by John Compton.
I am fascinated by cinematic disasters, and I know I’m not alone. I’m not talking about disaster movies such as The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno and Independence Day (the 1996 sci-fi action thriller and not the 1983 indie drama.) I’m talking about disasters in terms of ill-fated productions, bad box office reception and scathing reviews—or any combination thereof. Of course, there is no shortage of books, articles, blogs and other sources on topics such as the “Biggest Box Office Flops of All Time” and “The Top 100 Worst Movies.” There is nothing wrong with things like that. I certainly enjoy looking them over and even find myself getting combative about the choices even though I know it’s nothing to get all worked up about. (Okay, I admit I’ve also created such lists from time to time.) My focus, however, is on “Noble Failures” in the movies—good or great films that either have been or still are the subject of critical and popular contempt.
As the term “Noble Failures” suggests, there is among some movie watchers (yes, myself included) a certain romantic interest in stories of highly talented filmmakers struggling to realize ambitious projects against great odds. I’m going to borrow a phrase from the decidedly unambitious sci-fi gem This Island Earth to describe this type of filmmaker—“Faraway Visionary.” In a cinematic context, this term may evoke images as varied as the mad-eyed expressionist; the bearded New Hollywood maverick; the sleek, almost creepily affable yet uncompromising tech whiz; and last but not least— the diminutive, beret-topped Warner Brothers cartoon shouting through an oversized megaphone.
Often because of the legendary status of a director, screenwriter, actor, or other personnel, a movie that was originally an artistic and/or box office failure attains a more elevated reputation later. One of the most popular examples is the 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune. The “Faraway Visionary” in this case is David Lynch, who before Dune established his reputation as one of the most innovative and unsettling new talents in the industry. A sculptor and painter as well as a filmmaker, Lynch may be more accurately described not so much as “Faraway” as “Far Within” because of his fascination with what goes on in our heads—sometimes literally. His early short films such as The Alphabet and The Grandmother along with his debut feature Eraserhead show his uncanny ability to bring the texture of nightmares to the screen. They also exhibit his skills in eerie sound mixing and finding just the right kind of music to get your subconscious thrumming.
In some ways, these credentials alone may have been compelling reasons to deem Lynch ideal for Dune. The book does have a lot do with what goes on way down deep inside ourselves even if it is a story set in outer space. The spice mélange that the various dynastic houses are fighting over in the novel can turn people into prophets and adepts of inner as well as outer worlds. There are all kinds of weird locales and bizarre characters. It even has giant quasi-intelligent worms. Lynch had already dealt quite admirably with weird locales, bizarre characters, and even worms on a smaller scale before. At the same time, Dino and Raffaella De Laurentiis, the father-daughter producing team of Dune, could rely on Lynch’s earnestness as well as his mainstream cred from the multiple Oscar-nominated The Elephant Man.
Lynch’s earnestness introduces one of the more interesting things about the history of Dune on film—how the cinematic treatment of the novel went from one sort of surrealism to another.In the 1970s, Mexican filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, best known for the head movie sensation El Topo, made an attempt to put Dune on the big screen. That project was to star Orson Welles as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and no less a figure than Salvador Dalì as the Padashah Emperor Shaddam IV. Plot alterations from the novel were to include an incestuous relationship between Paul Atreides and his mother Lady Jessica, and the whole thing was basically supposed to be a Dionysian space romp. Jodorowsky’s Dune would have been of an altogether different strangeness than the faithful, if ultimately truncated, Lynch version ended up being. The De Laurentiis team and the executives at Universal did not have to fear that kind of trippy head-movie bizarro-ness from Lynch, whose brand of offbeat art has never been psychedelic.
Even though Lynch had never been a science fiction fan, let alone a fan of Herbert’s novel, he still tried—from the evidence of the film—to be faithful to the source material while he added a few of his own touches. The “touch” that stays most in my memory is the “heart plug” the Baron Harkonnen removes from one of his male slaves so he can drink the boy’s blood. That scene is pretty grotesque, but in general Lynch’s version is more subtly surreal than Jodorowsky’s would have been. I am thinking mostly of the way the movie sounds. Even though Dune had a state-of-the-art sound crew working on a space opera in the immediate post-Star Wars era, you can still faintly hear the dreamlike eeriness of Lynch’s earlier works in it—an almost organically humming machine sound here, a weird industrial creak there. The look of the film, which was shot by The Elephant Man cinematographer Freddie Francis and is Lynch’s first color feature, has especially in the interior scenes some of the organo-industrial texture of Lynch’s earlier work.
