Box Office Poison by Tim Robey
Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's a bomb from Hollywood!
Between 1978 and 1986, the brother writing team of Michael and Harry Medved published several books that occupy space on my bookshelf, beginning with The Fifty Worst Movies of All Time, The Golden Turkey Awards, which was followed by the 1986 sequel, The Son of Golden Turkey Awards. In 1984, the two also banded together for another book, The Hollywood Hall of Shame: The Most Expensive Flops in Movie History.
The first three books mentioned dealt with the kind of cheesy low-ball crap that I love to watch and write about. But that last one veered away from the main theme to point out some movies that had HUGE production budgets, but failed to end up on the right side of the ledger when it came to making money at the box office. However, since it was published in 1984, and no sequel ever came from the two, that left about 40 years of flops that were never touched upon by them. I never really thought about it until I finally did acquire that volume, but then I started thinking... What about the failures since 1984?
So it was with great pleasure that I discovered this new book. And although the author does delve into some pre-1984 movies, only 8 of the 25 movies are from that era. And Robey only covers one movie that the Medved brothers covered in their volume. That movie, BTW, is Intolerance, the D.W. Griffith silent film fiasco from 1916. (And, after all, any author with serious ambitions to talk about flops almost HAS to include the first REAL flop of the industry.)
Over the course of his volume, Robey spends about 5 or 6 pages talking about the background of each movie and the factors that lead to these films being such colossal money spenders and why they failed to find a niche in the public eye after their release.
The book is fascinating, although I have to admit that occasionally the author's own politically correct feelings would annoy me. To wit: some of the treatment that women received in certain movies... One in particular is when he laments the way Uma Thurman was treated on the set of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. So Uma was treated as a sex object? Oh, boo hoo! Whether the PC crowd of today, in retrospect, frowns upon such behavior, it was something that happened, and probably quite frequently, before the advent of Political Correctness. And whether it affected the financial failure of said films is debatable.
The best sections of the book cover movies I already had a familiarity with, and, (dare I say it?) even paid money to see in the theater. And a few of them I actually enjoyed, although my $5 ticket wasn't much in the coffers to profit the movie (obviously). Among those that I either saw or even liked that he covered are: Dune (1984), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), Cutthroat Island (1995), Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997), Rollerball (2002), and The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002). (I'll leave it up to you to guess which ones I actually liked, but if you've read this blog much, you probably already have a good idea, even though I haven't actually blogged on any of them... yet.)
With the exception of a few, in my opinion, unnecessary moralistic judgements, I think Robey treats each movie pretty fairly. And he even inspires me to seek out a couple on my own to watch that I never got around to seeing the first time. One in particular, A Sound of Thunder had completely escaped my notice. Which is surprising since the movie involves time travel and I absolutely adore time travel stories and movies.
One other thing to note about this book (one that has nothing to do with the content). The library director at Denison Public Library acquired this book and it just arrived and was processed for circulation last week. My sister, who knows I like books about movies, set it aside for me. Thus, I was honored with being the very first patron to check it out. Thanks, Karen.
Give this book 4 out of 5 stars.
Quiggy
