The Conversation is a feature at PopOptiq bringing together Drew Morton and Landon Palmer in a passionate debate about cinema new and old. For their ninth piece, they discuss Elaine May’s notorious flop Ishtar (1987).
LANDON’S TAKE
Elaine May possesses one of the more underappreciated shadow biographies of post-classical Hollywood, while also sporting several overtly tragic credits to her name. After co-writing (and receiving an Oscar nomination) for the Warren Beatty/Buck Henry blockbuster Heaven Can Wait (1978), she contributed her pen, uncredited, to some of the most celebrated films of the early 1980s, including Beattie’s Reds (for which Beattie and Trevor Griffiths were nominated for writing) and Sydney Pollock’s Tootsie (1982, which won Oscars for its three credited male writers). May wouldn’t receive writing credit for other directors’ movies until reuniting with her former comedy partner, Mike Nichols, on his acclaimed The Birdcage (1996) and Primary Colors (1998), for which she was Oscar-nominated for the first time since Heaven Can Wait.
Where the accomplishments of May’s screenwriting career are shrouded by guild politics and industry practices that rarely reflect the range of contributors to a single Hollywood screenplay, her career as writer-director turned her into a persona-non-grata at a time when Hollywood was uniquely receptive to the visions of unconventional risk-takers. For her debut as writer-director (and costar) in the class satire A New Leaf (1971), which follows a wealthy heir (Walter Matthau) who has drained his fortune and seeks to marry and kill his way to someone else’s (that of a nebbish anti-socialite played by May), the multi-hyphenate reportedly turned in a three-hour cut that was much darker in its depiction of how far the rich will go to stay that way. Paramount balked, cutting the film by more than an hour, and releasing the – admittedly, very good – film to stellar reviews but indifferent box office. May’s cut has never surfaced.
Following her success as director-only in bringing to screen The Heartbreak Kid (1972), written by Neil Simon, May was able to continue working within New Hollywood. May moved from comedy to character drama for her third project as director, Mikey and Nicky (1976), which follows the dissolution of a friendship between a lowlife and a family man – played by John Cassavetes and Peter Falk, respectively – as the former scrambles to avoid a mob hit. May shot almost a million and a half feet of film in an effort to fully embolden the famous improvisers in front of the camera do what they do best, transitioning her style from razor-sharp visual wit to a shaggy, oh-so-‘70s verite naturalism that complements Cassavetes’s own oeuvre. In an incident that’s grown into studio legend, a camera operator reportedly called “cut” when Cassavetes and Falk were off set, which he was reprimanded by May, who wanted to keep the cameras rolling in case the actors reappeared.
Mikey and Nicky’s budget escalated as a result of the extended production (and, thereby, post-production) schedule. After a litigious battle for the film’s rights between May and Paramount, the studio completed cutting the film and finally released it six months after its intended premiere. Mikey and Nicky would mark May’s excommunication from Hollywood. But her behavior as director was little different from other egos behind the camera during the 1970s, and her demands no more extreme than contemporary perfectionists like Kubrick, Coppola, and Cimino. But New Hollywood was no less a boy’s club behind the camera than Old Hollywood, and it doesn’t take much effort to suspect that Hollywood’s lack of patience with May’s esoteric meticulousness had to do with the fact that presumptions of authority so often ascribed to her male colleagues were not extended to her.
When Beatty, who felt indebted to May’s contributions to his career, decided to bankroll an unencumbered “Elaine May film” a decade later, he may have assumed she would see to screen a belated burst of New Hollywood-era inspiration, the unmitigated work of a female comic rebel overlooked by New Hollywood’s many other social revolutions. But what May made turned out to be as much a reflection on the ‘80s as Mikey and Nicky was a product of the ‘70s. A Crosby-and-Hope formula revamped as a farce of US foreign policy overreach, Ishtar is a mixed but fascinating bag of broad comedy and subtly insurgent politics. While hardly the masterpiece Beatty hoped for, Ishtar is, at the very least, a movie whose identity is, almost thirty years on, unjustly obscured by its reputation as a more publicized flop than her previous credit as director. I am by no means arguing that Ishtar is a diamond in the rough, but I can’t help but admire May’s caution-to-the-wind approach in using this opportunity to make something so silly, unflinching, and profoundly weird.
When developing the film, co-star Dustin Hoffman (re-uniting with May after Tootsie) argued that the film should stay in New York, where we meet Beatty and Hoffman’s bumbling lounge singing duo, rather than set most of its action in the far-flung setting of its title. I can’t blame him, as – more than anywhere else in the film – these early scenes possess a hilarious spark of chemistry, sporting two more-than-capable Hollywood stars convincingly rambling through several word salads of faux-inspiration, making up in blind passion what they lack in talent. The glimpses we see of Ishtar’s “bad” songs (taken from numerous compositions written by Paul Williams) possess a raw comic energy and timing rarely seen in these actors’ late careers, not to mention an irreverence now reminiscent of Fred Armisen and Kristen Wiig’s “Garth and Kat” sketch on SNL.
Ishtar loses this comic spark when re-locating its action moves to Morocco, where the film was shot on location amidst social unrest. The film’s espionage plotline – in which our two accidental heroes are recruited by a cocksure CIA officer (Charles Grodin) to divert a plot by populist rebels to overthrow a monarch – never quite feels as madcap as it should. Echoing many secret nation-building operations occurring in the 1980s, Ishtar eventually reverses the West-conquers-the East trope characteristic of action movies of the era, making US imperialism (not the threat of the global left) the film’s primary foe by staging a battle between Beatty, a bazooka, and an American chopper straight out of a Dolph Lundgren film.
