But on Friday, May 22, 1987, it all came crashing down. Ishtar was released on 1,390 screens. It was number one that weekend, grossing $4.3 million, but was almost edged out by a horror movie called The Gate, with no stars, a $4 million budget, and a gross of $4.2 million on the same number of screens. (Also by way of comparison, on the following Memorial Day weekend, Beverly Hills Cop II opened to a $26.3 million gross.)
Marylouise Oates, who was married to Beatty’s friend Democratic campaign consultant Bob Shrum, was covering the opening night for the L.A. Times. She had her young son Michael, twelve, in tow. They were standing outside, watching the crowd emerge from the theater. Beatty didn’t want to talk about Ishtar; he wanted to talk about Gary Hart. He explained to Michael, “The movie’s not important. Politics is important.” While he was delivering this message, he was idly snapping Oates’s bra strap. Michael said to him, “Stop, that’s my mommy’s.” He replied, “Oh, sorry, I just do it out of habit. It’s nothing personal.”
Ishtar got mixed reviews. Janet Maslin, writing in The New York Times, was most generous: “It’s a likable, good-humored hybrid, a mixture of small, funny moments and the pointless, oversized spectacle that these days is sine qua non for any hot-weather hit.” Considerably less generous, David Denby called it a “vanity production… [a] gigantic party joke,” in New York magazine, and tossed in a few more choice epithets like “crazy,” “greed,” “folly,” and “obsession.”
Like many of Beatty’s movies, Ishtar has a political subtext having to do with oil, poverty, and power. One of the picture’s revolutionaries says, “The dome of the emir’s palace is gold, and the people of Ishtar have never seen a refrigerator.” But you’d never know it from watching the movie. Beatty had generally worked within the genres, using them as protective coloration to cloak his more serious concerns. When the films worked, he successfully pressed the genre conventions into the service of his ideas, the way he did in Bonnie and Clyde, Reds, and later Bugsy. When they worked fitfully or not at all, the conventions smothered the life of the movies, as in Ishtar—and later, to some degree, Bulworth.
Paul Sylbert’s acerbic critique of the movie is unforgiving, but essentially on target. “When you make a movie like Ishtar, the audience’s expectations can be exceeded, but they can’t be disappointed. This one disappoints all around. First of all, you have to have romance where, according to convention, one of the two guys who were vying for her has to get her. But in Ishtar, nobody gets her. You can’t keep asking people to keep listening to songs that are bad but not funny. It was a funny script, but Elaine wasn’t able to execute it. Even the performances are not much to talk about. She flattened everybody out. I cannot imagine that anybody who worked on that movie left it feeling that they did their best work. I didn’t. Nobody did.”
Beatty’s relationship with May was never the same. “Elaine was blaming him,” Joyce Hyser recalls. May felt that he didn’t do enough press, and that the press that he did do was compromised by his excessive attempts to control it, which just antagonized everyone. Nor did she appreciate what she considered Beatty’s backhand compliments, like, “Who can control Elaine? She’s such a genius.” For a year or two after Ishtar came out, they were barely speaking. Although they warmed up some after that, the whole experience left a sour taste. Buck Henry adds, “Whenever I see Elaine, she has a wisecrack about Warren. It’s compulsive. And slightly mean. The sense of it is, ‘Are we having a good time in life, or are we working with Warren?’”
Beatty fell victim to his own success. “The great producer—how did this happen to him?” Sylbert says. “Shampoo was on the money in every way. So was Heaven Can Wait. If he said ‘She’s a fraud’ early on in the movie and didn’t do anything about it, I can’t account for it. You can get pretty puffed up in this business if you have the kind of successes Warren’s had, and even when the movie’s not a big hit, the fact that he got it made, in the case of Reds, and got the Oscar, can certainly affect your judgment.” He adds, “If he hadn’t gotten so good at keeping the studio away, and getting his way with things, and taking the time he wanted to take, he might have examined what he was making.”
