and the company's bankruptcy filing, and Samaha's career looks to be in its final spin cycle.
40.Mickey Rooney's Cartoonish, stereotype-infused
portrayal of Japanese landlord in Breakfast at Tiffany's marred a great film, and ranks near D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation as one of cinema's most racist nightmares.
39. Bruce Willis in Hudson Hawk
38. David Manning is a hollow man.
In 2001, Sony admitted that the rave notices for The Animal and Hollow Man, among other stinkers, were the work of critic Manning, who had been conjured up by its marketing department, and who was about as real as Rob Schneider's sex appeal. Fallout included a lawsuit from moviegoers and assorted slapping of corporate wrists.
37. Sofia Coppola's turn in The Godfather Part III.
For Francis Ford Coppola, bringing in camera-shy daughter Sofia — even if she was a last-second replacement for Winona Ryder — as coquettish Mary Corleone was the kiss of death.
36. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
It was supposed to usher in the era of the "synthespian," a CGI Uberform that would take over Hollywood. With a price tag of $137 million and a net loss of $105 million, Fantasy ended up being the first and last movie made by Japan-based Square Co.
35. Ashton Kutcher
34. Heidi Fleiss
She brokered $3,000 booty calls for Hollywood players and accepted personal checks for her services. When she got busted in 1993, her high- profile clients fretted a name-naming that never happened. Poor Charlie Sheen was the only big shot caught with his pants down.
33. The Director's Company.
Ignoring the cautionary examples set by such talent-founded film companies as United Artists (Pickford, Griffith, Chaplin, et al.) and First Artists (Streisand, Newman, Poitier, et al.) which soon became albatrosses around their originators' necks, '70s hotshot auteurs Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and William Friedkin forged ahead and formed this collective, which yielded three films before getting sucked into the usual whirlpool of ego and money.
32. Brigitte Bardot: Love the bod, hate the bigotry.
This June, the star was convicted yet again for inciting racial hatred against Muslims—but she's an equal-opportunity bigot, dispensing rancor for the unemployed, gays, women in politics, ill-kempt teachers, and the French in general.
31. Sean Connery and Harrison Ford as Russian sub captains with befuddling accents.
Between the Scot's brogue and the midwesterner's mumbling, it's an easy bet that the dialect coaches from 1990's The Hunt for Red October and 2002's K-19: The Widowmaker have since been outofworkavski.
30. Howard the Duck.
Long before George Lucas unveiled Jar Jar Binks, there was the 1986 sci-fi comedy about an extraterrestrial cigar-smoking fowl. Of course, as executive producer, Lucas didn't create Howard, but he bears some responsibility for this cinematic bird shit.
29. Madonna's acting career.
Great pop icon. Crap actor. Between the gimmick casting (A League of Their Own) and the vanity projects (Evita, Swept Away), the Material Girl has (literally) been a show-stopper on the big screen. We wish her the best of luck with her children's book career.
28. The Mutilation of Once Upon a Time in America.
Director Sergio Leone spent years crafting his gangster epic, imposing a dazzling Mobius-strip-like structure on his nearly four-hour-long film. The U.S. distributor, smelling box office poison, took the film from Leone, chopped it down to a little over two hours, and arranged the story chronologically. The 1984 film bombed anyway.
27. Gigli
26. The Razor's Edge. Jakob the Liar. The Majestic.
We love funny guys Bill Murray, Robin Williams, and Jim Carrey, but these sins against humanity, perpetrated in the name of serious acting, compelled us to suspend their dramatic licenses . . . but then we thought about Lost in Translation, Good Will Hunting, and The Truman Show, and figured we'd give them back. But let it be known that when good comedians go sad, a miserable time is had by all.
25. The MPAA's silly a screener ban in 2003 was supposedly about pirates.
A bunch of studio honchos outlawed the distribution of DVDs and tapes to press and Academy members. Was it sheer coincidence that they were also crippling their art-house competitors' shot at the gold? Nope, according to the judge who ruled against the studio consortium by overturning the ban two months after it took effect.
