Ishtar (film)

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Ishtar is a 1987 comedy film, directed by Elaine May and starring Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman as "Rogers and Clarke", a duo of incredibly untalented lounge singers who travel to Morocco looking for work and stumble into a four-party Cold War standoff. It also starred Isabelle Adjani and Charles Grodin and was shot by Vittorio Storaro. The songs in the film were written by Paul Williams, with additional help from Hoffman and May.

Ishtar began shooting in 21 October 1985 and wrapped on 24 March 1986. Having Oscar winner Warren Beatty (1981 - Reds) and Oscar winner Dustin Hoffman (1979 - Kramer vs. Kramer) in the starring roles, they felt confident in the product. The production was fraught with problems. Reshoots didn't wrap until roughly June 1986, pushing the release date back to May 1987.

The movie ran significantly over budget in production, to $30 million, due largely to unanticipated problems with desert filming, and was a financial flop, generating $14,375,181 in North American box office receipts. Its high-profile disastrous performance at the box office is part of the film's enduring bad reputation. Ishtar was nominated for Worst Picture in the 1987 Golden Raspberry Awards. The movie received overwhelmingly poor reviews, and holds a 19% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. "Ishtar" has since became synonymous with "box office flop."

Echoing a similar box office flop earlier in the decade, Heaven's Gate, Columbia Pictures' then parent company, The Coca-Cola Company, became the subject of jokes. Coca-Cola spun off its entertainment holdings into a separate company called Columbia Pictures Entertainment.

Support

Ishtar's notoriety as a box office flop has helped it reach a cult film status.

Negative buzz about Ishtar and its outrageous budget was widespread in the press long before the film ever reached theaters, despite three successful previews. In an interview with Elaine May, Mike Nichols describes the bomb as "the prime example that I know of in Hollywood of studio suicide", implying that Columbia's new chief executive, David Puttnam, (who took over at Columbia halfway through Ishtar's shoot) sandbagged the project by leaking negative anecdotes to the media because he held a grudge against executive producer and star, Warren Beatty and apathy towards Dustin Hoffman.

Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum surmised that the media was eager to torpedo Ishtar in retaliation for instances of Beatty's perceived "high-handed way with members of the press".

Contrary to Ishtar's overwhelming infamy, Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty, Charles Grodin, and Elaine May continue to strongly defend the film's quality. When Ishtar was released, Vincent Canby of the New York Times listed it as a runner up to his top films of 1987.

John Mitchell and Jonathan Crombie are producing (circa Feb, 2007) a documentary called Waiting For Ishtar.

Quotes

Elaine May: "If all of the people who hate Ishtar had seen it, I would be a rich woman today."

Warren Beatty: "There was almost no review that didn't in the first paragraph deal with the cost of the movie. That was an eye-opener — about the business, and the relationship of the entertainment press to business. Ishtar is a very good, not very big, comedy, made by a brilliant woman. And I think it's funny.

Dustin Hoffman: "I liked that film... just about everyone I've ever met that makes a face when the name is brought up has not seen it. ...I would do it again in a second.

Paul Williams: "The real task was to write songs that were believably bad. It was one of the best jobs I've ever had in my life. I've never had more fun on a picture, but I've never worked harder.

Trivia

In one of Gary Larson's The Far Side comic strips, captioned "Hell's Video Store", the entire store is stocked with nothing but copies of the movie Ishtar. Larson has apologized, saying "When I drew the above cartoon, I had not actually seen Ishtar. ... Years later, I saw it on an airplane, and was stunned at what was happening to me: I was actually being entertained. Sure, maybe it's not the greatest film ever made, but my cartoon was way off the mark. There are so many cartoons for which I should probably write an apology, but this is the only one which compels me to do so.
In an episode of Animaniacs, a video copy of Ishtar is used as a weapon, an exploding 'bomb'.
In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, reference is made to the movie as a bad choice for a person's name. "Why'd you pick Ishtar? . . . as a name? I mean it was a lousy movie.
At several points in Ishtar, Hoffman's character references Simon and Garfunkel as a benchmark for musical success. Simon and Garfunkel contributed to the soundtrack of The Graduate (1967), in which Hoffman made his breakthrough performance.
The brown helicopter used to attack Hoffman and Beatty at the end of the film (called a "Bell Gunship" by Grodin) is a Bell 222 with cannons and rockets mounted on its landing gear side "wings." This same series of helicopter was used in the tv show Airwolf. The other helicopter (white) was a German MBB Bo 105.
Ishtar premiered May 13, 1987 at the Century City Plitt Theater in Los Angeles, California.
In the Red Dwarf episode Timeslides, Lister suggests travelling back in time in order to prevent Dustin Hoffman from making the film.
In the TV series Everybody Hates Chris, a scene shows people running out of a cinema in despair. The cinema was playing a fictitious continuation for Ishtar, called Ishtar 2.
In an episode of the British comedy series Star Stories, Warren Beatty (played by Rhys Thomas) meets with Guy Ritchie (played by Matt King) and warns him about marrying Madonna, because she will ruin his movies. Ritchie replies: "She wasn't in Ishtar, was she? And that was a Richard, Richard the Third, turd." Beatty says: "That's Dustin Hoffman's fault!".
On an episode of Code Monkeys, after Dave and Jerry make the horrible E.T. game, Mary exclaims, "There they are, the ones who brought us the Ishtar of video games."

References

External links

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Last updated on Monday March 10, 2008 at 12:28:32 PDT (GMT -0700)
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