For his part, Beatty most likely regarded the entire episode as a specimen of no good deed goes unpunished, but he continues to defend the picture to this day, although he allows, “We probably shouldn’t have gone to Morocco.” Even Hoffman, who didn’t much like the script in the first place, defends it, albeit without enthusiasm. He says, “Ishtar was a B minus, C plus comedy.” But, he adds, “given its flaws, there was something aside from Warren’s seductive powers that made me do it. There’s a spine to it: isn’t it better to spend a lifetime being second rate at what you’re passionate about, what you love, than be first rate without a soul. That’s magnificent, and that’s what she was after. I’d do it again. I just wish it had worked out better.”
When its run ended, Ishtar grossed only $12.7 million. As with Reds, the real cost of the picture may never be known. According to The New York Times, sources put the final cost, including overhead and financing charges but excluding prints and ads, at $51 million. According to Mac Brown, “We were wildly high on a budget, but it wasn’t that we went over, it was that there was no budget, at least none that we submitted, where we said, ‘This is what it’s gonna cost,’ and signed off on it. But they went ahead and started the movie anyway. I think we ended up around $50 or $51 million. It shouldn’t have cost what it cost.” (The average production budget in 1987 was $17 million.) The L.A. Times, citing Variety’s numbers guru Art Murphy, reported that the outlay for prints and advertising (P&A) could have reached another $20 million, which would have put the total budget, including P&A, up around $70 million.
According to Fay Vincent, Ishtar lost about $40 million, becoming the flop the press predicted it would, which Beatty regarded as a self-fulfilling prophecy. He blamed the press for embalming the picture before it even hit the theaters. And he blamed David Puttnam for launching a whispering campaign against the film. “The man didn’t see the movie,” Beatty charged at the time. “He never called me, wrote me a letter, sent me a note, asked me a question. And didn’t with Dustin or Elaine May either. There was absolutely no communication with any of us from the man who was running the company. Usually you would expect negative gossip to emanate from other sources. When it emanates from your own studio, it tends to make you want to go to Barbados.”
“In some respects, Warren was right,” said Vincent. Puttnam “never even saw it.” Puttnam’s attitude was probably captured best by an anonymous Columbia marketing executive who wondered, rhetorically, at the time, “Could David have gotten involved and tried to make peace with the two of them? I guess he could have tried, but honestly I don’t think he gives a shit. It’s possible to live a fairly complete life without Warren or Dustin.”
The fallout from Ishtar was substantial. “It hurt me,” said Vincent. Referring to the producer who was a power at the studio, he added, “Ray Stark went after me, and the people at Coke went after me politically.” Puttnam, who had been hired to rein in star salaries, curb the power of the agents, and contain production costs—in short, to prevent future Ishtars—was fired in October 1988, having learned a harsh lesson: stars are forever, while suits—especially those cut from foreign cloth—have a brief shelf life. As composer Paul Williams put it, “You must remember one thing about Hollywood. Even if ‘Ishtar’ is a big bomb, Warren, Dustin, Elaine and I will all work again… only next time at a higher fee!”
But Williams was only partly right. Beatty and Hoffman worked again, but May never directed another movie. Nor was the studio itself immune. Said Lisbeth Barron, an analyst at the Wall Street firm Balis Zorn Gerard Inc., “With the negative publicity surrounding Ishtar, Coke management said, ‘What are we doing in this business?’” Just as Transamerica sold United Artists after Heavens’ Gate in 1981, Coca-Cola sold Columbia to Sony in 1989.
Although Puttnam lost the battle, setting back the attempt
s to rein in costs for nearly a decade, the war would continue. Beatty may have resisted, but he saw, as clearly as anyone, where things were going. “A big problem,” Beatty said, “is that the cost of production, distribution and promotion of films has become so great that you have to open your movie in more than 1,000 theaters at once. As a result, you have people making films that are designed to appeal to the broadest possible audience.… Things are in pretty bad shape right now.” Ironically, Beatty would play a major role in the next skirmish as well, targeted by Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg in his notorious 1991 memo after his studio produced and released Dick Tracy.
