WHAT WENT WRONG - Ishtar

Episode Date: February 2, 2021

Writer/director Elaine May sidestepped Moroccan landmines only for 1987’s Ishtar to bomb her career upon release. This week Lizzie gives us the details as Chris wonders, "Is this film as bad as people who haven’t seen it say it is?"Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Well, by the time our audience here is this, all have turned 32. Yay. And the crushing realization as to where I am in this life may mean that this is the last episode we recorded. But hopefully not, because I'm really enjoying doing this. I actually am thrilled that we finally got to this film. By the way, guys, welcome back to What Went Wrong. I'm Chris Winterbauer along here with the annoyingly youthful Lizzie Bassett. Who Remains 31.

against all the advice that I gave her to just age with me. Lizzie, tell the folks at home what film we are talking about today. We are doing a much-requested movie today. It's something a ton of people have shouted out, but most recently, Life is Strange, 2021 on Instagram, aka Logan. Thank you, Logan, for the recommendation. The movie is, of course, Ishtar. Ishtar.

Yeah, and this is one that, you know, when we first started doing this podcast, I started looking at all these like listicles of, oh, here are the worst movies, the movies that had like, that were just such a bomb and everything went wrong on set. Ishtar is like high on that list always. It's always in like the top five. Yeah. So I was always kind of avoiding watching it honestly because I was like, it's going to be bad. Like it has to be really bad. And then also it's going to be, you know, a trash fire to talk about. Neither of those is particularly true. No. I would just like to jump in and say, Ishtar, I thought, was delightful. It's good. And I particularly enjoyed the initial 25 minutes of the film, which is basically dumb and dumber meets Simon and Garfunkel. Yes, exactly. With Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman playing.

It's like dumb and dumber inside Lewin Davis. And it's so much fun. And I thought it was absolutely charming. And it goes a little off the rails in the middle. and towards the end of the movie. But overall, I was so pleasantly surprised when we watched this. It's lovely. It's short.

So if you want something fun to watch. It's not very long. It's under two hours. For anyone that doesn't know, Ishtar is a movie that stars Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman and was directed and written by Elaine May. We're going to get into all of them in a little bit. Right at the top, I do want to say, yes, we are 100% aware of the allegations against Dustin Hoffman. We're not going to talk about that at all in this episode.

it's not part of the story, but we are aware of it. So anybody that might be upset by that, feel free to bow out of this one. We're not going to blame you. I want to start with a quote from Elaine May, who said, if all the people who hate Ishtar had seen it, I would be a rich woman today, which is. I think that's entirely fair. I've had so many people reference it as a terrible movie. I don't think they've watched it.

No. So I think the question that we have to pose at the top of this is how did a movie that listed as a favorite of Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater, and Edgar Wright become a dead on a rival stinker that ruined the career of its director. And that's really what we are going to dive into today. And I'm very curious because I would just like to say, I took the time to make a list of all the movies that we've covered

that I thought were worse than Ishtar. Oh, good. Most of them. was better then. Yeah, so here's Chris's list of Ishtar beats this movie. Cleopatra, Last Action Hero, Popeye, Bonfire of the Vanities, Twilight Zone movie, Dr. Doolittle, Waterworld, Last Airbender, the man who killed Don Quix, Showgirls, Eon Flux, Heavens Gate, Fantastic Four, Southland Tales, Moreau, Evan Almighty, and Cats. And I might even want to watch Ishtar over the abyss, even though the abyss. I would prefer Ishtar over the abyss. I would have to say, I'm going to take cats and showgirls off that list.

Showgirls, I might take off, but cats, I will never watch again. I can't wait to watch it. I want it to be an annual thing. I would rather have to eat cats than watch cats again. All right. So Ishtar was released in May of 1987. It was widely considered a massive flop. It was known as Warren's Gate, which is a reference to Heaven's Gate.

We'll get into that little bit later. It's not even clever. It doesn't even mind. It doesn't work. It's not as good as Kevin's Gate, which we covered in Waters, the Waterworld. So the plot, it's a little hard to explain, but it follows two down on their luck, singer-songwriters, as Chris mentioned, sort of the dumb and dumber characters. I believe their names are...

There want to be Simon and Garfunkels. It's like the whole... But they're like a decade too late to be Simon and Garfunkel as well. And beyond untalented. Yeah. Like, they're so bad. It's amazing. They are bad. They're bad, but in a very sincere way that I think is hard to pull off.

Anyway, they're in New York. They've both kind of left their, like, regular jobs to pursue a songwriting career, even though they're absolutely horrible. And after they've done their sort of final show in New York where they really bomb, the guy who they finally convinced to sort of be their agent tells them, like, listen, the only jobs I can get you are one in Honduras where the acts keep quitting because they're afraid of the, like, insurrections that are happening. Yeah, like the roving death squads that are. And then the other is in Morocco at like a, a hotel that's popular with American tourists. And so basically...

Shea Casablanca over there. They basically are just, they kind of give up and decide to just not accept this, the boring life in New York that might await them if they stick it out. And they go to Morocco. They become embroiled in a sort of complicated

relationship with both the CIA and a sort of member of a leftist party. A Shia, yeah, Shia revolutionary group. Yeah. All of which kind of centers around the nexus of a fictional country called Ishtar. However, the movie is spent in Morocco.

