by Mark Kermode
So why did so many people pay for it?
One answer is ‘diminished expectations’: the film was a summer blockbuster, which everyone (myself included) expected to be utterly terrible before they saw it, and so no one was surprised when it turned out to be every bit as dire as predicted. But why pay to see something that you know in advance is going to be a disappointment? The truth is that, like it or loathe it, Pearl Harbor was ‘an event’ – a film which made headlines long before the cameras turned thanks to its bloated budget, and which managed to stay in the headlines throughout its production courtesy of a unique mix of historical tactlessness, fatuous movie-star flashing (Kate Beckinsale reportedly displayed her naked bottom during a no-pants flypast – whoopee!) and, most importantly, enormous expense. Remember that story about Bay and Bruckheimer cutting their salaries? For whose benefit do you think that story was planted? And what about the story (dutifully repeated on the film’s Internet Movie Database entry) that ‘the after-premiere party for Pearl Harbor is said to have cost more than the production costs for Billy Elliot’. Or that ‘Michael Bay quit the project four times over various budgetary disputes’. Or, best of all, that ‘the total amount of money spent on production and promotion roughly equalled the amount of damage caused in the actual attack’.
Even though some of these stories may appear at first glance to be mocking the movie and its grotesque expense, they are all in fact a publicist’s wet dream, and you can be pretty much guaranteed that the only reason we know about any of them is because some publicist somewhere told someone who would in turn tell us. This is how movie publicity works – with very rare exceptions, everything you know about a movie (at least during its initial release period) is a sales pitch. Even the reviews, about which film-makers regularly bleat and whinge and moan, are part of this sales process, raising the profile of the product. Why else would the studios go to the bother and expense of putting on private pre-release screenings for critics who may very well savage their product? If they really thought the reviews were going to hurt the movie, or have zero beneficial effect upon its box office, they wouldn’t press screen them at all. That’s what happens with the Saw movies, a rampagingly successful horror franchise that has thrived without press shows for several years now. As far as the distributors are concerned, they don’t need critics to raise audience awareness (the films have a firm dumbo teenage fanbase who get their ‘info-tainment’ from posters, internet trailers and carefully planted tabloid-press stories), and since the Saw sequels are increasingly rotten to the core there’s no chance of any proper critic actually filing a quotably ‘good’ review. I have yet to see any evidence that bad reviews can in fact damage a film’s box office (more of which in Chapter Four) but the distributors of Saw clearly aren’t taking any chances, so they just don’t screen them – end of story.
With Pearl Harbor (which was proudly screened to critics around the world) you can be sure that the piss-poor reviews it provoked were all part of the plan. Oh, I’m not claiming that the distributors wanted the critics to hate the movie – they would have preferred glowing notices praising its universal love story and drooling over its expensive special effects. But they will have known in advance that the reviews were going to be generally negative (because the film itself was so bad) and they went ahead with those press screenings anyway. Crucially, there were no ‘long lead’ previews, which are used to generate positive word-of-mouth buzz and to build audience awareness of titles that people might actually like. Instead, the film was screened as close to its release date as possible, ensuring that by the time the reviews (good or bad) appeared, the film was available for viewing by paying punters eager to see what all the fuss was about. And, as planned, many (if not most) of those reviews referred at some point to the whopping budget, about which the publicists had been priming us all since pre-production. However scathing a particular review may have been, the reader (or listener, or viewer) would come away having been reminded that Pearl Harbor cost a vast amount of money, and understanding that, for the price of a ticket, he or she could see where all that money had gone. Rather than the stars, the money was the story. And in today’s marketplace, that’s a story which almost always has a happy ending.