24. The lame movie career of Thomas Edison.
That lightbulb thing was great and all, but when it came to his work regarding moving pictures, Edison was a jerk (he also electrocuted an elephant once, but that's another story). Although he contributed many key innovations, his vicious, and ultimately unsuccessful, legal campaign to control the medium through patents led him to give up on the moving image in 1918.
23. Timothy Dalton as James Bond
He may not have been the worst idea, but the lanky, green-eyed brooder made his '80s 007 such a wussy sourpuss. All right, purists argue a darker Bond is what novelist Ian Fleming had in mind, but was he also going for charisma-free?
22. Orson Welles's torment at the hands of RKO Studios
The conflict dates back to 1942 and his attempt to follow up Citizen Kane with an adaptation of The Magnificent Ambersons. He shot his movie and left it in RKO's hands when he hurried off to Brazil to film an anthology that would foster relations between the U.S. and Latin America. His version was subjected to repeated testing, cutting, and a new ending while he worked down south. He couldn't rescue the now-compromised Ambersons, and was pulled off the Latin American project that would later become It's All True. His career never recovered.
21. Ishtar
20. Martin Scorsese losing the Best Director Oscar for GoodFellas to Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves in 1991.
19. Orion Pictures' sudden nosedive from the top of a heap of Oscar gold.
Failing to reap crucial profits from ancillary businesses like TV and home video, the mini-major filed for bankruptcy in December of '91, months after scoring seven Oscars for Dances with Wolves and just three months before The Silence of the Lambs racked up five statues.
18. Roman Polanski's Lolita episode with a 13-year-old girl.
Facing a rape conviction and possibly a half-century behind bars, the Chinatown director fled to France and became a fugitive from the law and his flourishing career.
17. Movie piracy.
The MPAA says that the film biz loses $3.5 billion a year due to piracy; between 400,000 and 600,000 movies are swapped on the Internet each day. And new technology to download and burn is just getting cheaper and faster. Three words for the studios: Video on demand. Use it or lose it.
16. The horror that was the making of the American classic Apocalypse Now.
With Martin Sheen suffering a heart attack and Francis Ford Coppola pouring in his own money to finish the film, the production was a prolonged struggle during which Coppola lost 100 pounds (and almost his marriage) over 238 days of drug-fueled filmmaking, but somehow he came home with a masterpiece.
15. The Charity Bazaar Fire of 1897.
The Parisian gathering spot was filled with people eager to witness the dawn of a new medium. Tragically, the projector lamp caused an explosion. More than 120 lives were lost.
14. Brandon Lee's untimely death on the set of The Crow.
On March 31, 1993, an improperly loaded prop gun dealt a fatal wound to the 28-year-old Lee, whose premature death was not only reminiscent of that of his father, Bruce, but of a scene from his dad's Game of Death as well.
13. Sony hiring Peter Guber and Jon Peters
as co-heads of production in 1989. The odd-couple producers, who took credit for the success of Batman and Rain Man, were hired away from Warners, at huge cost, to run Columbia, where they piled hubris on inflated salaries and self-indulgent perks, and flushed millions into high-profile underachievers like Hook and Bugsy, and flops like Last Action Hero. After Peters reportedly got pushed out, and Guber later quit, the Japanese company took a roughly $3 billion write-off in 1994.
12. Without an heir apparent,
Michael Eisner committed an error apparent in 1995 when he hired mega-agent Michael Ovitz to run Disney, following the death of the number-two man, Frank Wells, and a public falling-out with then studio chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg. The marriage between the two Mighty Michaels ended in a nasty divorce after only 14 months, with Ovitz walking away with a severance package worth $140 million, and angry shareholders suing the Mouse House.