Nineteen eighty-six and 1987 had not been kind to Beatty. Cousin David MacLeod had been arrested and charged with sodomy; his father had died; Ishtar had flopped; his friendship with Elaine May had dissolved in acrimony; his romance with Isabelle Adjani had ended; and with Gary Hart retired to Troublesome Gulch, his hopes for being the power behind the president lay in ruins, the big brass ring snatched from his grasp. Beatty was depressed. He confessed to a model he had been calling every night for a lengthy period of time, “I think I’m becoming slightly reclusive myself because I realize I haven’t left my house for weeks.” It had to get better. As the holidays approached, Beatty put all that behind him. He had moved Hyser into his house, and the two of them celebrated Christmas 1987 in Washington, D.C., with a dinner attended by his mother, MacLaine, Bella Abzug, and four or five others. They got into a conversation about the meaning of Christmas that segued to the subject of the Resurrection, Jesus, and how it really happened. The chatter went on and on, until it was brought to an abrupt halt when MacLaine suddenly threw her silverware down on the plate with a deafening clatter, and announced, “I know because I was there!” Hyser, who had a mouthful of food, launched it, projectile-style, across the table. MacLaine burst into laughter. Turning to Hyser, she said, “When you get to know me a lot better, these things won’t surprise you.” Beatty didn’t think it was funny. Hyser recalls, “Warren was completely horrified by it. He’s not a spiritual man by any stretch of the imagination. The concept of God is totally abhorrent to him. You have to be able to reason everything out. He totally adores her, but he doesn’t get her, there’s a complete disconnect there. She is pretty wacky, but she’s fabulous.”
10
MATERIAL BOY
How Beatty had a demographic romance with Madonna, created a wholly original comic strip movie, Dick Tracy, and lost or gave up Howard Hughes.
“Warren told me that Ishtar had dimmed his star, and he needed a big, fat commercial hit. He felt Tracy was his ka-ching, that it would make a lot of money.”
—Bo Goldman
BACK IN THE mid-1970s, Beatty had signed a contract with Warners that obligated him to do Howard Hughes before Heaven Can Wait. But contracts were made to be broken, he was a star, and used to having his way with the studios. If Hughes wasn’t ready, it wasn’t ready. He was not about to be rushed. Eventually, Warners accepted the fact that Heaven was going to happen first, but insisted that Hughes be up next. Still, after Heaven Can Wait he did Reds, and then Ishtar. Warners was again insisting that Hughes be his next picture. And indeed, at one time, he said that would be the case, but the catastrophic crash of Ishtar had made him reconsider.
Never one readily to admit mistakes, and still blaming the studio and the press for the failure of that picture, when the subject came up he shrugged it off, made a joke. But it was no laughing matter. Beatty was frustrated and puzzled by Ishtar’s poor box office. According to Pat Caddell, “You think you’ve made a good movie, and everybody’s saying it’s terrible.” Beatty had seen too many directors of his generation—Billy Friedkin, Peter Bogdanovich, even Francis Coppola—successfully fingering the pulse of the public one moment, only to discover the patient comatose the next. The relationship between director and audience has always been shrouded in mystery, and when the director is churning out hits, like a batter in the “zone,” better left unexamined. But Beatty approached the failure of Ishtar with his customary pragmatism. It was a problem to be analyzed and solved. Fearing that the culture, always a capricious mistress, had withdrawn her favors, he looked at everything that came out, sometimes two movies a day, trying to figure out if, in Caddell’s words, he’d “missed something.”
And now, thinking about Hughes, he was having second thoughts, despite the fact that he still owed Warners the picture. According to Mab Goldman, wife of Bo Goldman, whom Beatty would hire to do a page one rewrite of Tracy, Beatty expected “he could get Tracy done quickly, and that they’d put up with it. That was why he was willing to endanger his relationship with Warners.”
Several of his friends advised him against it, wanted him to do a romantic comedy of the kind he’d had so much success with in the past. “Dick Tracy has no ‘hooks,’” said Dick Sylbert in 1989. “It offers you nothing. The guy is no Sherlock Holmes, he doesn’t have superpowers, there are no big action scenes. The highlight of his career is ‘Stick ’em up,’ right?” Besides, no one under forty-five had ever heard of Dick Tracy. Many of them hadn’t even heard of Beatty. As Sylbert put it, “The kids already say, ‘Warren who?’ They even say, ‘Jack who?’” But the actor, whose trust in his instincts had most often paid off in the face of the conventional wisdom arrayed against him, or the advice of his friends, which all too often turned out to be the same thing, plowed ahead. He decided that Tracy, not Hughes, would be his next movie.
