‘Ishtar’ at 30 and the Legacy of the Giant Hollywood Flop

Thirty years ago this week, a bomb dropped in the middle of American movie theaters, a (for its time) big-budgeted, ambitious act of Hollywood hubris that combined the work of three of of the most acclaimed talents of the New Hollywood: producer/star Warren Beatty, star/pain-in-the-ass Dustin Hoffman, and writer-director Elaine May. The film that resulted was panned by critics, bombed at the box-office, and became Hollywood shorthand for disaster: Ishtar.

The story goes that Beatty felt indebted to May for her contributions to Heaven Can Wait (and Hoffman similarly for her uncredited work on Tootsie), and wanted to give her the opportunity to direct something with minimal interference from the studios. So May set to work on writing Ishtar, the story of two bumbling and unsuccessful American songwriters chasing down a career opportunity in Morocco, whereupon they end up embroiled in a Cold War CIA action in the fictional neighboring country of Ishtar. The idea was a modern spin on the classic Bob Hope/Bing Crosby “The Road to …” pictures, with Beatty and Hoffman as the central duo, Charles Grodin as the CIA guy, and French actress Isabelle Adjani as an Ishtari revolutionary who gets the guys mixed up in foreign intrigue.

From here, there are two stories that have been told: what happened behind the scenes and what ended up on screen. The first one has been told much more often, so much so that it’s a Hollywood legend. Beatty and May squabbled behind the scenes, the filming on Morocco was a total nightmare, the competing interests of Beatty, May, and Hoffman got more and more opposed to one another, Columbia Pictures brought on a producer with grudges against Beatty and Hoffman, and who subsequently disavowed Ishtar before it was even completed, stories leaked constantly about its ballooning budget, and by the time it was ready to lumber its way into theaters, it had become a big, bloated white whale, ready for the Ahabs of the critical community to harpoon it. And harpoon it they did! Siskel and Ebert called it one of the worst films of 1987, and it was almost immediately met with comparisons to Heaven’s Gate, the notorious 1980 disaster that was blamed for killing United Artists, director Michael Cimino’s career, and the American New Wave of cinema.

In the case of Ishtar, it didn’t really do much of anything to the careers of its two stars. Dustin Hoffman won his second Oscar the very next year for Rain Man, while Beatty would ride high with Dick Tracy and Bugsy back-to-back in 1990 and 1991. Predictably, it was the woman whose career was most decimated by Ishtar‘s failure, as Elaine May, one of the brightest comedic talents Hollywood had ever seen, never directed another movie again (though she’d see success later with her screenplays for The Birdcage and Primary Colors).

With all of this disaster, it wasn’t difficult to predict that a cult of re-appraisal would come Ishtar‘s way. The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody wrote about it in 2015 as one of his favorite films, calling it a victim of negative publicity by its own studio and a “masterwork” from Elaine May. One of these things is true. Ishtar‘s reputation as an all-time disaster was indeed more a product of a whisper campaign that caught traction in the critical community, that a movie so over-budget and beset with behind-the-scenes problems was ripe for a takedown. Ishtar isn’t the worst movie ever made. It’s not in the top 10 of worst movies made in 1987. Not the same year as Jaws IV: The Revenge and the Fat Boys comedy Disorderlies. But it is also far from a masterwork.

Watching Ishtar again for is 30th anniversary, there’s a lot to appreciate. Beatty and Hoffman have a fun, goofy chemistry, and any scene that includes them attempting to write a song — and there are quite a few — makes you wish they’d made more screwball comedies together.

But the pacing of this thing is atrocious. It takes the film forever and a day to get to Ishtar, and once there, there is hardly any forward momentum to the story until Beatty and Hoffman end up wandering the desert. There’s either too little or too much time spent on Grodin’s CIA plot, stuck in a no-man’s land where it doesn’t matter enough to justify its presence yet matters too much to be so lazily conceived. At root, there is just no fun to be had with this film. If the idea is to be screwball, be screwball. If the idea is to be a lightweight adventure yarn with comedic asides and a pair of movie stars at the center, do that. For as much as the idea of Ishtar is indebted to Hope and Crosby, the movies I kept thinking of were the Kathleen Turner/Michael Douglas movies Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile, both made a couple years before Ishtar, and both possessing the exact balance of high-spirited comedy and dime-store intrigue that May’s movie desperately needed.

But aside from the quality of the film, the thing that most jumps out about the whole Ishtar phenomenon is the idea of Hollywood engaging in a ritual bloodletting. Every so often, one film has to pay the price for the excesses and the egos — the batteries that Hollywood runs on. Most of the time, budget overages and behind-the-scenes clashes are the cost of doing business, swept under the rug or rationalized away. Everyone knows that movies cost too much and egos are out of control; nobody likes it, but we all agree to live with it, because the movies are so good. But every once in a while, it all goes bad, and on those occasions, the Hollywood machine throws one unfortunate project into the volcano. The press writes breathlessly about overages and delays and hubris; the critical community gets its knives out; the public cues up the rotten fruit. And so movies like Heaven’s Gate and Ishtar and The Bonfire of the Vanities get sacrificed so that we can get to work looking the other way for the rest of them.

Sometimes a movie can beat back the bloodletting. Certainly, Titanic was being set up as the volcano sacrifice of 1997, wildly over-budget and delayed by half a year. Cameron is still talking about how the press and the studio had it out for his movie. But James Cameron managed to defy the fate that awaited him simply by virtue of his movie being just that good. (Don’t worry, though; 1997 got its ritual sacrifice anyway, as The Postman went and killed Kevin Costner’s career.) Cameron so definitively beat back his doomsayers that when he came out in 2009 with another massively-budgeted piece of insanity, nobody wanted to be on the wrong side of history again, so Avatar floated into theaters on the benefit of the doubt (and proved Cameron right again, at least box-office-wise).

In our current blockbuster age, it’s harder to come by these sacrificial lambs, probably because it’s harder to lay claims of hubris on a movie that’s the product of corporate group decision-making. If a Marvel movie bombs (we’ll call you if that happens), it’ll be tough to say that it collapsed under the weight of its hubristic director, since in most cases, it’s not the director’s grand vision at play. There are fewer and fewer personal projects getting the kinds of budgets to fail as big as Ishtar did. Ironically, if anyone’s going to do it again, it would have to be James Cameron; certainly the press for his ever-expanding (and ever-delayed) Avatar sequels seems to be setting up that way. Perhaps by the time we reach Ishtar‘s 40th anniversary, Hollywood will have found the latest successor to the bomb of all bombs.

Where to stream Ishtar