Needless to say, Dune’s reception was, well, disastrous. The poor box office for this movie with a budget of over forty million dollars put it in the financial ranks of the 1963 Burton-Taylor Cleopatra, and the hostility of critics was nearly unanimous. (The only notable exception I can think of was Harlan Ellison, who much preferred it to the Star Wars trilogy.) While I like the film, I cannot fault the reasoning behind much of the criticism. The desperate scramble by the editing team to get the movie from an approximately eight-hour to a two hour length meant severely chopping a massive, epic story with more twists and turns than a sandworm could reasonably be expected to manage in its life cycle. This of course led to a great deal of confusion about what was going on, who was who, and why there were so many instances of voiceover-with-concerned-facial-expression. The voiceover itself is a big problem. While Virginia Madsen as the storyteller Princess Irulan has a pleasant voice, the narration is vacuous and clearly meant simply as a desperate means of getting around the massive amounts of material left on the cutting room floor. “Chani and Paul’s love…grew,” is a particularly shy-making example.
Much of the acting isn’t exactly terrific either—Kenneth MacMillan’s constantly screaming Baron Harkonnen is particularly bad. We get it—the Baron is incredibly decadent and loud. (Compare him to Ian McNeice’s quieter and much more effectively nasty Baron in the 2000 Sci-Fi channel production.) Kyle MacLachlan, while a generally good actor and a great fit in later Lynch projects, remains always a little too gawky and affable for the apocalyptic Messiah-Destroyer Paul Atreides. Sean Young as Chani appears even more withdrawn than she did as the replicant Rachel in Blade Runner. Still, acting was not a strong suit of megahits like The Poseidon Adventure and Star Wars either, so that might not account for much of Dune’s poor reception. Yet you could argue that the hefty source material and screenplaydemanded a little more from Dune’s cast than did the stories and dialogue for those other examples.
Dune’s heft was an enormous challenge for those attempting to adapt it to the screen not only because of the book’s length and intricate plotting but also because of its status as probably the pre-eminent science fiction novel in the two decades between its publication and the release of the 1984 film. The novel had (and certainly still has) a cult following—people devoted to the novel itself and also to its sequels, commentaries, concordances, and whatever else may be out there. It also has crossover appeal for people who are not into science fiction (such as myself) but who enjoy the intrigue, the exotic characters, and the (often amusingly ham-handed) commentary on religion, eco-politics, drugs, and so on.
Any adaptation was bound to disappoint at least a few of the novel’s fans. (In fact, I wonder if Jodorowsky’s wacky head-trip approach may have been motivated in part by a desire to be so far out as to render useless any criticism about the faithlessness of his aborted adaptation.) If Dune had been made as a two-part film or as a trilogy, and there were no horrible narrative lacunae as there were in the theatrical release, purists would still gripe about the inevitable cuts and changes that would take place. There would still be a Paul who looked too old, heart plugs, and probably little or no discussion of the Orange Catholic Bible. Even the enormously successful Peter Jackson adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, justly split into three parts, had its highly vocal detractors for its plot and character deviations. I’m sure fans of all the other novels now being segmented into multiple movie adaptations (Harry Potter and the Wraiths of Pevensea: Book I, Part I) have their complaints about omissions and distortions as well. Still, squeezing Herbert’s sprawling, mind-bending saga into two hours and twenty minutes was a sure way to alienate not only the novel’s devotees but also those who would have liked a tour of that universe but who felt shut out by disconnected snippets of a labyrinthine story.
Dune’s rehabilitation has been thorough. Unlike other disasters from the same era such as 1941 (actually pretty darn good)and Howard the Duck (which has a sort of masochistic cult following), Dune no longer resides in the Moviegoers’ Hall of Shame (location to be announced). People might say it’s stupid and/or awful on IMDB comment threads and so forth, and it certainly does not have a widespread reputation as a masterwork. But when people watch it now, even if they make fun of it, they can enjoy it on some level that is not entirely ironic. It’s not a terrible rite of passage to be endured, like Gigli,or “so bad it’s hilarious,” like Xanadu. It’s a beloved mess—a noble failure.
Despite the drippy narration, desperate editing and bad acting among some of the cast, Dune has an awful lot of visual and aural grandeur. Many of the sights and sounds are truly otherworldly—the Guild Navigator—a bit reminiscent of the mutant baby in Eraserhead—in its hissing and weirdly Victorian-looking fish tank; the swaying and flowing sandworms; Brad Dourif. Some of the performances shine through also, despite how severely character development was sacrificed for brevity. Highlights are Sian Phillips as a chilling Reverend Mother Helen Gaius Mohiam and Max von Sydow as a jaunty Dr. Liet Kynes. The cinematography by Freddie Francis along with the production design by Anthony Masters and company evoke the temperatures, various levels of moisture and even odors (both pleasant and unpleasant) of the various settings.
