Ishtar
Musical comedy takes scenic route toward big screen mediocrity
For the month of July, Video Days piles in a vehicle and for those who can’t take a vacation, journeys to unfamiliar places with four comedies about strangers in strange lands.
ISHTAR (1987) has the patina of an unaired television comedy pilot whose cult following or legend is more fascinating than anything ultimately in the effort itself. Its best moments reside in its first twenty minutes, and are so droll and so unlike any major motion picture produced at the time–good or bad–that its two lead actors and a writer/director should be admired for their attempt. The result is not only a failure, but a spectacular failure. Rarely has a film stockpiled this many resources to squeeze one more joke out of what is just a one-joke comedy.
Playwright and performer Elaine May ascended to theater, television and recording stardom in 1959 as half of the pioneering improvisational comedy duo Nichols and May. As Broadway and Hollywood welcomed her creative partner Mike Nichols as a director, May was courted as an actor, screenwriter and director. She co-starred (opposite Walter Matthau) in, wrote and directed A New Leaf (1970). May next directed Charles Grodin in The Heartbreak Kid (1972) from a script by Neil Simon. Both comedies were well reviewed and attended. Her next film would not be. Mikey and Nicky (1976) was an off-beat, buddy crime drama May wrote and directed, casting Peter Falk and John Cassavetes in the leads. Taking place in a cheap hotel room, a bar, a bus and a cemetery, production somehow stretched over ten months, in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. A full year into May’s efforts to finish the film, Paramount Pictures filed a lawsuit in New York Superior Court to assert ownership of the negative and remove May from any further involvement in its editing. The reputation of Mikey and Nicky as a boondoggle was upheld by most print critics, and audiences stayed away.
Legends about the film’s production and its unrecognized genius led May, Falk and distributor Julian Schlossberg of Castle Hill Productions to purchase the distribution rights from Paramount, restoring and re-releasing Mikey and Nicky. May’s cut would screen at the Directors Guild of America’s 50th anniversary tribute in 1986. She hadn’t directed another feature film, but in the interim, Elaine May had become one of the most respected and well paid script doctors in the film industry. She penned a remake of Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), released as Heaven Can Wait (1978), reworking a script by the film’s star Warren Beatty and integrating his ideas with hers. The comic fantasy was produced by Paramount, which may have been too busy counting all the money the movie raked in to hold a grudge against May. Though uncredited on Reds (1981), she’d been entrusted with the responsibilities of a co-writer/ co-director, Beatty turning to May for input every step of the way directing the historical epic. Accepting an Academy Award, his first, for Best Director, Beatty thanked her in his speech. Later that year, Tootsie (1982), the Dustin Hoffman comedy which May had also written material for, was an enormous success, May’s uncredited contributions to the script widely reported.
Noodling ideas for Warren Beatty’s next starring role, May pictured a change of pace from the ambitious and overwrought Reds to something light and silly. She was a fan of Paramount’s Road To … musical comedies of the 1940s, often billed as the “Bob Hope-Bing Crosby road pictures,” but all seven co-starring Dorothy Lamour. Whether casting Hope and Crosby as touring musicians or flim flam men, or both, the series placed the duo in international intrigue, gently spoofing the popular adventure films of the day. The “exotic” locales were adorably spoofed on the Paramount lot. May drew a comparison between the charming but naïve boys of the Road To … series to the current U.S. president, former B-movie actor Ronald Reagan, and the turmoil the United States was leaping into around the world, namely the Middle East. Unbeknownst to her, Beatty had been sketching ideas for a political satire in which a film director shooting a revolutionary picture in Central America gets caught up in the real deal. May joined Beatty and their lawyer, Bert Fields, for dinner in New York, and pitching them her idea about two witless singer/ songwriters who get mixed up in a North African adventure, all agreed that Dustin Hoffman would be ideal to join Beatty as the other half of the musical duo.
Whether Beatty felt like giving May a gift for her work on Heaven Can Wait and Reds, or thought she’d never been given an opportunity to direct with a strong producer and major star protecting her, Beatty became enamored with producing and starring in whatever script she came up with based on her Road To … homage. While May spent three months writing, Beatty secured financing and distribution from Columbia Pictures, where Guy McElwaine, a former executive vice-president at International Creative Management and friend of Beatty’s, had ascended to president of Columbia and by 1985, studio chairman. McElwaine met with May and she assured him that she’d work with and not against the studio. Upon reading May’s script, Dustin Hoffman and his creative consultant, playwright/ screenwriter Murray Schisgal, noted a few concerns they wanted to discuss. Chief among these was their opinion that the action in Morocco overwhelmed the story of two losers with delusions of grandeur. Beatty compelled Hoffman to trust in May’s talent if he didn’t quite believe in the material yet.