I wish that Ishtar was – as the similarly-maligned ‘80s film Heaven’s Gate comes so very close to being – a misunderstood, overlooked masterpiece by an eccentric but gifted director. But looking back on the film long after the dust of its rampant publicity has settled, it resonates today as something of an inevitable manifestation of May’s career: a fitfully inspired but disjointed work by an active filmmaker who never had the same opportunity as her New Hollywood colleagues to find and hone her directorial voice. Ishtar, characteristic of May’s Hollywood biography, suggests what could have been as much as it sports its own troubled production history. Suggesting what her career might look like in an alternate universe, May told a crowd in a 2006 interview with Nichols that, “If all of the people who hate Ishtar had seen it, I’d be a rich woman today.”
DREW’S TAKE
I’m not sure what I expected from Ishtar. Not being a huge Warren Beatty fan and knowing more about Mike Nichols’s career than his former partner’s, the film has always existed as one of those abstract variables where a long history of hyperbolically scathing criticism – “The Citizen Kane of big-budget, A-list vehicular homicides,” as one critic described it – overshadowed any sense I had of the text itself. Due to the sheer magnitude in which Ishtar the punchline eclipses Ishtar the movie, I half-expected it might be the 1980s equivalent of Freddy Got Fingered (2001): a bizarre, misunderstood comedy that few people champion while every other critic asks “The studio paid money for that?!” Sadly, Ishtar isn’t Freddy Got Fingered…but it isn’t exactly cinematic vehicular homicide either. It is towards the lower end of mediocre, which is perhaps the worst crime a film can commit. I would imagine that “A-list vehicular homicide,” like a star studded Ed Wood film, would be a lot more fun to watch that an action-comedy that made me laugh approximately five times in almost two hours.
Part of the problem is that Ishtar wants to be three different films: a comedy about showbiz, a comedy about imperialism, and an espionage action-comedy. The break that comes near the forty minute mark – as failed musician Chuck Clarke (Hoffman) takes the hand of his writing partner Lyle Rogers (Beatty) after threatening suicide atop a New York City apartment building and says “Let’s go to Morocco!” – almost feels like the shift from training camp to Vietnam in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). The film, up until this point, has felt like a reoccurring Saturday Night Live sketch about bad lounge singers, stretched out way past its expiration date. Sure, there are one or two big laughs in those endless montages of bad songs (my favorite was the dedication to the couple on their wedding anniversary), but a lot of it doesn’t land with the parody punch of a good “bad” song by a team like Spinal Tap, Flight of the Conchords, or The Lonely Island.
The second film – the comedy about imperialism – probably had the greatest ROI when it came to comedy for me, but the momentum of the film had been bogged down so much by that first third that I felt largely numb to it. The CIA agents bumbling over which strangely dressed people belonged to which intelligence agency was hilarious:
AGENT #1: The KGB is here. I recognize two agents.
AGENT #2: The ones dressed as Texans?
AGENT #1: No. The ones dressed as Arabs. The ones dressed as Texans are Arab agents. I also recognize two guys from Turkish intelligence.
AGENT #2: No, the Bermuda shorts. The ones in the Hawaiian shirts are tourists.
Yet, what is telling about this section of the film is the laughs largely do not come from the two leads. Instead, they come from Charles Grodin’s double-talking CIA official (“We did NOT fire on two Americans in the desert. Who told you that? The Secretary of State? Well, how would he know?”) and his interactions with the Emir (Aharon Ipalé). The biggest laugh that comes from the stars in this section of the film is the finale. Out of sheer happenstance, the two singers head out into the desert and uncover the CIA’s base of nation-building operations. In exchange for their silence, the CIA is asked to finance and promote a live album by the duo. Yet, the crowd consists largely of soldiers who are told to “APPLAUD!” by their superior officers.
I couldn’t help but view the Clarke and Rogers live album as analogous to the film itself. How had this gotten made in the first place? Where was the usually dazzling work of cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (The Conformist, Apocalypse Now, Dick Tracy, and The Last Emperor) here? Because Ishtar largely does not have the visual grandeur promised on its poster. What did Elaine May, Beatty, and Hoffman have on Columbia Pictures that caused the studio to cut a check for $54 million dollars? And, perhaps most importantly, what had that staggering amount of money been spent on (Predator, Beverly Hills Cop II, and Lethal Weapon – also released in 1987 – had cost between $15-20 million)?
If the bulk of that budget went to the third within Ishtar (the espionage action-comedy), I’m sure a camel have been procured for a much smaller amount because that is really the only joke that works here (and I will say this: the blind camel bit works extremely well!). As Landon describes it, the showdown between the helicopter and the leads just comes off as being out of place and Elaine May just is not the type of filmmaker that knows the visual clichés, stereotypical rhythms, and character types of a diverse body of genres that would allow her recombine them in an energizing way. In other words, think of Ishtar in Edgar Wright’s hands, with two more appropriately cast leads, and it might work! The chases around the market place and across rooftops (not to mention the bizarrely flat use of co-star Isabelle Adjani, who exists simply to flash her breasts and advance the plot) are cinematically milquetoast.
Sure, there are a few good laughs to be had in Ishtar, but nowhere near enough to deserve two hours of your time. The film largely deserves its punchline status. I’ll end with one of my favorites from Sophia (Estelle Getty) The Golden Girls: “Let me tell you girls the three most important things I learned about life. Number one? Hold fast to your friends. Number two? There’s no such thing as security. And number three? Don’t go see Ishtar. Woof.” As my wife said, “We should have listened to Sophia.”
I knew there was a good reason as to why I married her.