The Box-Office Flop Is Becoming a Thing of the Past

In 'Box Office Poison,' Tim Robey looks for lessons in a century of Hollywood failures.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
An elegy for the box office flop by Elis rob
read by Lisa Costello, It is undeniably humanizing, even satisfying,
to read about Hollywood executives and household named directors screwing up.
Why did d W. Griffith think eight hours was the
right length for a feature film? You decided it was
a good idea for a seventy five million dollar romcom

(00:22):
to have a title no one could pronounce, Geelie. Why
did David Lynch need twenty thousand extras for the Mexico
City shoot of Doune? And why were they paid in
choes but British film critic Tim Roby insists that his
new book Box Office Poison, Hollywood Story in a Century
of Flops HarperCollins, November fifth, is motivated by more than

(00:43):
just rubber necking or schadenfreude. Flops, he argues, are durably
interesting artifacts that can tell us something about the eras
in which they were made, about early conflicts between art
and commerce, about a relationship with new technologies, and are
shifting appetites for reality and escaping. Box Office Poison is
a potted survey of financially ruinous films from the lavish

(01:06):
nineteen sixteen Saga Intolerance, which spanned three millennia of human history,
to the twenty nineteen musical adaptation of Cats, which traumatize
viewers with the image of Judy Dench covered in cgi fur.
Not all these movies were critically panned. Some, like Doctor
Doolittle nineteen sixty seven and The Magnificent Amberson's, earned Oscar nominations,

(01:27):
while others eventually developed cult followings. Dan Ackroyd to nineteen
ninety one Nothing But Trouble, a horror comedy about a
one hundred six year old judge who sends traffic violators
down a lethal guillotine roller coaster, cost Warner Brothers forty
five million dollars and Akroyd his nascent directing career. Last month,
it played to an appreciative, sold out audience in Prince

(01:49):
Charles Cinema in London. The films in Roby's study are
united by their adherence to two criteria, genuinely atrocious commercial
outcomes and shoots that were epic or crackers or in
some way freshly entertaining to recount. Roby is drawn to
the dramatic stakes of a multimillion dollar disaster and relishes
in the gory details of ballooning budgets and creative clashes.

(02:11):
He writes exuberantly about sheep on the set of Doctor Doolittle,
forcing retakes by urinating on the star, about Dune's enormous
blue screen, burning down, about Ackroyd directing nothing but trouble
while in costume is a giant baby. These movies suffer
from an array of videosyncratic stumbling blocks, but certain themes emerge.

(02:31):
Read back to back, these twenty six accounts of failure
can teach us about success. Many of the productions were
hamstrung by bullying. Box office poison brims with tales of
eaglemaniacal actors and erratic directors derailing their own projects. Rex Harrison,
who was cast as the lead of the musical Doctor
Doolittle despite his narrow vocal range, banned the rest of

(02:53):
the cast from singing in his presence, sabotaging the quality
of the finished product. A cameraman on the nineteen twenty
nine romance Queen Kelly recalled that the director Eric von
Stroenheim used to fire me four times a day, part
of a pattern of behavior that led to von Stroenheim
being fired and a chaotic merry go round of directors
trying in vain to salvage the film. The equally damaging

(03:17):
flip side of a dictatorial directing style is a second
guessing one. Again and again we see studios and directors
overreacting to early criticism. Fox Office Poison is full of
nightmarish previews, audiences laughing at the wrong jokes, fleeing the theater,
or even suing the studio for distress. But executives might
have considered holding their nerve and waiting to see if

(03:40):
the first crowd was truly representative. Instead, we see them
compounding the problem with panicky last minute tinkering. And GM
responded to the preview of Todd Browning's Freaks by resting
control away from the director and whittling down the runtime,
cutting the emotional payoff in the process. Nor was it
helpful when Warner Brothers as to director Joe Wright to

(04:01):
refashion his tween Peter Pan spinoff Pan, which had already
wrapped into something suitable for six and seven year olds.
Overdue market research has suggested that tweens were not interested
in Peter Pan and Tom Hooper's attempt to foist a
new version of Cats on cinemas that were already showing it,
The equivalent of handing in your homework then trying to

(04:21):
get mistakes scrubbed off during the marking process, only succeeded
in communicating a lack of confidence. The most recurrent pitfall, though,
is bad timing. Box office poison is a catalog of
art that was behind its time, ahead of its time,
or just wrong for its time. Some films debuted into
an environment dominated by their competitors. William Friedkin's Sorcerer had

(04:44):
the bad luck of opening in June nineteen seventy seven,
a month after Star Wars, when cinemas around the country
were crossing out every other release with thick black markers.
Roby writes, some directors ignored technological advances and wound up
with movies that were dated by the time they came out.
Eric von Stronheim knew that his rivals were working on talkies,

(05:06):
but he and his producers assumed that sound was just
a passing fad. The extent of their misjudgment was epic.
Roby Wrights and their silent drama Queen Kelly suffered a
near total loss at the box office. Stroheim's directing career
never recovered. He spent his later years in Hollywood playing
Nazis in World War Two dramas. Other flops suffered from

(05:28):
the opposite problem. Freaks, which stars can join twins, a
bearded lady and siblings with dwarfism as circus performers, was
met with Boycott's and Booze in nineteen thirty two. Today,
Freaks is celebrated for recognizing the humanity of its central characters,
and as one of the only American feature films with
a majority disabled cast, has entered the disability canon. A

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few years later, George Cooker's nineteen thirty five screwball comedy
Sylvia Scarlett delivered a surprisingly modern treatment of gender an
cross dressing as part of a convoluted scheme to help
her father escape his gambling debts. Catherine Hepburn, Sylvia disguises
herself as a boy Sylvester, chopping off her long hair,
donning trousers, and provoking a queer feeling in the men

(06:15):
she encounters. Early viewers registered their repugnance at Hepburn's lewed portrayal.
Sylvia Scarlett was condemned by the Legion of Decency and
grows less than half its budget, earning hepburn a short
lived reputation as box office poison. A hazard of Hollywood's
years long development timelines is that national mood can change

(06:36):
between a film's conception and its release. Several of the
movies here were victims of a shift in political climate.
Orson Wells's The Magnificent Ambersins came out in nineteen forty two,
a few months after Pearl Harper was attacked, a moment
when middle class audiences, craving escapism, had little patience for
a melodrama about the fortunes of a cattish Midwestern air

(06:58):
Doctor Doolittle, a light hearted musical about a Victorian veterinarian
who can communicate with animals, had been in the works
for several years. By the time it was released. In
nineteen sixty seven, the US was sending troops to Vietnam,
Campuses were roiled by protest, and a cinema of restlessness
and alienation was knocking at the door. A thriller called TikTok,

(07:19):
about terrorist bombings in La was canceled after nine to eleven.
A designation of flop may itself become a relic of
its time. Roby predicts that Cats may be the last
truly public catastrophe in cinema history. Today, if studios suspect
a movie won't turn out, they can quietly release it
on streaming services, which Roby calls a convenient burial plot

(07:42):
for their most embarrassing product. Box Office Poison is a
fitting elegy to the era of the flop, and a
reminder to us all to avoid bullying our colleagues, to
stick with our gut, and to hope we don't get
scooped