This wasn’t always the case. Back in the good old days, really terrible movies could actually sink studios. Because film-making is such a costly enterprise, the risk factor involved in making a movie has always been high, with lavishly mounted productions facing the very real prospect of failing to recoup. For this reason, studios and producers would attempt to build levels of certainty into big budget productions, most notably by the presence of star names (who came with a loyal following, upon whose box-office bucks you could rely) and spectacle (if the explosions were big enough, or the scenery jaw-dropping enough, people might forget that the movie itself sucked). But even with these tried-and-tested caveats, grand-scale star-studded turkeys could still sink at the ticket booths, and a string of them proceeded to do just this in the sixties. Reeling from the onset of television and increasingly out of touch with the demands of movie-goers who were no longer going to the pictures in family groups, the majors backed a series of overpriced extravaganzas such as Doctor Dolittle, Hello Dolly and – most infamously – Cleopatra, and got their fingers burnt in the process.
Stories of the profligacy of Cleopatra’s production are legend, and include $10 million worth of unusable footage having been shot in England by original director Rouben Mamoulian before the entire production upped stumps to Italy when a choking Elizabeth Taylor, who had almost died of pneumonia, was deemed unfit to work in British weather. (The only people to benefit from this situation were the makers of Carry on Cleo, who wound up shooting on the abandoned British sets and ultimately fared far better – both artistically and financially – than the makers of Cleopatra.) With a contract guaranteeing her $125,000 a week for the first 16 weeks, Taylor effectively earned $2 million (around $14 million in today’s money) from Cleopatra before a single usable frame had been shot. Her eventual earnings from the film are generally reckoned to be in the neighbourhood of $7 million (around $50 million today), which – as Robert De Niro says in Midnight Run – is ‘a very good neighbourhood’. At the height of its production, the movie was estimated to be costing Fox $70,000 a day, with palaces, barges and entire fleets being conjured up for service – prompting a popular quip about Fox owning the world’s third-largest navy.
Originally envisaged as two three-hour epics (Caesar and Cleopatra and Antony and Cleopatra), the footage was ultimately condensed to one three-and-a-quarter-hour epic when the producers realised that nobody would want to see the first film because it was sorely lacking in the Richard Burton department. Burton and Taylor’s on–off romance had by that point become the stuff of gossip sheets (they were the Brangelina of their day) and people were apparently more interested in their off-screen affairs than in their on-screen characters. By the time Cleopatra opened, it had cost Fox between $44 and $48 million, the equivalent of around $300 million by today’s standards. Industry insiders confidently predicted that there weren’t enough cinema tickets in the world to cover that kind of cost, even if Cleopatra turned out to be the most brilliant movie ever made. Which it didn’t.
When Taylor first saw Cleopatra at the London premiere, she threw up.
Imagine the UK publicist’s phone call from Hollywood the next morning.
‘Hey, how did the screening go?’
‘Oh, great. It was really great. Absolutely terrific.’
‘Well that’s wonderful. And how about Liz?’
‘Oh, great. She thought it was terrific. Really fabulous.’
‘Really? Cos everyone’s saying she’s been complaining about how we cut all the “motivation” out of the movie – whatever the hell that means. Considering how much we paid her, I’d have thought she had motivation up the wazzoo! Aha ha ha ha ha!’
‘Yeah, aha ha ha!’
‘But seriously, she loved it, right?’
>
‘Yeah, she loved it.’
‘How much did she love it?’
‘Oh, loads. You could tell she was really … moved.’
‘She was “moved”?’
‘Yeah, she was moved. You know, to her stomach …’
‘She was moved to her stomach?’
‘Uh, yeah. That’s right. Something like that.’
‘You mean her stomach moved …?’
‘Just a bit. Kinda …’
‘Her stomach moved there in the theatre?’
‘Oh no, no, nothing like that. She got to the bathroom. It’s fine. She loved it. Everyone loved it. It’s going to be huge. You know, historically huge. I think everyone’s gonna be really …’
‘Moved?’
‘Yeah. Really moved …’
By the time first-run audiences had done with Cleopatra, Fox had plenty of reason to feel moved to their stomachs. After its massive initial outlay the movie recouped just $26 million in American theatrical rentals, leaving a whopping $18 million hole in the studio’s coffers. In 1981, editor David Pirie’s respected film publication The Anatomy of the Movies cited Cleopatra as the fifth-biggest money-losing film of all time – behind Waterloo, Darling Lili, The Fall of the Roman Empire and Raise the Titanic, although the books weren’t closed on the last of these, which, Pirie’s splendid book gamely admitted, was still playing to audiences of two men and a dog at the time of publication.