That's really all you need to know. Everybody ends up fine. It's sort of a delightful romp. One of the best parts of the entire movie is I thought Charles Groton as the CIA agent. Who's the father in Beethoven, if you don't remember him. And he's so good as this like just in over his head CIA agent. And the movie, the best way I can think of describe it is it's like, stepbrothers by way of

Siriana. Yes. I couldn't really, it's such a weird mashup. It's really strange. Sometimes it feels like Indiana Jones. Yeah. Sometimes it's indescribable.

I really think you just need to go watch it if you have it. You definitely should watch it. And both Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty are extremely charming in it. So wonderful. So while Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman obviously went on to have very illustrious careers with little to no damage,

Ishtar effectively ended Elaine May's directing career. This is the last film that she ever directed. Was it her first film as well? No, it was not. Okay. She directed at least two other films before this, which we will get to. There are plenty of directors that we have talked about on this show before, all of them men, I think it's worth noting, that had box office bombs and then returned

to make hit after hit pretty much no problem. Yeah, and perhaps the only exception being the one that proves the rule is Karen Kusama. who directed Eon Flux, if you haven't listened to our episode on it, check it out, who is effectively ostracized for more or less 10 years before coming back with small indie films to kind of regarner her position in the industry. Yeah, I mean, you have to wonder why Elaine May was shown the door. I think the answer is pretty simple. When someone is a pioneer in a field, they're kind of expected to carry the weight of their

entire demographic. And if they fail, the assumption then is that you've closed the door. Not just for yourself, but for everybody waiting in line behind you. It's an extremely unfair amount of pressure and weight that's on your shoulders. I actually got a chance recently to talk to Regina King at my job about her directorial debut one night in Miami, and she expressed a similar frustration. She is potentially going to be the first African-American female director ever to be nominated for an Oscar. She deserves it, by the way.

But it's the same thing of like, if this fails, she closes a door. that's kind of what we see happen with Elaine May here, and it sucks, and it should stop. So let's start with who Elaine May is. Now, you may actually know her comedic partner in crime by name a bit better than you know Elaine May. That's because she was one half of the comedic duo Nichols in May, as in Mike Nichols, who did The Graduate, among many other things. They were a stand-up comedy duo from October 8, 1960 to July 1st, 1961. They had an evening with Nichols, with Mike. Nichols and Elaine May on Broadway. It was very successful. To give you an idea of their sense of humor, I want to play a short clip of one of their sketches for you. And all you need to know about this one, the setup is that a guy saw an ad for a $65 funeral, like a discount funeral. And he is trying to collect on that ad and discovers that it doesn't exactly tell you all you're getting in for. Before you go, Mr. Manzo-Freen, I was just wondering, would you be interested in some extras for the loved one.

What kind of extras? Well, how about a casket? Isn't that included in the funeral? No. We have to have a casket. Yes, it looks better. She's got such a good deadpan. I love that. Yeah, they're great.

So that's really where she got her start, and particularly in a lot of improv, which will come up a bit later as well. Now, by the early 80s, she had a pretty decent career as a screenwriter and or script doctor. Most notably, she had co-written Heaven Can Wait alongside Warren Beatty. She had directed The Heartbreak Kid based off Neil Simon's play. That was a moderate success. Charles Groden is in that one as well. Now, she'd also written and directed Mikey and Nikki, which was a bomb. She also allegedly... I've never heard of it. Yeah. It's not actually supposed to be bad in retrospect, but it did not do well upon release. Now, she also allegedly shot 1.4 million feet of film for that movie. Whoa. Yes. It's a lot. Now, it left her with a bad reputation as a

troublesome perfectionist, if you will. And she was kind of put in movie jail after this one and didn't direct another movie for 10 years, which the next one, of course, will be Ishtar. Interesting. Now, there were some other female directors sort of getting started working in the 80s, think Penny Marshall, Barbara Streisand with Yentel, Susan Sidelman with Desperately Seeking Susan. However, they tended to focus on more female-driven stories, which I think is worth noting because that's not what Elaine May focuses on. No. Your star almost seems like it feels very male-oriented in a lot of ways, but it subverts a lot of

those expectations. A lot of her comedy was, and I think that's something that kind of rubbed people the wrong way. early on because they didn't really know what to make of it. So Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman both owed Elaine May big time. She had done pretty massive uncredited rewrites on Warren Beatty's Reds, which he won the best director Oscar for and was nominated for Best Screenplay for, by the way. She'd also been a strong contributor in post-production on Reds. Basically, it's not entirely clear that that movie would have been what it was without her. And he kind of admitted that. She's the third person he thanks in his Oscar acceptance speech after Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson, who are the stars of Reds and

Diane was his girlfriend at the time. Now, she'd done something similar for Dustin Hoffman for Tootsie as well. She'd done a massive amount of uncredited rewrites and was credited with kind of helping fix the story of that movie. So pretty much immediately after making Reds, Beatty starts looking for a project for May to direct. This does make me like Warren Beatty. He knew he owed her and he was immediately like, I am going to pay you back. I know that you're not getting the opportunities you deserve. I'm going to make sure you get them. And just timing for the audience. I think this was like 1981. 82 is when Reds comes out. So immediately after in about 83, he starts looking for something that they can work together on. He said that he felt like she never really had a good producer to

support her. So he's like, you know what? We're going to make a movie and I'm going to produce it and star in it so I can make sure that you're getting all the protection you want. I am really going to set you up to succeed. Right. This ends up backfiring, which we will get to. Warren Beatty, not one to sit back and let other people have all the control. It's that, but it's a combination of things. May kind of immediately expressed interest in the Middle East as a big set piece.

