My Year of Flops (35 page)

To thwart the Bratz's sinister campaign to spread fashion, friendship, and montages set to peppy pop songs across clique divides, Meredith decides to throw herself a second sweet 16 party. The catch? In order to attend her chichi soiree, attendees are forced to agree to associate only with their cliques. Even worse, Meredith hires one of the Bratz's mothers to cater the affair. In
Bratz
's fantasy world, even the girl without money has money. The film's idea of poverty is a mom who owns a catering business, and a computer-owning teenager who scoots around on a moped instead of in a sports car.

At said party, Meredith humiliates the singing, personality-devoid Brat by showing a video of her singing “La Cucaracha” with mom/all-purpose ethnic Lainie Kazan. Ha! That girl totally has a mother! And she doesn't always look like a runway model! Could she
be
any lamer? Tragedy turns to triumph, however, when a sympathetic DJ fucks up the mix, and soon everyone is boogying to a hip-hopified version of “La Cucaracha.” But triumph soon morphs back into tragedy when a party elephant kicks Meredith into the pool. An enraged Meredith blames the Bratz for ruining her party, when we all know an unruly pachyderm was at fault. Must party elephants always spoil everything?

Suddenly, the same classmates who embraced the Bratz as liberators
from the tyranny of cliques shun the fashion-forward foursome for costing them sweet 16 gift bags. Clearly, only a climactic performance of a song espousing the virtues of “Brattitude” at the big talent show can set things right and put Meredith in her place. Meredith and her nemeses are all about clothes, glamour, and performing forgettable synth-pop ditties. The crucial difference is that Meredith uses clothes and generic dance-pop to destroy; the Bratz use it to uplift and edutain.

Watching
Bratz
the first time around, I was filled with profound amusement, albeit not with the film so much as the culture that would produce such a shiny pink monstrosity. It's tempting to argue that the toy-pimping opus represents the evil of banality, but
Bratz
is far too stupid to be worthy of hate. I was less amused by
Bratz
the second time around, in part because the insane incongruity of watching such disposable pop-culture ephemera while surrounded by middle-aged men was gone. I was amused, however, by the DVD's coming attractions for animated adventures starring
Bratz: Kids
and
Bratz: Babies.
Can
Bratz: Fetuses
(“When your womb needs a makeover, these style-conscious prehumans take over!”) and
Bratz: Spermatozoa
(“You will not believe how they accessorize their flagella!”) be far behind?

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Failure

Chapter 7

The Floppiest Flops

Honestly Unpopular Case File #3: Ishtar

Originally Posted February 2, 2007

Comic genius Elaine May has led a schizophrenic existence as both an in-demand script doctor and a ferociously independent, obsessive überauteur who would rather feed her children to wolves than let a script doctor (or studio head) tinker with her vision.

May's control-freak tendencies are legendary. She made her directorial debut with 1971's
A New Leaf,
a dark screwball comedy about a deliciously sour misanthrope/professional ne'er-do-well (Walter Matthau, channeling W. C. Fields) who leads a pampered life happily devoid of substance until his inheritance runs out and he sets upon marrying, then murdering a daffy heiress (May) for her money.

In a troubling omen, producer Howard Koch Jr. tried unsuccessfully to get May fired. The film's budget more than doubled. After 10 months of editing, May still wouldn't let Paramount see the film. Paramount essentially had to wrestle the film away from her.
A New Leaf
's paltry box office, coupled with Paramount's trials trying to wean
the film from May's clutches, would be enough to kill the careers of most filmmakers. But May was too talented and strong willed to let that happen.
A New Leaf
was followed by May's sole box-office success: 1973's
The Heartbreak Kid,
a trenchant exploration of the perils of assimilation and the spiritual emptiness of the American dream.

An acidic companion piece to
The Graduate
(which was directed by May's former comedy partner, Mike Nichols),
Heartbreak
follows a directionless young schmuck (Charles Grodin) who dumps his sunburn-addled new wife (Jeannie Berlin, May's daughter) on their honeymoon to recklessly pursue shiksa goddess Cybill Shepherd. Where
The Graduate
ended on a famously ambiguous note,
Heartbreak
's ending borders on emotionally apocalyptic. In a neat inversion of romantic comedy orthodoxy, pursuing an impossible dream girl turns out to be not just wrong, but immoral.
Heartbreak
's bleakly ironic ending asks, “What does it profit a man to get the girl but lose his soul?” Grodin ends up with Shepherd, but it's a victory so empty it doubles as a crushing defeat.

