My Year of Flops: The A.V. Club Presents One Man's Journey Deep into the Heart of Cinematic Failure

by Nathan Rabin

  • minutes (525,600 to be exact)

  • daylights

  • sunsets

  • midnights

  • cups of coffee

  • inches

  • miles

  • laughter

  • strife

  • love

  I measured the 135 minutes of Rent not in love, but in snickers, derisive snorts, and gales of unintentional laughter.

  The film and play follow a series of scruffy bohemians as they try to change the world through their crappy art. There’s Roger (Adam Pascal), a Jon Bon Jovi look-alike with big hair, AIDS, and a tormented past that keeps him from being able to accept the sexual advances of heroin-addicted, AIDS-stricken, yet really perky and fun stripper Mimi (Rosario Dawson).

  Then there’s Roger’s roommate, Mark (Anthony Rapp), an aspiring D. A. Pennebaker making a revolutionary documentary where he films his friends and neighbors. Incidentally, there’s a name for casual, ramshackle portraits of friends and neighbors shot on the fly: home movies. Last I checked, they’re considered something to show bubbie and zayde when they visit, not art.

  This dynamic duo and their crazily nonthreatening bohemian pals face a looming crisis in the form of handsome Benjamin (Taye Diggs), a former comrade who sold out and plans to evict his former pals from their Louvre-sized loft so he can build a “a state-of-the-art digital virtual interactive studio.” The battle lines are drawn.

  Benjamin offers the boys a Faustian bargain: He’ll let them stay in their apartment if they can get a sassy performance artist played by Idina Menzel to cancel a protest where she wears tight pants, calls Benjamin a lapdog, and whines, “It’s like I’m being tied to the hood of a yellow rental truck being packed in with fertilizer and fuel oil pushed over a cliff by a suicidal Mickey Mouse.” Obviously, no wealthy real-estate dynasty can compete with the society-changing power of an underground performance artist’s impish pop-culture allegory. So pigs bust the protest before she can disseminate more of her dangerous ideas.

  Much singing and dancing ensue en route to the climactic death of a kindly, angelic character named Angel, who continues to hover benevolently over his friends like some sort of … what’s the word I’m looking for here? You know, they made a TV show where these creatures touched people, and a movie where they were in the outfield, and a play where they were in America. I’m sure I’ll think of it at some point after this book is published.

  Mimi threatens to die until she’s literally brought back to life through the power of Roger’s terrible song. Ah, but what about the music, you say? Doesn’t that redeem the whole sorry endeavor? No. No, it does not.

  Larson’s lyrics, maudlin powerless ballads, and MOR melodies are less Stephen Sondheim than outtakes from The Apple. It seems perverse to make a musical about Gen Xers, the most cynical and sarcastic generation known to man, that’s wholly devoid of cynicism and sarcasm. Rent consequently feels like a Disneyland stage show about those nutty Gen Xers, with their bicuriosity and crazy drug addictions and shameless love of hoofing and crooning. In Rent, there’s no problem that can’t be overcome with singing, dancing, and/or moxie. The film doesn’t just feel like a fairy-tale version of New York bohemia created for blue-haired tourists and clueless out-of-towners; it feels like it was created by them as well.

  Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Failure

  Let’s Go Crazy Case File #102: Under The Cherry Moon

  Originally Posted January 15, 2008

  By 1985, an androgynous, three-foot-tall black man from Minnesota had reached the pinnacle of pop superstardom. Prince was a critic’s darling and a popular favorite. He’d conquered the world of film a year earlier with Purple Rain and walked away with an Academy Award and a smash-hit, instant-classic soundtrack.

  Yes, everything was coming up Milhouse for Prince. All those years of hard work were paying off. In times like these, Prince is habitually visited by an angry, persistent voice from somewhere deep within his purple-and-paisley soul. This agitated voice regularly issues a cry for professional suicide: “Things … going … too … well … fans … too … happy … career … proceeding … too … smoothly … must … sabotage … self … with … crazy … off-putting … stunt.”