And also the old Bing Crosby and Bob Hope rode to movies, particularly Road to Morocco, which is one that they had done. she comes up with the basic plot for Ishtar, but she also decides that instead of casting Warren Beatty to type, which would be playing the sort of Bing Crosby ladiesman type, she wants to flip it and have him play against type to play the sort of bumbling oaf that Bob Hope usually played, while the co-star, who they were already talking about being Dustin Hoffman, should play the Devonair ladiesman. So the idea of them playing against type actually does end up getting sort of much maligned down the road from a bunch of critics. But here is Dustin and Warren talking about it in one of

the few interviews that they did to promote the movie. As I watched the film and the roles you're playing and I laughed so much and had such a good time. But Warren, I couldn't help but wonder if at any time did Elaine may ever consider reversing, in other words, you playing Dustin's role and him playing your role? I have no idea. I don't think so. I don't think so. Did she write it for you two? Yeah, yeah. She wrote it for both of us.

She purposefully, I think, wanted to tell the truth, and that is that the, you know, the more attractive and the more sexy of the two is obviously me, and that's the part that I play in the film. And she wanted to tell the truth about Warren that, you know, even though he has this image of being the kind of leading man, very sexy guy, that in reality he's a really so stiff and, you know, clots and, well, you could see for yourself. That's why he doesn't do these interviews very often. So it's not a character part that he's not a character part that he's playing in the film that's very close to him.

Yes. He's not intelligent. Everything he's going to say now has been written for him by people that he did. That's awesome. I thought the against type worked wonderfully overall. I thought it worked well, too. I was a little skeptical at the top, honestly, with Warren Beatty. not so much with Dustin Hoffman, but I did think it worked fine by the end.

Yeah, I bought it. I thought his, oh, man, Hawk, you're such a cool guy. Like, I just, I love, like, the way you walk with that confidence, it's the walk of a shorter man. I know. Like, there are so many funny lines that I loved. And then Dustin Hoffman's preening Napoleonic confidence is great. I bought it. Potentially more accurate to Dustin Hoffman's real personality.

I was going to say, exactly. Yeah. I think that one might be real. Yeah, I thought it was very charming. Yeah. So Beatty takes the story to his friend Guy McElwain, who happens to be the chairman of Columbia Pictures. And it is already being billed as a Beatty May production. He also told his lawyer, quote, anything she wants, period. That's my negotiating position. So that's where this starts. Now, at this point, Dustin Hoffman is already quasi attached. And he was also, as we said, indebted to Elaine May.

Now, if you think Warren Beatty was at the top of his career prior to this movie, check out this list of Dustin Hoffman's credits in the decade leading up to Ishtar. All the President's men, Marathon Man, Kramer versus Kramer, Tutsi, and Death of a Salesman. It's pretty intense. So despite all of the star power currently attached to this, Guy McElwain at Columbia is a little skeptical because all three Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty, and Elaine May were known for being extreme perfectionists and perfectionists who are asking that they shoot on location in the Sahara Desert. He's like, this has got to be a no.

Yeah, exactly. Too many people are going to die if we green lights it. So that being said, he kind of weighs his options and figures if he passes on this, another studio is going to pick it up and it's going to be a big hit and I'm going to look like an idiot. So he goes ahead and green lights it basically with the caveat that they want to discuss not shooting in the Sahara Desert. So Elaine finishes the script and Warren hands it over to Dustin. Hoffman, who doesn't love it, he actually says, no, I don't really want to do this. Warren keeps pushing, and Dustin and his friend playwright Murray Schistel agreed to have dinner

with Elaine May and Warren Beatty. Dustin said, quote, we felt that the movie should not leave New York. That whole Hope and Crosby thing in Morocco was a distraction. Just stay with these guys who think they're Simon and Garfunkel and play that out. Warren and Elaine disagreed, but he deferred, deferred to her. I gotta say, I wish I'd gotten to see just those two guys in New York movie. I actually completely disagree. I'm the opposite of you. My favorite part of this was the second they left New York. Oh, I just loved all of the New York face bumbling about. But I just feel like I've seen it and there was something about.