Hoffman, who by the summer of 1985 hadn’t acted in film in three years, might have entertained the possibility that offers would stop coming in if he held out for the perfect movie (Tootsie was a farce about a difficult actor who no one wants to work with). Despite his misgivings, Hoffman signed on to what May had titled Ishtar. Isabelle Adjani, Charles Grodin, Jack Weston, Carol Kane and Tess Harper also joined the cast. With McElwaine earmarking somewhere between $23 million and $27 million to produce the picture, Beatty assembled the best artisans available for May. Vittorio Storaro, who’d lit Apocalypse Now (1979) and Reds, came aboard with his Italian crew as the director of photography. Paul Sylbert, production designer of Mikey and Nicky, Heaven Can Wait and Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), designed the sets. Jazz pianist and composer Dave Grusin was commissioned to score the film. Though May had written lyrics for several (bad) songs in her script, Paul Williams was hired to write far more. Williams had written several songs each for the musicals Phantom of the Paradise (1974), Bugsy Malone (1976), A Star Is Born (1976) and The Muppet Movie (1979), including “Rainbow Connection” for Kermit the Frog in the latter.
Accustomed to spending a few days on a set, Williams estimated he spent a year and a half at May’s service writing and producing at least fifty demos. Of the twenty-three songs in Ishtar–ten scripted by May, three ab-libs–five original compositions by Williams would end up in the movie. Shooting commenced in October 1985 in Morocco. While the filmmakers found the government of reigning King Hassan II cooperative, Morocco was a Third World nation, and didn’t have infrastructure to support a major motion picture for ten weeks with much efficiency. Cast and crew returned to New York on December 23, 1985 and after a one-month break, filming resumed at Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens for another three months. In May 1986, the picture’s historically bad press cycle began. Coca-Cola, which had bought Columbia Pictures nearly four years earlier, dismissed Guy McElwaine as the studio’s chairman. Despite his regime producing two of the biggest films of 1984–Ghostbusters and The Karate Kid–1985 had been a lousy year for the studio, The Slugger’s Wife, The Bride, Perfect and Silverado performing below expectations at the box office, while McElwaine’s most successful picture, White Nights, came at a considerable financial cost. Starting 1986, Quicksilver, Violets Are Blue and a once bankable superstar in Richard Pryor directing and starring in Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling failed to reverse the studio’s misfortunes.
Hired to replace McElwaine was David Puttnam, the British producer credited for restoring prestige to the British film industry with movies like Midnight Express (1978) and Chariots of Fire (1981), winning an Academy Award for Best Picture for the latter. Puttnam had publicly lobbed barbs at Warren Beatty during the Oscar race between Chariots of Fire and Reds, outspoken in his belief that Hollywood was spending extravagantly to produce movies that weren’t even his taste, his success driven not by stars but by material, like Local Hero (1983) or The Killing Fields (1984), which Puttnam would produce. Austerity was to be a guiding principle of the new Columbia Pictures. Beatty had been amendable to getting Ishtar into theaters for Thanksgiving 1986, perhaps Christmas, as a gift to Guy McElwaine when he was running the studio, but for David Puttnam, no sense of urgency existed whatsoever. In August, Columbia attached a teaser trailer for Ishtar to prints of the John Candy-Eugene Levy comedy Armed and Dangerous (1986) promising the eagerly awaited Warren Beatty-Dustin Hoffman comedy was coming soon. Beatty then stunned the studio by announcing that Ishtar would open May 22, 1987. Suddenly left without a holiday picture, the new regime at Columbia was not happy.
Conducting damage control with the Los Angeles Times, which like most of the press, considered a major delay in a film’s release to be a major story, Beatty pointed out that he’d never promised the studio that Ishtar would be ready for the holidays, that both he and May were contractually guaranteed at least a year to cut their films, and getting the picture right mattered more than getting it quick. He’d later suggest some of the rumors generated about Ishtar–the director ordering sand dunes to be bulldozed in the Sahara, etc.--had leaked from Columbia. What was true is that May had shot 108 hours of film. The amount of film shot for a typical comedy was considered by some to be 30 hours. May, three editors and many film canisters occupied an entire floor of the Brill Building in midtown Manhattan for the editing of Ishtar. Working from 8 AM to 10 PM Monday through Friday, with a light eight hour work day on the weekends, Ishtar was cut by Richard Cirincione (sound editor on The Heartbreak Kid and Mikey and Nicky) & Stephen A. Rotter, who’d edited Target (1985) together, and William Reynolds, who’d worked as editor on several event films for director Robert Wise: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The Sound of Music (1965), The Sand Pebbles (1966) and Star! (1968).