11. The demise of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle
came to pass during the Labor Day break in 1921, when young actress Virginia Rappe was discovered passed out in his San Francisco hotel suite during a party. When Rappe died days later, Arbuckle (who was rumored to have been framed as her rapist by scam artists) was pilloried in the press during three manslaughter trials (with two hung juries). He was ultimately acquitted and was just getting to work again when, in 1933, he died of a heart attack at 46.
10. Cleopatra.
Fox invested $44 million in the two-and-a-half-year shoot of 1963's Cleopatra, which still reigns as the most expensive movie ever made (when adjusted for inflation). Liz Taylor nearly died from double pneumonia, director Rouben Mamoulian dropped out, the production relocated from England to Italy, and the Vatican condemned Richard Burton and Taylor's love affair.
9. The money pit that was Heaven's Gate.
Directed by Michael Cimino, this 1980 western also cost $44 million to make (not quite Cleopatra, but still . . . ) and grossed under $2 millionÑan epochal flop that triggered the sale of United Artists to Kirk Kerkorian, who merged it with MGM. A career-hurter for everyone involved, and the signal that the auteurs of the '70s, like Scorsese, Friedkin, and Altman, would begin to lose power.
8. Woody Allen: the past ten years.
We're not mad just — deeply disappointed. We adore Woody, which is why we're so upset: Every year we go to see his latest, only to find ourselves walking out of the theater, stunned at how one-note, sophomoric, and just plain unpleasant his movies have become. The few good ones (Sweet and Lowdown, Bullets Over Broadway) haven't helped stem the sickening recognition that a brilliant auteur has been replaced by a shrill hack.
7. Jar Jar Binks
6. VHS proved bigger but not necessarily Beta.
Although many experts argued the smaller tapes were superior in quality, Sony kept its Betamax format exclusive to its own VCRs while its competitors proliferated the VHS tape as the format of choice among consumers. So did Sony learn a lesson? Do you own a MiniDisc player?
5. Movie star salary inflation.
Jim Carrey raised the bar to $20 million with The Cable Guy; since then, Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, and Will Smith have pushed the club into the $25 millionÐplus range (including profit participation deals). As salary inflation spirals upward, so do production costs. And, funny, we have yet to see any positive correlation between an actor's paycheck (did we say Paycheck?) and the movie being any better for it.
4. Never giving Alfred Hitchcock or Cary Grant an Oscar.
The Academy has made mistakes in its 77-year existence (the Oscar for Best Picture goes to . . . Chicago?), but none are as egregious as never calling the name of either Hitchcock or Grant. And no, honorary Oscars don't count.
3. Death on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie.
In 1982, actor Vic Morrow, seven-year-old Myca Dinh Lee, and six-year-old Renee Chen were killed by a helicopter run amok amid blinding F/X explosions as director John Landis allegedly screamed "Lower! Lower! Lower!" at the pilot. Landis stood trial for involuntary manslaughter and walked away a free man.
2. The Hollywood blacklist.
During the McCarthy era, the House Committee on Un-American Activities took its communist witch hunt to Hollywood. More than 300 actors, writers, directors, and producers were branded red and found themselves unemployable, and some were even thrown in the clink. Those who named names saved their livelihoods, but tarnished their reputations. As for moviegoers, we lost a decade's worth of great films that might have been.
1. The tyranny of the opening weekend box office.
Anyone who has anything to do with movies lives and breathes in its shadow. The amount of money a movie earns in its opening weekend determines its life, and thus, the lives of everyone who works on it, starting with the executive who green-lights the project, so you know quality is not his biggest concern. What matters is what's marketable—the effective trailer, the prettiest faces to slap on a poster, the market-tested themes that draw an audience—so it's no wonder that a big chunk of the average studio movie's total budget goes to prints and advertising. No longer can smart movies hunker in at movie theaters, slowly developing an audience. This summer's unprecedented glut of huge openings—followed by precipitous drops—tells us that audiences are restless. So are we. Still, there's hope: Surprise hits like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Fahrenheit 9/11 do exist. And then there was The Passion of the Christ . . . Well, maybe a little tyranny isn't such a bad thing after all.
