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If there's one lesson to be learned from Elaine May's Ishtar, it's that the road to $40 million hell is paved with good intentions.
The 1987 action-comedy started as payback of a debt owed to May, a comic legend who, alongside her partner Mike Nichols, was one of improv's first stars in the 1950s and later a prodigious, Oscar-nominated screenwriter (Heaven Can Wait, Primary Colors). Ishtar co-starred Warren Beatty at his peak. He'd won an Oscar in 1982 for directing the historical epic Reds, to which May contributed a massive, uncredited rewrite. Beatty intended to return the favor by producing and starring in the globetrotting screwball comedy directed by May.
Beatty and Dustin Hoffman play two aging, low-rent singer-songwriters whose attempts to launch musical careers fall flat. When their agent, Marty Freed (Jack Weston), lines up a gig for the duo in Morocco, they end up embroiled in a power struggle between the despotic Emir of neighboring Ishtar, its resistance movement led by the mysterious Shirra Assel (Isabelle Adjani), and the CIA, represented by agent Jim Harrison (Charles Grodin). Not a bad premise for a late-'80s buddy comedy.
But Ishtar—which shows this week at Portland State University's student-run 5th Avenue Cinema as part of a fall season that focuses on box-office flops worthy of revival—would mutate into one of Hollywood's most notorious disasters. A cascade of production problems and ego clashes lost Columbia Pictures nearly $40 million and is likely to have played a part in the studio's then-owner, Coca-Cola, selling it to Sony in 1989.
Peter Biskind chronicles the debacle in his biography of Beatty, Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America. There are many stories, but here's one that has since become Hollywood lore: Coca-Cola greenlit May to film Ishtar's extensive desert scenes in Morocco, an impoverished country in a politically volatile region that had little apparatus for supporting a major Hollywood production. Animal trainer Corky Randall was tasked with tracking down a blue-eyed camel. At the camel market in Marrakesh. the crew found a perfect specimen for $700, but tried to find a second camel to get a better deal from the merchant. Little did Randall know that blue-eyed camels are rare, and a second one of reasonable quality couldn't be found. When the crew returned to the merchant days later to buy the first camel, they learned he'd eaten it.
This was one of many disasters, and a comparably minor one. May and Beatty, both notorious perfectionists, fought a cold war over the direction of the film, with Hoffman having to act as intermediary at times. May quarreled with her cinematographer, the renowned Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now, Last Tango in Paris), having him shoot more than 100 hours of raw footage, more than three times as much as the average comedy.
Once the film missed it's Christmas 1986 release date, critics caught wind that Ishtar was gearing up to be an enormous bomb. Scheduled to cost $28 million, the film's final budget exceeded $51 million—compared to the average production budget in 1987 of $17 million. Before its release May 15, negative buzz about the movie was bountiful, and it was believed that the then-president of Columbia was leaking negative stories to the press.
A bomb it was, one of the biggest in history. Ishtar took in $4.2 million in its opening weekend, beating the starless, low-budget horror film The Gate by only $100,000. Reviews were mixed: Janet Maslin of The New York Times called the film "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," while Roger Ebert excoriated it as "a long, dry slog. It's not funny, it's not smart and it's interesting only in the way a traffic accident is interesting." Ishtar grossed less than $15 million at the box office, not even recovering the cost of film prints and marketing.
Which is a shame, because Ishtar isn't a bad '80s buddy comedy.
Beatty and Hoffman both deliver incredible comic performances, deliberately cast against type, with Beatty's rugged physicality transformed into bumbling insecurity and Hoffman's tightly wound anxiety worked into blind confidence. They perform composer Paul Williams' deliberately bad songs with the confidence of those too dumb to know they're dumb.
The supporting cast is just as good. Weston as the sleazy agent embodies a kitchen garbage can that's been left out a week too long. Grodin is as good a smirking government villain as you'll see, and Isabelle Adjani maintains the ludicrous pretense that a stunningly beautiful woman can be disguised as a teenage boy with grace.
RELATED: Slow-and-low ceramic-pot cooking straight outta Fez.
Ishtar isn't perfect. Once the film moves to Morocco, the jokes are less consistent and the action scenes are wholly unnecessary. But what we do have is a rare instance of a deeply talented cast and crew, one of history's great comic writers teaming up with a legendary cinematographer and two Oscar-winning actors to make an idiotic comedy in the middle of the desert. You aren't going to find a shot of Hoffman screaming gibberish at Bedouin tribesmen more beautifully framed anywhere else.
SEE IT: Ishtar screens at 5th Avenue Cinema. 9:15 pm Friday-Saturday, 5:15 pm Sunday, Nov. 18-20.
Willamette Week