By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Ishtar unfeathered: defending May
“The Departed is unlikely to make as lasting an imprint on the film community as another high-profile title, now celebrating its 20th anniversary: Ishtar, writes Dalton Ross at EW. “Starring A-listers Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman as failed songwriters caught up in international espionage, Ishtar [1987] is considered [by some] one of the greatest Hollywood flops of all time… Time magazine even included the movie on its list of ‘The 100 Worst Ideas of the Century‘… Certainly one of the reasons Ishtar is so widely ridiculed has to do with the [then] huge cost ($40 million, with only a $14 million return [theatrically, not including an HBO sale or video revenue]) and even huger egos involved, but I’m here to tell you something that many may find funnier than anything in the actual film—it’s not that bad… I cackle watching Hoffman try in vain to teach Beatty the difference between ”smuck” and ”schmuck,” guffaw at the bit about a blind camel, and pause the screen every time that [Isabelle Adjani] flashes her left breast. (I never claimed to be a proud man.) … [O]ne could even call Ishtar a cutting-edge precursor to awkwardly uncomfortable gems such as “The Office” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Jonathan Rosenbaum takes Elaine May’s comedy more seriously. May converses at length with Mike Nichols after a 2006 Manhattan screening held by Film Comment in which her former performing partner suggests “you invented the perfect metaphor for the behavior of the Bush administration in Iraq” and May observes, “If all of the people who hate Ishtar had seen it, I would be a rich woman today… [O]ddly enough when I made this movie Ronald Reagan was president and there was Iran-Contra, we were supporting Iran and Iraq. We put in Saddam. We had taken out the Shah. Khomeini was there. I remember looking at Ronald Reagan and thinking—I’m qualifying this, this was just an idea, I didn’t really believe it—I thought, he’s from Hollywood, he’s a really nice man. It’s possible the only movie he’s ever seen about the Middle East are the road movies with Hope and Crosby, and I thought I would make that movie.” When Ishtar opened, “I left almost immediately for Bali,” May says. “The film was political and it was a satire but it was my secret. When these articles started coming out, I thought—only for five minutes—it’s the CIA. I didn’t dream that it would be the studio. For one moment it was sort of glorious to think that I was going to be taken down by the CIA, and then it turned out to be David Putnam. I think this man was unique in that way, in that he was going to redo Hollywood and make it a better place. He was going to work from the inside…” [It’s a fascinating Q&A in its entirety, plus, a dialogue transcript.]
Ishtar is a great movie, and more and more people are catching on to that fact… With the documentary on the way, and perhaps a DVD release in the US (lucky Europeans have had one for years) … this is going to be a great year!
http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/ILoveIshtar/
http://www.waitingforishtar.com/
http://www.ishtarthemovie.com/