Absolutely. The whole thing that happens to them in Morocco, it ends up actually being very reminiscent of things that we have now seen so much like Tropic Thunder comes to mind. Yes, that's fair. It seems more played out. But it, it was. wasn't at the time. And you did miss out, and you did miss out on the Charles Gruden. Who is so funny in this. Yeah, not to, not to sidebar too much, but I did feel that once they get in the desert, the movie just starts dragging a little bit. And that was, I guess, more of what I was reacting to. No, I still enjoyed it a lot. I just, I loved their New York scenes too, Dustin Hoffman out on a ledge. Yeah. So I kind of expected that Dustin Hoffman was going to be a bit of a pain in the ass on this set. That doesn't actually seem to be the case. As soon as he realized they were going,

were not going to budge on the plot. He basically just resigns himself to doing what they want him to do and hoping for the best. One, because he owes Elaine May big time and knows it. And two, because Warren Beatty was so confident that it would work that he's like, whatever, I'm just going to, I'm going to choose to trust them and just do it. And he gave a very committed performance. He does. He's all in.

Look, Dustin Hoffman, personal stuff aside, he's an amazing actor. And he is very fun to watch in this. Now, before shooting had even begun, the movie had cost. 12.5 million dollars. Wait, what? Yeah, yeah. That is 5.5 for both Dustin and Warren each. Oh, what? What? Oh, yeah.

One million for Elaine's script and 500,000 to Warren Beatty for producing. Now, most importantly... I forgot that this was like the flaming 80s of just rolling rails of cocaine before making deals and it's like, yeah, let's go, let's go. 12.5 million. Most importantly, all three were promised heavy input into the final cut. That will prove to be a massive problem down the line. Isabel Adjani was cast as

Shira, I think that's her name. She also happened to be Warren Beatty's sort of girlfriend at the time. She apparently had a bad time on this. It was kind of like everybody was fighting and nobody paid attention to her. She does a great job. She's good. She's in possession. You guys haven't seen she's also was with Daniel Day Lewis for a little while, which I didn't know. They have a son together. Oh, I didn't know. There you go. Now, despite Colombia's misgivings about shooting in the Sahara, it turns out that their parent company, Coca-Cola, had a lot of frozen assets in Morocco and needed to burn some money over there. So they go to Guy and they're like, actually, we're going to go ahead and need you to shoot as much as possible in the middle of the desert in Morocco. We got some stuff we got to jettison over the desert.

So you guys could just go film there to give us an excuse to be there. That's basically what happened. Now, there's just a couple of problems with this. One being that Morocco in October of 1985 is not a particularly fun place to be. North Africa in general is not, especially not for Dustin Hoffman, who is Jewish. Now, some things that had happened at the very beginning of October, Israeli warplanes had recently bombed the Palestine Liberation Front's headquarters in Tunisia, nearby Tunisia, and then a week. later, the Palestinian Liberation Front had hijacked, famously hijacked a cruise ship off the coast of Egypt, murdering Jewish-American Leon Klinghoffer before tossing him overboard. This is literally

like two weeks before they're supposed to go start shooting in Morocco. And Dustin Hoffman is maybe the most famous Jewish man in the world at this point. And so he's uncomfortable. They're not, you know, they're not super stoked on this. There was also a bit of a TIF going on with some local guerrilla warfare. It's just not a great time to be shooting there. Now, the production designer, who will hear from quite a bit in this episode, Paul Silbert, also an Oscar-winning production designer, by the way, said, quote, we heard there were armed Palestinians headed our way.

There we were with Dustin, who just sort of stuck out. Another person said that they'd been looking for locations when this extremely agitated Moroccan general came rushing up saying you have to wait for the mine sweeper. There are mines all around here. You could lose a leg. And they said they had been walking for three days and didn't know. Yeah, exactly. So that's kind of what they are walking into.

Now, some other fun little production snafus that crop up on set, there's the problem of having to locate a blue-eyed camel who features rather prominently in the movie as a blind camel. It's not blind in real life. I can't remember her name, but apparently Warren Beatty really liked the camel. Camel did a great job. So the story goes that animal trainer, Corky Randall, went to a market in Marrakesh. And the first camel they saw that fit the bill, had blue eyes, looked great. But being the savvy, you know, production people that they are, they're like, well, we're not just going to buy the first one we see.

We're going to walk around and see if we can get the best deal. So they decided to shop around. and then to their horror, they realize that blue-eyed camels are extremely rare and very hard to find. So they circle back to the same stall they went to at the beginning to try and buy the first one, at which point the seller informed them that they couldn't buy it because he had eaten it. Yeah, great. Makes sense. You want this one? You can have it now.

Happens fast. Otherwise, it's going to be lunch. It's going to be lunch. Oh, God. Now, to give you an idea of sort of the feeling of things on set, I came across quite a lot of commentary from particularly Silbert, who we mentioned, who claimed that Elaine May was impossible to please. And one of these said stories is that she had sent him out to find, quote unquote, the perfect sand dunes. So according to this guy, he's like, I looked everywhere.

