Book Review: The Hollywood Hall of Shame by Harry and Michael Medved

Note: I was inspired to re-read this book and post this review after reading Realweegiemidget Reviews review of Boom!, a film that was one of the focused entries in this book. Gil encouraged me to follow through with this long overdue review of the book. 

 

 

 

 

The Hollywood Hall of Shame by Harry and Michael Medved 

Not long ago I reviewed a recently released book titled Box Office Poison by Tim Robey. The subject matter being the same as this book, a background into what went into making movies that had big hopes and big budgets, but eventually bombed at the box office, made for some interesting reading. That review of Robey's book mentioned this book in passing, because as I pointed out, this book was published in 1984, and in the 40+ years since it's publication there had been any number of financial fiascos from Tinseltown, so an update was overdue. 

This volume covers 23 films (up to 1982, which was fairly recent at the time) that had pumped tons of money into the production, but through varied reasons, failed to impact the movie going public to shell out their hard earned dollars to go see in the theater. Some of those films started out so far in the hole that making a profit would have been a effort of "epic" proportions. Cleopatra, for instance, had cost so much to produce, that even if the price of a ticket had been double the normal price, it probably STILL would have lost money.

The book starts out with the one movie that nearly every book that covers the subject of financial movie flops HAS to address; 1916's D. W. Griffith mammoth production of Intolerance. The background to that film is indicative of several other films in this "Hall of Shame"; that of a director who insisted on pulling out every stop to get authenticity in the film, including whatever it took to create believable settings. Intolerance included a recreation of a Babylonian setting with tons of moolah building the set. And, according to research, that set still stood years later as a sort of "monument" to extravagance.

Many of the films selected to be included for focus in this volume endured extravagance in production in other areas than just the desires megalomaniac directors trying to achieve authenticity. Three of the films suffered from the machinations of overly egomaniac stars. Three of the 23 films suffered severe setbacks because the star(/stars) of the film created problems that wasted studio money; Elizabeth Taylor (along with Richard Burton in two of them) did more to bring down studio hopes of financial windfalls. These three films, Cleopatra, Boom! and The Only Game in Town are featured here because Taylor had become so intransigent that her demands made the producers bend to her will (and her frequent "illnesses").

A section is devoted to two religious epics. To "infidels" like me the failure of 1977's Mohammed: Messenger of God seem like an obvious failure to hope to capture the American and European dollar, but it seems to me, given the time of it's release, that The Greatest Story Ever Told might have fared a little better, given the fact that two contemporary Biblical epics, The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur had been such money makers. (One of the things the authors point out that I find interesting is that at one point the producers tried to pull in viewers by promoting the presence of John Wayne in the film, even though he is only on screen for less than a minute of the running time...)

The last two entries in the book focus on the then recent releases of Inchon and Heaven's Gate. Inchon in particular is an interesting movie as far as it's production, since it was financed by Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his cult, the Unification Church. The Reverend and his church pumped millions into an epic war movie, which to my mind would seem to be at odds with a church and a message of peace. But the granddaddy of them all would have to be Heaven's Gate. This was the follow-up of Michael Cimino to his Oscar winning The Deer Hunter, (and a review of both of those movies is in the works for a future post).

The Medved brothers have put out several books on movies, and posts past and future from such books as The Fifty Worst Movies of All Time and The Golden Turkey Awards have been inspired from reading those volumes. As far as this book, well, I will say that I have avoided Paint Your Wagon for years because the basic premise did not intrigue me, but after reading the chapter on it included in this volume, I now think it's a movie I just gotta check out some day...

Happy reading, folks.

Quiggy