So was Cleopatra an unqualified flop?
Well, not quite.
In that same 1981 publication which listed Cleopatra among the all-time top ten failures, the movie also makes an impressive showing amongst the all-time box-office earners. Whatever its failings, and despite some scathing reviews from the likes of Judith Crist, audiences (who knew all about the film’s ever-expanding expenses) were drawn to this gargantuan spectacle in time-honoured fashion. On opening day, Cleopatra had sold out in some theatres for the next four months, proving once again that big stars plus big budgets plus big spectacle equals big box office. It went on to become the biggest grossing film of the year.
So the problem with Cleopatra was not that it flopped per se, but that (as analysts had predicted) it had cost too much and the marketplace simply wasn’t big enough to pay for it – at least not yet. When the film sold to TV, however, ABC coughed up a handsome $5 million sum to Fox that went some way to correcting the film’s financial imbalances. Years later (and long after Fox had officially ‘closed the books’ in order to stave off any future percentage profit demands) Cleopatra generated yet more income thanks to the emergent home video market, and later the advent of DVD. Depending on which industry analysts you believe, Cleopatra actually broke even in either 1973 or 1986, thanks to worldwide sales and small-screen ancillary income, and has been turning a serviceably steady profit ever since. So, given time, one of Hollywood’s biggest-ever flops ended up in the black after all.
And everyone lived happily ever after.
Eventually.
Fast-forward to 1981 and the case of Heaven’s Gate, which is regularly cited alongside Cleopatra as a studio-sinking stinker. Directed by Michael Cimino, who must surely hold the title for the most egregiously overrated director of all time, Heaven’s Gate effectively put paid to the idea that auteurs should be indulged by studios seeking prestige hits. In many ways we have Michael Cimino to thank for the fact that producers became stars in the eighties, a return to the days of old Hollywood, when Selznick was a bigger name than any of the five directors who worked on Gone with the Wind and only the money men had final cut.
Cimino started out as a screenwriter whose credits included Douglas Trumbull’s wonderful seventies sci-fi tearjerker Silent Running (one of my favourite movies of all time) which also lists Steven Bochco amongst its aspiring scribes. Bochco would go on to revolutionise American television with series such as Hill Street Blues, LA Law and NYPD Blue. Today, he is probably the most famous (and certainly the most successful) name associated with Silent Running, eclipsing even leading man Bruce Dern. But back then he was still such an unknown that his name was actually misspelled (as ‘Bocho’) on the UK poster for the movie, an original print of which now takes pride of place in my living room. As for Cimino, having co-written the Dirty Harry actioner Magnum Force and helmed the decent Clint Eastwood thriller Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, he embarked upon a breast-beating pet project about American soldiers having a terrible time in Vietnam which somehow bamboozled everyone into thinking he was brilliant – albeit briefly.
Quite why The Deer Hunter was so well received by audiences, critics and Oscar voters remains a mystery to me. Yes, the film has a few impressive set pieces, most notably the opening wedding sequence, which smacks of macho authenticity and has a nice woodsy feel and some lovely shots of trees. But after that it’s ill-disciplined balderdash and baloney all the way, with symbolic games of Russian roulette being orchestrated at gunpoint by screamingly racist ‘gook’ caricatures in the manner of the most crass exploitation cinema. The sadistic Nazis of SS Experiment Camp look positively underplayed in comparison with Cimino’s demonic Vietcong (whose country, we should remember, had actually been invaded by napalming Americans). It doesn’t help that The Deer Hunter uses music known to some British audiences as the ‘Gallery Theme’, from the kids’ TV show Take Hart, which would subsequently become a hit single for John Williams, The Shadows, and (most bizarrely) Cleo Laine (‘He was o-o-o-o-oh, so-o-o-o-o, bee-yooooo-defulllllllll’). Legend has it that grown men were crying in the aisles when The Deer Hunter first played in the US. I saw it in 1979 at the Classic Cinema in Hendon and fell asleep. Years later, I walked out of a screening at Manchester University on ‘political grounds’. Eventually, I saw the whole movie from start to finish when it came out on newfangled ‘sell-through’ video. I enjoyed it more the first time.