I looked outside Los Angeles. I looked all over Morocco, all over North Africa. He finally finds the perfect sand dunes. He goes to Elaine May and he's like, Elaine, I found them. and she's like dunes what dunes make it flat and she tells him to you know completely flatten it out raise the desert and and flatten it out um it should be noted that accord to several other sources that did not happen like that i think it's very interesting that there are so many conflicting stories about elaine may on set um somebody else was like yeah that didn't

happen it was flat when we got there um many other people said that Paul Stillbert absolutely fucking hated Elaine May. So take anything you hear from him with a grain of salt, I would say. But that being said, she was very demanding. It does seem to be the general impression for everyone. I mentioned that Paul Stillbert is an Academy Award winning production designer. This is because Warren Beatty did everything in his power to surround Elaine May with what he considered the best possible team to make this movie. He's, this is his whole, I am going to set you up for success thing. He, in addition to Paul Silbert, he also hires Vittorio Storaro as the cinematographer.

Great cinematographer. Sure, who had done Apocalypse Now and Beatty's Reds, also Agatha with Dustin Hoffman, among many other very dramatic movies, it should be noted. But so my point being that having so many experts around her may have actually left her a little hamstrung. From what I read, it seems like she was essentially trying to stand her ground and play the part of a strong director. However, with all of these extremely experienced people around her, they're kind of looking at her like, why are you telling me what to do? And so that immediately...

It's hard to bark orders when everybody else can just say, like, I'm sorry, my friend Oscar here was telling me to do the other thing. Yeah. And literally, Warren Beatty has an Oscar at this point. Right. I think Dustin Hoffman had an Oscar for Kramer versus Kramer. your production designer has an Oscar, your DP will probably get an Oscar. It's like, yeah, that's not an easy situation. Now, her relationship with Vittorio is actually one of the most unpleasant on set.

He's talked about the movie quite a bit. By midway through the shoot, he said that he actually started putting the camera in the opposite place of where he wanted it, knowing that he would be able to bring her out, have her look at it. And she would go, I don't want that there. I want that there. And point to the other side. and he'd go, whatever you say, and then he'd put it where he'd initially wanted it.

Like, that's where they ended up. So weird. It's very strange. But, you know, a lot of the articles that I read, I read an excerpt from a biography of Warren Beatty, and all of it was kind of talking about, you know, from this guy's perspective, like, why won't this woman listen to an expert? The flip side of that is that he was not known for doing comedies at all. And that is her specialty and expertise, and that she was very much trying to

shoot a comedy, which was opposite what he was trying to shoot. So I think there's two very different ways of looking at this. I think she was trying to shoot a different movie. And that's kind of what happens throughout the whole thing. Now, tensions begin to arise on set in addition between Elaine and all of the production crew, also between Elaine and Warren Beatty. He frequently was siding with people like the cinematographer or the production designer against her. Remember, all people that he kind of put in place on the team, not people she got the chance to handpick. Now Hoffman claims that he became sort of a go-between for Elaine and Warren Beatty as tensions grew on set, saying, quote, I would have to ask, Elaine, what do you want me to say? I'd go to Warren.

What do you want me to say? Warren and Elaine, you couldn't get closer than those two. And suddenly it was like, who's afraid of Virginia Woolf, but no shouting. It was worse than shouting. They stopped talking to each other. ICE. There were times there when I was the go-between, me of all people who have my own reputation was going back and forth saying, come on, guys. It's relatively self-aware, Dustin Hoffman in that moment. Actually, all of his interviews about this are very self-aware, and it seems like he did. I think he didn't hate his time on the set, and I think that both he and Warren Beatty actually liked the movie, which we'll get to a little later.

Now, our friend, The Dooms Man, is back again to talk about how much Elaine May hated Isabel Adjani. And I want to give this story, again, as sort of. an idea of the picture that was painted of Elaine May, whether or not it's fair. Now, he claims that Elaine May was just a total bag of dicks to Isabella Johnny because Elaine, essentially, according to this man, wanted to be in a Warren Beatty Dustin Hoffman sandwich. I don't think that this is accurate in any way. She gives no indication that she wanted to have any kind of sexual or romantic relationship

with either of them. Or sandwiches. Or sandwiches. in fact she made it pretty clear through her entire career that she did not want to sleep with the men she she was working with because she was very afraid of being labeled that and we should be very clear if she wanted to sleep with Warren Beatty Warren Beatty probably would have not probably he 100 would have slept with her there's a story that this is pre his marriage to Annette Banning yeah it would not have been a struggle there's a story Dustin Hoffman told I'm not going to get it

exactly right, but about them shooting on this where like Dustin Hoffman's kind of unloading on Warren Beatty about how frustrated he is. And then he just stops in the middle of the conversation and looks at this woman who's wearing a full burka riding by on a horse. And Dustin Hoffman's like, what are you looking at? Like we're in the middle of the conversation. And Warren's like, sorry, I just, I saw that woman. And Dustin Hoffman's like, is there any woman on the planet you would not sleep with? And Warren Beatty like thinks about it for a second. And he's like, probably not. and Dustin Hoffman's like, why? And Warren Beatty goes, because you just never know.