  As usual, this insane inner voice urging self-destruction made valid points. But how could Prince best go about sabotaging his thriving career? Should he change his already ridiculous prance-about stage name to something so ludicrous it couldn’t even be pronounced? Maybe something so bizarre it was subverbal, something that would make him a constant target in talk-show monologues and stand-up routines? Or should he scrawl “Slave” on his face and launch a long, public, widely mocked campaign to get out of his major-label contract by comparing it to unpaid servitude? How about an album of jazz-fusion instrumentals? What if he formed his own independent label and flooded the market with three-disc monstrosities and increasingly irrelevant solo albums? What if he passive-aggressively fulfilled Warner Bros.’ desperate cry for a Purple Rain sequel with a flaky spiritual romance about an angel named Aura? Or he could very publicly become a Jehovah’s Witness, that most respected and least ridiculed of all religious sects.

  Oh, but there were so many different ways for Prince to fuck up his career! Over the course of his long, glorious, exquisitely checkered life, Prince would have an opportunity to try out all the aforementioned career wreckers. But in 1985, he happened upon an altogether more ingenious self-sabotage scheme. If those Hollywood phonies wanted another Prince movie so damned badly, he’d give them the craziest, least-commercial Prince movie imaginable, a black-and-white period romance heavy on dialogue and perversely light on musical performances. Maybe he wouldn’t even sing at all! That’d show them.

  I can imagine Prince’s pitch. He’d look a studio suit firmly in the eye and say, “Look, I know this whole black-and-white thing sounds risky, but if it’s any consolation, I’ll be performing at most two or three songs. It’ll be less about the music and more about dialogue and comedy. Oh, and the soundtrack will be vastly different from anything I’ve ever done, and my character will be an asshole. But that won’t matter, because the woman I’m romancing—who’ll be played by a white, British unknown, incidentally—will be a raging bitch. Also, I die at the end. And I plan to direct it myself after the original director is fired over ‘creative differences.’ And I’ll film it almost entirely in France. In case you’re worried that a hit soundtrack might accidentally fuel interest in the film, you should know I plan to give the soundtrack a different name from the movie. I’ll call it Parade, and the film Under The Cherry Moon. Now may I please have $12 million for this can’t-miss proposition?”

  I suspect that after the ashen-faced executive picked his jaw up off the ground, he assumed that Prince was playing an elaborate practical joke and actually planned to make another Purple Rain–style conventional musical melodrama. You know, for the kids. Warner Bros.’ doom was sealed.

  Released in the summer of 1986, Under The Cherry Moon opens with glittery narration promising an escapist fairy tale about a bad boy redeemed by the love of a good woman. From the get-go, the film promises more than it can deliver. But for its first scene, at least, the prospect of a screwball Prince romance seems not only palatable but delectable.

  As the film opens, freewheeling gigolo Christopher Tracy (Prince) is tickling the ivories while making goo-goo eyes at a potential meal ticket. He doesn’t just make love to her with his eyes; he makes love to her, marries her, grows bored and disenchanted, cheats on her, proposes a trial separation, becomes lonely, and reluctantly reconciles with her exclusively via glances, winks, and lascivious stares. In this first scene, Prince comes off like an impossibly glamorous silent screen star, a caramel-colored Valentino with big, wonderfully expressive eyes, oozing sex and glamour. It’s a full-on seduction from a legendary lothario, pitched as much to the audience as his ostensible conquest. Michael Ballhaus’ black-and-white photography is silky, decadent, and lush, an impossible dream
of retro glamour.

  Here, Prince’s vision of a screwball comedy directed by Fellini comes gorgeously to life. Prince gives us not just a setting but an entire seductive fantasy world created by consummate old pros: regular Scorsese cinematographer Ballhaus and production designer Richard Sylbert, a two-time Oscar winner with credits such as Chinatown, Dick Tracy, and The Graduate to his name.

  Then people start talking, and everything goes to shit. Christopher is a pianist whose affections can be rented by the hour but who pines for true love. He lives with effeminate sidekick/professional manservant Tricky (Jerome Benton), his half brother and endlessly game partner in crime, mischief, and androgyny. Perhaps the only heterosexual alive who can pull off wearing a puffy pirate shirt, Christopher keeps his customers satisfied with lascivious compliments like, “To not hear your voice each day is to die seven times by God’s wrath / if I was anything other than human, I’d be the water in your bath.” But when he happens upon society girl Mary Sharon (Kristin Scott Thomas, in her first role) on her 21st birthday, he’s instantly smitten.