When Ishtar was screened for test audiences in the spring, May cited positive responses to her film, while the press found nothing negative to report from those early screenings either. That changed when Ishtar opened, on May 15, 1987 in 1,139 theaters in the U.S. Critics leaned negative. On their syndicated television program, Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert turned two thumbs down. Siskel stated that a little of Beatty & Hoffman’s singing did go a long way, but the political intrigue didn’t work, Charles Grodin providing the only satisfying moments. Siskel chalked it up as “a crushing bore.” Ebert called the film “regimented right down into the ground.” He was perplexed that anyone could have found the script funny and nominated Ishtar for their worst-of-the-year list, which it made. Several months later, Ebert credited Elaine May’s debut A New Leaf as having been funny, but offered that size had beaten all the humor out of Ishtar. In her mixed review, Janet Maslin wrote in the New York Times: “If neither does his best work here, Mr. Hoffman has a nice abandon and Mr. Beatty, a studiedly oafish, self-effacing charm. There are moments, if only a few of them, when the two actors and Miss May seem to be in perfect alignment.” Ishtar opened as the #1 grossing movie in the country, narrowly eclipsing a $4 million U.S./ Canadian horror picture titled The Gate that drew in kids headed into their summer vacations.
By its fourth weekend of release, Ishtar was selling fewer tickets than either The Gate or the Michael J. Fox comedy The Secret of My Success (1987), held over since April. After a month, Ishtar fell out of the top ten. Once all the pearl clutching in the press over Hollywood excess had subsided, the film’s New York unit production manager G. Mac Brown, who’d go on to draft and administer the production budget for Scent of a Woman (1992), clarified that Ishtar never went over budget. Per Brown, no one had ever submitted a budget. He tabbed the film’s final production cost at $50 or $51 million. By comparison, Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987), another road comedy that shot an unusually large amount of film, would cost roughly $15 million to produce. Throw Momma From the Train (1987) came in at around $14 million, while Good Morning Vietnam (1987) which qualified as a Road To … movie, cost $13 million to produce. Repeated viewings and time would cement all three as classics, though many moviegoers who made it out to see Ishtar offered that it was good. Quentin Tarantino, Edgar Wright and Lena Dunham were among the directors who’d defend Elaine May’s film in later years, while Martin Scorsese has called it hilarious.
There’s a lovely bulb hidden in a ball of Christmas lights that neither Elaine May or her editors are able to untangle in Ishtar, much less turn on. The film’s brilliant little question is whether it’s better to go through life failing at something we love, or succeeding at something we don’t. Love isn’t just what the world needs more of, it’s what Ishtar needed more of too, along with structure. The movie opens as if at least 15 minutes are missing. The bromance between Lyle Rogers & Chuck Clarke–rarely have two characters been so adroitly named–is missing a “meet cute,” for one thing. If this premise was real, the men might’ve been introduced by their wife (Tess Harper) and girlfriend (Carol Kane) at a social function neither wanted any part of. Realizing they share a passion for songwriting, they would need to be separated–perhaps from the garage Clarke has converted into a dumpy studio–in order to return to their lives, which they now no longer can. Fueling each other’s delusions, their family and friends would try to break the news that they aren’t any good. At the very least, this would’ve given Harper and Kane measurable screen time rather than the cameos they’re reduced to. There was potential here for a gentler companion to Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1983), in which a schmuck risks everything for his art. One lesson May might’ve taken from the Scorsese picture is that Rupert Pupkin (Robert DeNiro) doesn’t take the stage until its climax, and when he does, we’re surprised by how professional this amateur’s set is. Rather than build their act and their friendship, May is backed into a corner because neither Warren Beatty nor Dustin Hoffman were willing for their characters to be introduced second. By introducing them at the same time, performing the catchiest song of the soundtrack (“Dangerous Business,” music and lyrics by Paul Williams), the movie comes out of the gate with its closer.
Once the action shifts to Morocco, Ishtar has nowhere left to go. It enters a death spin that neither the charisma of its stars or instincts of its writer and director can rescue the picture from. A better version of this material would’ve focused on the once dull lives of Rogers & Clarke and their struggle to overcome by writing a special song they can share with the world. The business in the Middle East—with prophecies and a map and a freedom fighter (Isabelle Adjani, whose role is written and performance directed as if she’s been sentenced to community service) and the CIA and a helicopter and a blind camel—droops. One of the missing anecdotes about the production of Ishtar is why Elaine May was so tickled by the idea of a blind camel to labor over it as much as she does. It’s the sort of bit that a stronger director would have left on the cutting room floor, or never shot, realizing the movie wasn’t about a blind camel. Given that May hadn’t directed a film in twelve years, there were probably two ways Ishtar could’ve gone: as a wondrous balance of slapstick and political satire she’d been writing and honing for a decade, or a grossly out of shape endeavor whose expectations and logistical challenges needed a filmmaker in better rhythm. In addition to the material failing Hoffman, the talents of cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and musical composer Dave Grusin are misappropriated in what could’ve been a small mess set in some sleepy corner of America rather than a giant mess staged in North Africa.
Video rental category: Comedy
Special interest: Fictional Bands
Good morning Joe… I never saw Ishtar, not sure why,, but I remember a lot of negative reviews from the pundits and ambivalent responses from my friends that had seen the movie… But, as always, your background information and analysis is enlightening and entertaining… Thanks! Peace! CPZ