Hey. So to Chris's point, yes, a hundred percent if she'd wanted to, that would not have been an issue. But my point is more like all of these stories start cropping up from people that worked on the set about like, oh, she's vicious to the other woman on set because she wanted the attention of Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman. When there's no actual evidence of that from what I could see. Now, was Isabella Johnny kind of ignored because she was too? busy fighting with the rest of the production and or Warren Beatty. Yes, I don't think she got a bunch of attention on this. Now, Elaine also had a habit of shooting more takes than David Fincher. As we mentioned with Mikey and Nikki, she shot 1.4 million feet of film. She actually

shot so many takes in this movie. This is very sad. There was a scene, I think that must have gotten cut because I don't remember seeing it, but a scene involving a cobra and a snake charmer. Yes. Not in the movie. The cobra actually had a heart attack. and died after being required to do too many takes of the same scene. Nature's deadliest hunter, killed by Elaine May's relentless perfectionism. The poor Snake Charmer showed up in their trailer with a dead cobra being like, you killed it. Like, it's dead. So they had to pay him more money.

Production costs are just continuing to run up as they shoot more and more. Now, Beatty and May continue budding heads regularly, and at one point when it came time to shoot the battle scenes, and they were kind of arguing, she just screamed at him to just do it. He could have stepped in, and a lot of people were suggesting that he stepped in and kind of take over as the director at this point. To his credit, he says no. He's like, the whole point of this was to set her up to be able to do it. So it's going to be her project. I'm going to let her do it. Of course, at the same time,

he's not exactly letting her do it. Yeah. Yeah. No, you got to do it, Elaine. Also, not going to say that line. Yeah. Yeah. But you got to direct this movie, but not saying it.

There were a lot of stories where it's like, Warren, you're being a pain in the ass too. Like, I'm sure she was difficult, but there were things where they would have a conversation about some scene and she would be like, okay, so your cue is going to be wake up, and then they'd start shooting. And then she'd be behind the camera and she would say, like,

awake. Warren Beatty wouldn't open his eyes and she'd be like, awake and he wouldn't do it. And then he'd be like, I thought you said wake up. We just had a whole conversation about that. And you're going to tell him. And she was like, I'm going to kill you. So he's pissed because he feels like I set her up with everything she could possibly need. And now she's turning around and being, you know, a pain in the ass to him. She's pissed because she feels like all she's doing the entire time is just defending her own ability to direct. And frankly, it seems like they made the movie much bigger than it should have been. It's not really what she was good at.

On December 23rd, 1989, everybody arrives back in New York with a bunch of stuff left unshot and everybody super pissed at each other. I was wondering, did they leave scenes unshot in general? Because the end of the movie feels a little weirdly truncated. We will get to why there are sections of the movie that feel strange. I think it has more to do with post-production than it does what was not shot. So they've wrapped up in Morocco. They've returned to New York.

Everybody fucking hates each other at this point. Warren Beatty goes to the president and CEO of Columbia and says, you've got a problem. Elaine can't direct. And the CEO is like, okay, you're the producer on the movie. Fire her. Warren Beatty's like, I'm not going to fire her. I got her this movie for her to be her movie. Instead, he says, I would like to now shoot double the content,

his version of Ischar and hers. What? Yes. So they start shooting some pickup. No. Yeah, he wants a different movie. They don't do a lot of it. But by 1986, the film was shot 108 hours of it, to be exact.

Okay, so a quick thing. When you shoot a movie, your shooting ratio is how much footage you shoot versus how long the movie is it being. and the most famous example probably for like, you know, the most footage shot, at least at the time, was Apocalypse Now, which we talked about, which shot millions and millions. And I think it shot like, you know, almost 300 hours basically compared to the final film. But the final film is quite long. It is. Yeah, yeah. But still, I think, you know, 300 versus three hours.

So it's like 100 to 1 shooting, you know, ratio. And then Primer, the little indie film from the early 2000s about time travel was almost one. to one. It was they had so little money that they basically were shooting and keeping everything that they were shooting. So 108 hours of footage is a lot for a two-hour film at the end of the day. Now, Post also takes 10 months and Ishtar misses its Christmas release date. According to the New York Times, at one point, there were three separate teams of editors each preparing a different cut of the film. One for Elaine May, one for Warren Beatty, and one for Dustin Hoffman. And this is not like, this is not like they're collaborating.

I just hope that the reels were called the dusty cut. Because that would be so fun. This is like full teams of editors, like fully cutting different movies. It got so bad that at one point, Bert Fields, who is actually a very famous and powerful Hollywood entertainment attorney, allegedly ends up coming into the editing room and deciding which chunks of who's cut to use. Warren Beatty has denied this, but there were a lot of other people that said, yes, this happened. He literally sat there. He would start screening, usually start with Elaine Mays cut. And if anybody, like, raised a hand to flag an issue, he would stop it. They would watch the other

takes and they would swap something else in. That's how they were doing this. They're like live lane switching. Yes. That's awful. It was just like by a show of hands who likes what take. Oh, God. Yeah. It's like, you're not allowed to vote for yourself. Yeah. God, that sounds. and still miserable. And if you want to hear more instances of this, Fantastic Four, famously the director was working on his own cut while the studio was doing another one. So you'll listen to that episode. Now, as we know about films that missed their release date, the press smelled blood in the water. They go wild. They love it. The New York Times is so horny

for a missed release date. Oh, yeah. So they start paying closer and closer attention to what they have now quickly decided was going to be a catastrophe. We saw this on the other end of the spectrum with as well, where it very much was being panned as an absolute flop before it ever hit the big screen. Unfortunately, with this one, it actually does have the desired effect. Now, the worst possible thing happens at this time when they're about halfway through post-production, and that is that they lose their protector. Guy McElwain at Columbia gets kind of elbowed out of the way by, let's say, a rather uptight man named David Putnam.