  Thomas’ character is written as an elitist snob who treats Christopher with aristocratic disdain and lets her sinister father control her. Yet she’s introduced brazenly flashing high society, causing a wealthy dowager to faint in horror. After gleefully crowing, “How do you like my birthday suit? I designed it myself,” Thomas settles down behind a drum set and leads the crowd in a funk-rock chant of “Let it rock. You just can’t stop.” Have I mentioned yet that the film takes place either in the ’30s, the ’40s, or some strange alternate universe that looks uncannily like the distant pre-rock past yet includes boomboxes, computers, cable, answering machines, and references to Liberace and Sam Cooke?

  Initially repulsed by Christopher’s leering advances, Mary repeatedly derides him as a “peasant.” “It may seem strange to a hustler like you, but I go out with people my own age, special people. And they don’t wear wedding rings, either,” Thomas hisses self-righteously at Prince. He retorts, “Then they must be wearing diapers!” This, alas, is the film’s conception of sophisticated screwball banter. There are elementary-school playgrounds with higher levels of intellectual discourse.

  Withering insults like, “Maybe if you took off your chastity belt, you could breathe a little more better!” vex Mary to the point that she practices a series of equally devastating snaps to hurl Christopher’s way the next she sees him, settling on, “You know, I could breathe a lot easier if the air weren’t so polluted by your presence.”

  After treating this obnoxious playboy with withering contempt, Mary inexplicably falls in love with him and showers her exotic new lover and Tricky with gifts and money. But trouble lurks around the corner in the form of Mary’s disapproving father. Will Mary end up with the mystery man who incites her wildest fantasies, or settle down with her stable, predictable, (unseen) boyfriend, Stuffy Q. Borington III? More important, will Christopher ever stop behaving like a petulant middle schooler and sing some fucking songs? Or will the audience simply be forced to choke down dialogue like the following:

  Tsk, tsk, what a pity. Sometimes life can be so shitty. Here’s a girl who’s smart and pretty.

  It must be easy to swim with a head as swelled as yours.

  Mirror, mirror sevenfold, who’s the finest dressed in gold?

  If vintage screwball banter suggests a furious volley between two world-class tennis players, Cherry Moon’s version feels more like a lazy game of badminton between morbidly obese amateurs. In classic screwball comedies, the leads’ rapid-fire surface bickering masks lust, attraction, and ultimately something nobler. Here, however, the leads’ contempt for each other feels both deeply warranted and authentic; it’s their growing attraction that rings false.

  Prince and overqualified collaborators Ballhaus and Sylbert create a sinful, seductive world, then populate it with grating stick figures. Screwball comedies are all about pacing, speed, momentum, chemistry, wit, and the heedless, exhilarating forward rush of witty banter breathlessly executed. A woefully misbegotten would-be concoction, Cherry Moon is more like cotton candy with the weight and consistency of a brick.

  Shortly after being shot by one of Mary’s husband’s goons, a death-bound Christopher (don’t worry, in a too-little, too-late bid to give the audience what they want, Prince gets to sing in heaven alongside the Revolution, over the end credits) asks his true love, “We had fun, didn’t we?” To tardily answer his question, no, we most assuredly did not.

  Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Fiasco

  All-Singing, All-Dancing Book-Exclusive Case File: The Musical Version Of I’ll Do Anything

  I believe in screen tests. I believe in cutting people out if the dailies are bad. I believe in replacing people if the previews aren’t there. Because I don’t make movies for theaters that serve cappuccino in the lobby. I make popcorn movies. You want to know what I like? Come to my house, look at my lamps. That’s what I like. But you’re not going to find it in my movies.

  —Burke Adler (Albert Brooks) in I’ll Do Anything

  I’ll Do Anything puts the words that begin this Case File into Albert Brooks’ mouth to establish his Joel Silver–like superproducer as the gauche embodiment of everything that’s crass and mercenary about show business. As delivered with lip-smacking zeal at a machine-gun clip by Brooks’ excitable schlock merchant, the monologue becomes a proud vulgarian’s warped code of honor, a cultural barbarian’s moolah-mad manifesto.

