Daily Mail, March 23, 2012
There’s something eerie about sitting perfectly alone in a large cinema. It’s as though something terrible has happened somewhere else and you are the only one who doesn’t know. That’s how it felt this week, anyway, as I bought my ticket and sat down to watch the new Disney epic John Carter.
I soon discovered why I was alone. John Carter is a terrible film with an incomprehensible story, ludicrous, mutton-headed characters and unspeakable dialogue, and already Disney have announced that it is likely to lose $200 million dollars so abject have been the first box office takings. From what I saw in my West London local, that figure may be an underestimation, with John Carter heading rapidly for the movie flops record book.
No amount of tall, four-armed, computer generated creatures, of gravity-less leaping, monster slaying savagery and visual homages to Star Wars and Gladiator could redeem such a complicated farrago of boring daftness.
But how did it get like this? Nobody sets out to make a flop. At the start of shooting of any film, everyone involved is filled with hope and expectation about the wonderful entertainment they are about to create, about the prizes they might win and the money they might make.
That would have been how it was when Disney gave the green light to invest a total of $350 million dollars in John Carter. Based on a character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, who also brought us Tarzan, with writer/director Andrew Stanton riding high as a Hollywood power player after the success of his animated movies Finding Nemo and Wall-E, all it needed was astonishing special effects, which is pretty much a given these days in hi-tech Hollywood, and a popular star. Step forward US TV favourite Taylor Kitsch playing the intrepid Carter on a nineteenth century trip to Mars, where he finds not just red dust but monsters galore.
With so much going for it, the movie should, on paper, have been a shoe-in for success. Unfortunately that success was absolutely not assured on the paper on which the screenplay was written.
Once again a vastly expensive movie fails because, in part at least, the ingredient which should be the cheapest in the whole blancmange, the screenplay, wasn’t good enough.
Once denigrated as “schmucks with Underwoods”, screenwriters have never been the most visible stars in the Hollywood firmament, although the best are extremely well paid these days as they sit at their computer screens with their dedicated screenwriting programmes.
But the rules still apply. If they don’t get the screenplay right and make a blueprint for the telling of an interesting story with believable characters and clever dialogue, no amount of money, beautiful stars, stunning special effects, brilliant cameramen or visionary directors will make the beast work.
Everyone in Hollywood knows this, yet, somehow, a lot of people continually manage to forget it, sometimes even the writer himself when, like Andrew Stanton, he also happens to be the director. How else do we explain Heaven’s Gate which was written and directed by Michael Cimino?
Having tasted financial and critical success with The Deer Hunter, Cimino set out in 1979 to make a modest $7.5 million Western starring Kris Kristofferson and Christopher Walken. Two years and around $45 million later he presented an unshowable five hours long movie to United Artists, the studio that had backed him.
In his book about the film, Final Cut, former United Artists executive Steven Bach explained how Cimino, who had once been a commercials director, fell in love with the sumptuous images he was shooting rather than the story he was telling. The result was, Bach says, that the “viewer became a victim sensory overload”.
But why did United Artists let Cimino keep on shooting when they could see the budget was out of control? Basically, because of some very fancy Hollywood-style contracts that protected Cimino, and, perhaps more importantly, because they couldn’t afford not to finish the movie.
There’s little as worthless as an unfinished film, and sometimes it seems, or at least it seemed to them, that the only solution is to keep throwing money at it in the desperate hope that something magical will finally emerge.
It didn’t. Heaven’s Gate sank at the box office, and, less than a month later, United Artists had to be sold to MGM. Cimino’s ambition had been too great. He could never bring himself to stop shooting.
Other movies (actually, lots of them) should perhaps never have started. Take Gigli, a tasteless comedy about a Mafia hit man (Ben Affleck), who is assigned to kidnap a mentally retarded brother of a California district attorney, and assisted by a presumed-to-be lesbian assassin played by Jennifer Lopez (she of the bottom before Pippa).
Worried about the unfunny scenes they were seeing in rushes, the studio executives apparently kept demanding script changes throughout shooting. It didn’t help. The movie was withdrawn from the cinemas after a three week run, a big chunk of the $54 million budget never recouped, and Affleck and Lopez ended their engagement. Who says there are no sad endings in Hollywood?
The Hollywood habit of engaging one screenwriter after another (and many are never credited) to work on a project, while sometimes successful (as was the case with Gladiator, on which British writer William Nicholson made an important difference), can also indicate that something was wrong with the idea of the movie right from the beginning.
This may or may not have been the case with Battlefield Earth which starred John Travolta in an adaptation of the book by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and involved at least two writers. One American critic was unimpressed by their efforts. “A million monkeys with a million crayons would be hard-pressed in a million years to create anything as cretinous as Battlefield Earth,” he wrote of the screenplay which cost $42 million and recouped $22 million.
On Sahara, which starred Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz, it wasn’t just that too many cooks in the writing room may have spoiled the script, it was also that there was a plethora of producers, twenty being credited in all. Stuck in the sands of Morocco for endless months as the budget edged up to $241 million, one of them, a friend of mine, had to take a year off after shooting to get over her experience.
Of course it’s easy to be amused by the hubris of movie directors, the interference of executives, the overweening vanity and demands of some film stars and the eye-watering losses. But this is all in retrospect. It’s easy to be wise after the event.
If Ishtar had been a hit, no one would have criticised Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty for being too obviously in love with themselves on screen. But it wasn’t and they did.
While, on a more modest level, if Swept Away in 2002 had been as successful as director Guy Ritchie’s later efforts, it wouldn’t have mattered that it looked rather like a vanity film for his then wife Madonna.
Now I don’t want to hold out too much hope for the makers of John Carter, they don’t deserve it, but it doesn’t always follow that all movies that do badly in their opening weeks are destined to be complete flops.
Blade Runner opened disappointingly in the US in 1982 – shortly after E.T. smashed all records and captured a different kind of public mood. But foreign sales, TV and video rights, and acclaim as one of the classic films of all time, have followed ever since. Whether that means it’s ever gone into profit, I rather doubt, however. Net profit can be a hazy concept in terms of Hollywood bookkeeping.
Surprisingly one film that, against all expectations, is said to have gone into profit was Cleopatra, the 1963 movie on which Elizabeth Taylor got off with Richard Burton. Dogged throughout by Taylor’s delicate health, with the director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz rewriting the screenplay every night to negotiate the vicissitudes of filming, it cost the equivalent of about $300 million in today’s money, but finally broke even in 1973 with sales to TV.
Back to John Carter. Although there were still only eight people in the cinema when the lights went up the other night, Disney isn’t about to go bankrupt because of its losses. The movies the big studios put their hundreds of millions into these days, those aimed at hormone bubbling teenage boys, will still keep coming, and some will get it right.
And how is the best way to get it right? By making sure the screenplay works before filming starts and the hundreds of millions start flooding out.
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Ray Connolly’s black comedy novel Shadows On A Wall, about the making of a movie on which the budget is out of control and the stars and director are found dead, is now available as an eBook from Amazon.