David hated Warren Beatty, not to put too fine a point on it. He had like a personal hatred of him. He had produced Chariots of Fire, which was up against Warren Beatty's Reds. Chariots of Fire did actually win, I believe, win Best Picture over Reds, but he still kind of viewed Warren Beatty's lifestyle and that movie as sort of like the epitome of American Excess. And he was very upset by it. that kind of like celebrated a communist figure, you know, an American communist figure. Didn't like that.

David Putman was an American. Yeah. I actually think he was British. I'll double check on that. Yeah, I would say if it's chariots of fire, then I think he's British. He also once referred to Dustin Hoffman as, quote, a worrisome American pest and also called him, like, malevolent at one point. Which I guess he might not have been wrong about, given the press around circa 2017. I don't think that's what he was referring to, however.

Now, it's important to mention all of this because it is alleged, it is not confirmed, but it is alleged that Putnam may actually have been leaking quite a lot of the nasty stuff directly to the press about the movie. It seems somewhat likely that he was out to sabotage this film, which at the end of the day was stupid. Yeah, and there have been instances that in Last Action Hero, there was an unnamed, disgruntled source at Sony, who they later found out, was just like leaking random garbage about the movie. It happened with town and country, with New Line Cinema a little bit. So it does happen,

even though it's not a smart play. It's not a smart play at all. First of all, because like, had this been a success, it would not have hurt David Putnam at all. Well, it would have in that Warren and Dustin would have done well. It might have irritated him personally, but would have hurt his career? No. He actually ends up getting. shit canned a couple years later because he is a bit of a problem himself. So there you go. He might be a perfectly nice man. He didn't get great press in what I was reading about this. So the movie premieres in May of 1987 to extremely mixed reviews and tepid box office success. And I want to read an excerpt from, I believe this is Roger Ebert's review.

Ishtar is a truly dreadful film, a lifeless, massive, lumbering exercise in failed comedy. Elaine May, the director, has mounted a multi-million dollar expedition in search of a plot so thin that it hardly could support a five-minute TV sketch. And Beatty and Hoffman, good soldiers marching along on the trip, look as if they've had all wit and thought beaten out of them. This movie is a long, dry slog. It's not funny. It's not smart. And it's interesting only in the way a traffic accident is interesting. Well, I'm not going to besmirch the late. No, but like, did you watch the movie? Yeah, but also to be fair, we watched the director's cut.

I don't know how different. It's three minutes different. I looked this up, by the way. There's not a huge difference. Okay, but it might be, I was seeing in terms of takes used, et cetera. There can be a big difference, even if the running time is not that different. True. I'm going to go out in a limb here and say I don't think that that's accurate.

Yeah. And also like, come on, Iver, you wrote in the Valley of the Dolls. Like, relax a little bit. Deep cut. I also really don't like about this review, but it is. very indicative of the talk at the time that he's placing the blame squarely on Elaine May's shoulder. If you reread that, it's him saying like, Badie and Hoffman, good soldiers, you know, doing their job or whatever. And then Elaine May is the one who has spent millions of dollars on this, you know, absolutely plotless piece of crap.

It grosses only $12.7 million in its initial run. And it had cost somewhere by the end of around 50 to 55, million dollars to make. It's a lot. It's bad. It's bad. It did not make its money back. However, is it the biggest financial flop we've covered on here? No. No, no, no, no. Warren and May's relationship was irreparably damaged. Their mutual friend Buck Henry, who I believe we've talked about before, once said that in the future May would say things like, quote, are we having a good time in life or are we working with Warren. Wow. Now Warren Beatty goes on as we have discussed to continue having hits after this. Dustin Hoffman turns around and makes Rain Man less than a year after this.

I was wondering if that was, yeah, because I thought that was the late 80s. It is. It is less than a year later. So what happened to Elaine May? She never directed a movie again. She did go on to write the screenplay for the birdcage and primary colors. But she would never again direct feature. Now, I want to play a clip of Dustin Hoffman presenting Warren Beatty with the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award and just give you an idea of how he introses it. It's ironic that they asked me to speak at the films that bombed part of the evening. Ishtar shall rise again. That's really all I wanted to play.

And it will. It will. Especially after people listen to this podcast. I hope so. Honestly, you should go watch this movie. You should. And in that clip, if you actually watch the video, when they cut to Warren Beatty after Dustin often says that, he looks like he is in tears, like about to start crying.

I think they, at the end of the day... Oh, he's genuinely pumping his fist. I'm looking at the still screen right now. He's not embarrassed. He's like, yes, Ishtar will have its day. I think, honestly, despite everything that I read about Warren Beatty and Elaine May budding heads, I think that they both came to this movie with the best of intentions. and I think that they actually both stand behind the final product.