  So it’s ironic that James L. Brooks ended up living the mercenary creed of a character he created to epitomize everything that’s monstrous (and secretly wonderful) about Hollywood.

  Brooks filmed I’ll Do Anything as a 140-minute musical with songs by Prince and choreography by Twyla Tharp. When the dailies were bad and the previews weren’t encouraging, he castrated his musical by gutting the songs. Every last one of them. Yes, even the one where Rosie O’Donnell and Woody Harrelson rap. Brooks likes Tharp’s choreography and Prince’s light funk, but audiences wouldn’t know it from watching the theatrical version of I’ll Do Anything. They didn’t even learn what kind of lamps its writer-director likes.

  The musical I’ll Do Anything has never been seen by the general public, but I was lucky enough to have a My Year Of Flops operative send me a bootleg DVD of the aborted version for use in this book. I watched the film as test audiences saw it, as a rough assemblage of scenes instead of a polished, finished movie.

  In a desperate attempt to save his baby from being shown only in theaters serving cappuccino, James L. Brooks ended up killing it. A strange, overreaching musical was radically re-edited to become an intimate comedy-drama about the tricky intersection of art and commerce. A film that once sang its ambitions from the mountaintops became a meek, tuneless, albeit intriguingly personal and bravely sincere mediocrity.

  It was to no avail. The Film Formerly Known As A Prince Musical flopped anyway. Audiences were understandably skeptical of an ex-musical with production numbers so terrible they were all excised before hitting theaters. Anything hobbled into theaters enshrouded in a thick cloud of failure and desperation. Brooks fatally lacked the courage of his convictions. He let disastrous test screenings destroy his labor of love.

  The first of many, many ironies is that both cuts of I’ll Do Anything are obsessed with test screenings, focus groups, and Hollywood’s pathological need for approval. In the musical version, this theme is established in its very first scene, a brassy production number where a contingent of shaggy young singer-dancer-actor types share an orgasmic sense of post-show exhilaration following the première of a new play with Nick Nolte’s Matt Hobbs as Jesus. Then a snake arrives in their show-biz Eden in the form of a tweedy critic panning the show on television.

  Their dreams of living, in the immortal words of the opening song, “L to the A-R-G-E large!” are suddenly shattered, as nothing can compete with the godlike power of a geek with a pad and pen doling out a negative review on television.

  A yo
ung, disconcertingly hunky Nolte (he didn’t yet embody terms like “grizzled,” “hard-living,” “zombie-like,” or “dead-looking”), wearing what appears to be a Tarzan wig, tries to cheer up a fellow actor by unconvincingly arguing, “Listen, no matter what this review says, the play was a great experience for me. I mean, it is about process, right?”

  At the opening-night party, Hobbs hooks up with Beth, a hideous shrew played with the world’s worst Southern accent by Tracey Ullman. Beth flatters Hobbs’ creative ego by gushing, “Your feelings about your work are one of the things I love most about you.”

  We then cut to a shrieking baby and Beth screeching at her overwhelmed husband, “Don’t pretend to be asleep just because you got the baby the last four times. What’s the matter, is the artist tired?” At least she didn’t speak ill of process. Never denigrate the process. This is one marriage that cannot and should not be saved, a doomed union with the words “Do Not Resuscitate” tattooed on its forehead. We then skip ahead six years. Beth and her daughter are long gone, and Hobbs’ career is floundering.

  That all changes when Hobbs blows an audition but picks up an unlikely pal/temporary employer in superproducer Burke and a love interest in Cathy Breslow (Joely Richardson), Hollywood’s last idealist and one of Adler’s employees. After the unsuccessful audition, Hobbs spies Adler lurching down the sidewalk and sobbing softly to himself while filled with the soul-shaking despair most folks reserve for the death of a child. It takes only his driver being 20 minutes late to reduce Adler’s Master of the Universe to a state of childlike helplessness. “Look at me. You’d think I was a writer,” he moans to Hobbs before hiring him as a chauffeur.