Others loved it, however, and Cimino was promptly declared a genius – a description with which he appeared to agree wholeheartedly. When United Artists came calling in search of a profile-raising, awards-baiting ‘event’ movie, Cimino pitched them a historically dubious Western – originally entitled The Johnson County War. Thrilled at the chance to work with a ‘genius’, UA gave Cimino carte blanche to go off and be brilliant, without requiring him to bring his movie in on time, on budget, or at any sensible length (his first cut ran to over five hours). Nor were UA executives allowed to view a single frame of footage before the maestro was ready to show it to them. Duly emboldened, Cimino went off and made a movie that was as expensive as it was dull, a film about which the nicest thing that could be said is that it looks lovely. Of course it looks lovely – entire fields were irrigated to make it look lovely, and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond was allowed to shoot only during the ‘loveliest’ light of ‘magic hour’ at the very end of each day in order to ensure that it all looked as lovely as possible. Big deal. Venice looks lovely but it still smells like a toilet. Will looking lovely stop it from sinking into the sewers? I think not.
The same was true of Heaven’s Gate – it stank, and it sank United Artists.
Oh, and the historical stuff about the Johnson County War turned out to be hooey. I mention this only in passing.
There are, of course, several key differences between the flopping of Heaven’s Gate and the (initial) failure of Cleopatra. The most obvious difference is that (as we have noted) people actually wanted to see Cleopatra, and did so in their thousands. The problem there was that the movie was just too costly to break even, no matter how many people went to see it. In the case of Heaven’s Gate audiences simply stayed away in droves, with poor reviews, lousy previews (it was savagely re-cut after a disastrous premiere) and an overwhelming lack of public interest causing it to tank at the box office. If the film had been a popular hit, United Artists could conceivably have broken even on their whopping investment, which was more than could be said of Fox’s sword-and-sandal escapade. But Heaven’s Gate had zero popular appeal and, although some modern critics now claim that the
film was an overlooked masterpiece, audiences have never shown any interest in it whatsoever.
Why not?
Well, first up, it’s rubbish – boring, overblown and ill-disciplined, just like The Deer Hunter (although that was a huge hit). Yet as Pearl Harbor more recently proved, really poor, historically inaccurate movies can still make their money back if they feature popular stars, are packed with eye-catching spectacle and cost a fortune. Crucially, Heaven’s Gate ticked only one of these three boxes: it was stupidly expensive. But its stars were Kris Kristofferson (who I like, but who is essentially a country and western singer), Christopher Walken (quite famous now for his weirdie dancing, but a solid second-stringer back then) and Isabelle Huppert (brilliant, but French). And looking lovely is no substitute for scenes of a spaceman with a lightsaber blowing up a massive Death Star. At least, not with that kind of budget. The truth is that Heaven’s Gate could (and should) have been made for a fraction of its cost; its initial budget was $7.5 million, at which price it might have become merely an honourable failure. But at a (then) staggering $36 million, it was a dishonourable disaster, and no amount of revisionist critical reappraisal can change the fact that Cimino should never have been allowed to spend that much money to make that movie. What United Artists paid for was ‘an event’ – what they got was closer to a money pit. Indeed, respected American critic Roger Ebert rightly called it ‘the most scandalous cinematic waste I have ever seen’.
In the wake of Heaven’s Gate, UA’s parent company TransAmerica sold the ailing studio to MGM, and by 1982 Variety observed that ‘for all intents and purposes, United Artists has disappeared as a major, self-contained production and distribution company’. Thus, the grand studio – which had been founded in 1918 by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith, and whose Oscar-winning hits in the seventies had included One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Rocky and Annie Hall – was effectively sunk by one massively overpriced clunker.