And it's good. And I get the sense that Beatty liked his performance in it too, because it's unlike anything he did across the rest of his career. He played kind of this like bumbling kid from Virginia Town, which there's another version of his life where that's what he could have been. And I don't know. I can totally see why this holds a special place in his heart. Yeah.

So I guess the point of this is give Ishtar, a chance. Don't believe the rumors that it's a piece of crap. It's not. It's very enjoyable. And go watch Heartbreak Kid and some of Elaine May's other work because she

this made me sad because it seems to me like we really lost the opportunity to have a truly incredible female comedy director. We lost 90% of her career because they just cut her.

off. Yeah. Well, and you think about the type of, for example, the type of television that's being made right now and what she, imagine if she had been born. Yeah. 40 years later. I mean, she would be making fleabag, Penn 15. You know what I mean? Something along those lines. Broad City. She pioneered this, you know, sketch comedy so early on. And I just, yeah, obviously we were denied a lot of great, funny, very funny, smart films, I think. I also, I think she does something that you touched on earlier, which is that she, she chose to tell stories with male leads in general, but from a very sort of feminine perspective. Yeah. And it's, it's very funny. It's very sort of soft. There's a lighter touch to all of it that I think we don't get from a lot of the broad comedies of the time.

And people didn't respond well to it. But in retrospect, it's great. it's it this movie would do so well now because it's a romance and this movie is i love you man it's stepbrothers it's all the jet apatown made his living on these male to male relationships that no one was doing in the 80s like neither of them ever actually have sex with anyone in this movie that's the whole joke is that they both are terrible at getting women and dustin hawkman makes up a nickname for himself which is Hawk because he's so good at sleeping with women. And Warren Beatty is so obsessed with him that he genuinely thinks women call him

Hawk. And so he calls him Hawk. And like he's just so in love with him. I love when he tells him early on the story, Dustin Hoffman, this was like, I thought this line was so well written. I'm going to jump into what one right really quick, which I thought the writing was very sharp. I actually thought the dialogue was spot on. And there was a line. And Warren Beatty has some of my favorite throwaway lines in this movie. He says, you'd rather have nothing than settle for less. Understand as he's trying to pump up Dustin Hoffman. And not a lot of people would be willing to go as low as you've gone. It's such a good anti-pump up speech and it works. And I don't know, I thought it was wonderful. And I think it would have been such a fun read too. I think the characters really would

have jumped off the page. Yeah. That moment is actually something that Dustin Hoffman called on later when talking about how he really does stand behind the film and does like it, which also like, I have to give him and Warren Beatty quite a lot of credit for not dumping on this film, which we- No, it would have been easier for them to turn around and say, oh, we didn't really have anything to do with this. And they did not do that. They didn't do that at all. They stood behind it and they still stand behind it. And that's something that Dustin Hoffman pointed out. He was like, it's, you know, it's a movie about not choosing to sort of settle for the middle ground to be willing to be just absolute.

bottom of the barrel trash as long as you're pursuing what you're passionate for and that he thought that was a movie worth making, which I agree. For my what went right, I have to go with Charles Groden and the sort of bumbling portrayal of the CIA, which like honestly was not seen a ton before this. That's something else we didn't really touch on. But underneath all of this, I think there is an undercurrent in the movie for very much skewering the CIA and also the American involvement in the Middle East, which as we know was spot on. Like, she nailed it. But boy, did people not really want to hear that or see it at the time. But again, please watch it. It is truly funny. I highly recommend it.

I'm a big, I'm going to start the Ishtar fan club because I thought this movie was a absolute wrong. And I think something that we didn't really touch on in this because it actually is something that went very right and not wrong at all is that Paul Williams was brought in to write the sort of so bad they're good but not quite good songs, which Justin Offen and Warren Beatty also co-wrote certain parts of them. But I just have to say the songs are very funny, not in like an intentionally, they somehow managed to not be intentionally funny, but be so bad. It's really worth watching from beginning to end. And shout out to Paul Williams for the music. If you admit that you play the accordion, no one will.

We'll hire you in a rock and roll band. That's the one that keeps coming up. So good. Guys, thanks so much for listening. Lizzie, anything else on Ishtar? No, that's it. I really enjoyed it. Our party recommendation. Yeah, give it a watch. This is one of the few that we have covered so far that I really enjoyed. And I would say is definitely worth your time. As always, thank you for listening to what went wrong. If you're enjoying this podcast, I know we're broken records. Head over to iTunes. give us a rating and a review. We got a great Instagram review that was basically like, listen to a couple episodes.

They were trash. Listen to a third one. And it was really good. So I'm going to keep listening. So apparently, guys, rule of threes that applies to our podcast. So if this is only the second one you've listened to, give us one more try. And send us your recommendations.

Thanks again. Lizzie, who sent us this one? Life is Strange 2021. Yes, it is, sir. First name is Logan. I will not read your full name as our hordes of fans listening may be able to steal your identity. So just Logan for now. You could get doxed by 40 people. Yeah. Logan, thank you very much for the recommendation. Guys, we will see you next week.

Bye. What went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing music by David Bowman with cover art from Yvonne UOse.