May's follow-up, 1976's brilliant John Cassavetes homage
Mikey & Nicky,
found the enfant terrible once again inducing mass aneurysms in the Paramount executive suites. Her budget once again ballooned to more than twice its original size, and May again retreated to her bunker and steeled herself for another round of warfare with her corporate overlords. This cinematic David couldn't help picking fights with the Goliaths of her industry.

Lawsuits were filed and release dates missed by over a year. May was fired in postproduction, then rehired when she cunningly hid two reels of the film to ensure that it could not be completed without her. Paramount was not amused, and it buried the film.

By this point, May embodied “box-office poison.” She should have been unemployable as a director. She was litigious. She was expensive. She was difficult. She viewed studios as enemies rather than collaborators or benefactors. From a commercial perspective, investing in an Elaine May film made only slightly more sense than purchasing magic beans or building a building a bonfire out of out of hundred-dollar bills.

Then in the mid-'80s, something inexplicable happened; Columbia gave Elaine May somewhere between $30 to $55 million to direct a comedy with two of the biggest movie stars in the world. If one of the marks of insanity involves doing the same thing repeatedly yet expecting a different outcome, then the studio executives should have been fitted en masse for straitjackets.

Where
A New Leaf
and
Mikey & Nicky
were small films that grew big and unwieldy, 1987's
Ishtar
was a big film that became the poster child for Hollywood excess. It embodies a phenomenon I call “the Curse of Bigness.” The Bing Crosby/Bob Hope road movies that
Ishtar
riffs on reveled in cheapness and artifice, in rear projection and back-lot “deserts.” So it seems perverse that
Ishtar
goes all David Lean with the production values, roping in the great Vittorio Storaro (
Apocalypse Now
) as cinematographer and filming on location in Morocco.
Ishtar
's ballooning budget became the story instead of the film itself. The question became less, “Is it funny?” than “Does it provide $30 to $55 million worth of laughs?”

What could inspire studio suits to abandon their solemn fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders and re-up for another voyage onboard the Elaine May Express to Pauperville? The answer lies with the film's producer and star, Warren Beatty. If Hollywood is a status-obsessed high school, then Beatty is the valedictorian, class president, lead in the class play, and star quarterback in one shimmering package. And if the class president says his friend the weird girl who edits the yearbook should get Richard Avedon to shoot photos of the glee club, then who are we to doubt his wisdom?

According to a talk she gave with Mike Nichols after a sold-out screening of
Ishtar
at the Walter Reade Theater in 2006, May semi-seriously designed the film as a Trojan horse to smuggle a trenchant critique of American foreign policy inside a seemingly innocuous broad comedy. May was going to reach Ronald Reagan, no stranger to back lots himself, through a medium she was sure he understood—the Hope/Crosby road picture.

Since her pioneering days as half of Nichols & May, our intrepid
heroine has struggled to rid comedy of its lazy reliance upon setups and punch lines, and invest it with the awkward, uncomfortable rhythms and painful silences of real life. She's spent her career doggedly chasing truth, so it's fitting that
Ishtar,
the pinnacle of her lifelong love affair with principled failure, opens with its sad-sack protagonists (Beatty and Dustin Hoffman) haplessly cocomposing a monstrous ditty about how “telling the truth can be dangerous business / honest and popular don't go hand in hand.”

Hoffman and Beatty play best friends and songwriting partners leading lives unsullied by accomplishment. Beatty portrays a doe-eyed naïf too pure for a corrupt world; Hoffman plays a nebbishy hustler with a big mouth and a million doomed schemes. He's a cleaned-up Ratso Rizzo with a guitar and delusional dreams of becoming half of the next great songwriting team.

In composing songs for the film, Paul Williams, May, and Hoffman faced the unique challenge of writing tunes that aren't just bad, but painful.
Ishtar
walks a fine line between abusing audience eardrums and cleverly spoofing the clumsy wordplay and agonizing sincerity of clueless aspiring tunesmiths.

I adore
Ishtar
's songs, though critics at the time probably wished the main characters had taken the advice of crusty, alcoholic agent Marty Freed (Jack Weston) to “sing songs people already know. That way, if they don't like it, they'll still have something to applaud.”

Marty is understandably mortified by the duo's performance at an open-mike night but assures the boys he can book them in a Honduras hotel where, he confides casually, “the last act got nervous because of the death squads. But there's no danger if you don't drive into the countryside.”