Beatty had acquired the rights to Tracy in 1985, and now he took it to Disney, where two of the refugees from Paramount ended up, Michael Eisner, who was CEO of the company, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who ran production. Again, as Bob Evans pointed out, he targeted a studio that had a new regime. When he was still at Paramount, Eisner had written a memo arguing that the studio’s films were too expensive, using Reds as a case in point. But at Disney, while charting a penurious but profitable course for themselves, the two men had watched enviously as the other companies put their eggs in the blockbuster basket and saw their profits grow. By the late 1980s, Paramount was doing the third Indiana Jones, Fox the second Die Hard, Warners the second Lethal Weapon, and Universal the second and third Back to the Future. Deploying a dazzling mix of charm and financial acumen, Beatty seduced Eisner and Katzenberg, who for the second time saw an opportunity for their own tent pole. Of course, as soon as they bit, he turned around and made them sell it to him.
Beatty never thought he was right for any role, possibly a reflection of his lack of confidence in his range as an actor. The same was true of Tracy. He didn’t think he looked like the hatchet-jawed detective, meaning his features were too soft for a character that called for an action hero, a tough guy with a hard-edged, flinty look, like Clint Eastwood, who had been interested in the role at one time. And in this case there was also the question of how to deliver comic strip dialogue without it sounding like comic strip dialogue, which would have been embarrassing.
Nor was Beatty his own first choice to direct. But he was having trouble finding someone to do it. On April 8, 1985, Variety reported that Martin Scorsese would direct a script written by Elaine May and Herb Gardner. But that was before Ishtar. Then Scorsese withdrew, complaining later that Beatty would not give him final cut. Bob Fosse turned down the job as well. So did Brian De Palma, so did the Coen brothers, Sam Raimi, and Hal Ashby. During the course of Beatty’s conversations with Ashby, the director complained about what he thought was a bite on his leg. And on the other leg as well. It struck Beatty that what resembled a bite was what he had always imagined phlebitis would look like. He said, “I don’t like that.” He called a doctor he knew at Johns Hopkins, and asked him, “Is there such a thing as phlebitis on both legs?” The doctor replied, “There is a migratory phlebitis which comes as a result of pancreatic cancer.” Beatty recalls, “That scared the hell out of me. We had some CAT scans done of the liver and the pancreas, and of course he did have malignancies in the pancreas and the liver, so we took him to Hopkins.” Ashby hated d
octors and refused to have surgery, but Beatty kept at him. “You ask Warren to do something, he’s gonna do it whether you like it or not,” says Dick Sylbert. “He knows more about cancer than the oncologists do.” Ashby gave in, had the surgery, and as a result lost part of his liver. He had chemotherapy as well. He lived out the last weeks of his life in excruciating pain, for which he blamed Beatty, and wouldn’t let him visit. Ashby died on December 27, 1988.
Despite his fears that he didn’t look enough like Tracy to play him, he realized that nobody else did either, so, why not him? He also decided to direct it himself, as well as produce. Beatty rounded up the usual suspects, reconstituting, with some exceptions, the Beatty Bunch: Dick Sylbert to design the production, Vittorio Storaro behind the camera, and Stephen Sondheim to write the music. He added Milena Canonero to design the costumes.
So far as the actors went, Beatty drew on his friends, as well as people he had worked with in the past. Dustin Hoffman played Mumbles, Paul Sorvino played Lips Manlis, Michael J. Pollard played Bug Bailey, Estelle Parsons played Tess’s mother. He also gathered a rogues’ gallery of offbeat character actors, like Ian Wolfe, R. G. Armstrong, Mary Woronov, Seymour Cassel, Allen Garfield, Kathy Bates, Mandy Patinkin, and so on. Every once in a while, he struck out. He wanted Gene Hackman to play Big Boy Caprice, a villain invented expressly for the movie, but with the memory of Beatty demanding that he do serial takes on Reds still fresh in his mind, Hackman declined, saying, “I love you Warren, but I just can’t do it.”
One night, Beatty ran into Al Pacino in a restaurant in L.A. and asked him for a suggestion. He refused to name names, as per usual, but likely referring to Hackman, he said “[Gene] is giving me a terrible time, I want to punch him.”
“Let me think about it.” Beatty went home to work out. Pacino called, said, “Were you serious?”
Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America Page 49