The rise in prestige for Dune is in part a result of Lynch’s rise to international cult status following Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. A lot of this is plain old auteurism. Since he generally makes good or great films, this one must be by association—that kind of thing. Alfred Hitchcock got a lot of leeway for just being Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks for being Howard Hawks, and so on. With Dune, however, even many Lynch enthusiasts were not immediately won over upon its initial release. Lynch had to become a superstarfor a lot of people even to bother seeing Dune on videocassette, DVD, Blu-Ray, streaming, cortical implant and beyond. I am sure some of those people convinced themselves they liked the movie because of its scenarist and director, but others (like me) checked it out because it is a David Lynch film but discovered a rich, deeply flawed, yet exhilarating movie.
Like David Lynch, John Boorman is an explorer of what makes us tick within, but while Lynch gives us the creeps with his dreamlike visions of sexual anxiety, Boorman tries to get us to go out to the woods with him, choose our spirit animals, kill those spirit animals, eat them and then transform into them. Okay, that was over the top, and Boorman has done subtle and under-the-top or just-to-the-top work as well (such as the crime thriller Point Blank and the semi-autobiographical tale of the Blitz Hope and Glory). Still, Boorman is the quintessence of the Faraway Visionary. He has reached terrific heights, such as the grueling masterpiece Deliverance, and he has fallen to epic lows, such as the pretentious phallus opera Zardoz. Another, more interesting failure, however, was his sequel to the 1973 megahit The Exorcist called Exorcist II: The Heretic.
Interestingly, Boorman was offered the job of directing the first Exorcist by John Calley of Warner Brothers. Even more interestingly, Boorman turned it down specifically because he resented the story, which he thought was just a nasty, sadistic yarn about torturing a little girl. I know little about how he landed the job for the second movie, but the contrasts between the first and the second could not be greater. The Exorcist started out as a novel by the devout Catholic screenwriter, playwright and novelist William Peter Blatty, who wrote the screenplay and produced the film as well. The director, William Friedkin, though Jewish and not a religious man, struck up a weird spiritual bond with Blatty. Both men later talked about the film as if it were some kind of sacred mission to dramatize the struggle between good and evil. While I love The Exorcist and still find it scary, I think it’s a little silly to see anything deep going on in it (or in the novel, for that matter), and many critics writing at the time thought so too, even some who praised it. But to the point—The Exorcist is a brutal and desperately earnest tale of the demonic violation of an innocent girl and how only the Catholic faith can save her. Exorcist II: The Heretic is a bizarre and often playful story of psychic interconnectedness, the spirits of nature, hive minds and one horny priest.
That last item in my list does actually have some relevance—specifically, the widely divergent views of sexuality in the two films. In the first, we see in what is justifiably the most notorious scene, a possessed 12-year-old girl (Linda Blair voiced by Mercedes McCambridge) stabbing at her own genitals with a crucifix. In the second, when the Regan-Pazuzu-succubus (Blair again) tries to seduce Father Lamont (Richard Burton) and nearly succeeds, it’s supposed to be evil and everything, but it comes across as a what-the-hell, let’s have a bit of fun moment anyway. Some critics of The Exorcist decried what they saw as a reactionary view of female sexuality. Boorman has a strong appreciation for formidably sexual women (Helen Mirren’s Morgana in Excalibur being the finest—and I mean finest—example), and he shows it in the sequel.
As John Boorman later indicated, Exorcist II was probably just asking too much of its audience. While I would suspect Boorman meant this in a bit of a snotty way, it is true that Exorcist II is a completely different kind of movie from The Exorcist, and many saw and still see this as something of a betrayal. Some unsuccessful sequels are unsuccessful simply because audiences consider them weaker than their originals and/or others in the series. The major complaint about The Godfather: Part III is not that it’s not like a Godfather movie at all but rather that it’s a pale shadow of the other two. Alien 3 sucks not because it goes too far afield from Alien and Aliens but because it’s just a dreary, pointless outgrowth of them. (But at least it’s preferable to Alien Resurrection.) Exorcist II has none of the same tone or purpose of The Exorcist. People wanted to wet their pants with fright again, and instead most of them were either bored or ironically laughing (especially at Richard Burton). While it is true that there are some, including myself, who like both movies, those who appreciate Exorcist II are largely those who disliked what they saw as the heavy-handed cruelty of the first one.
Considering John Boorman’s hatred of Blatty’s novel and of the first movie, it might be interesting to speculate as to what degree his movie was a repudiation of The Exorcist. Hell, why did he direct a sequel in the first place? If it was to repudiate the original, how vindictive is this guy? I really don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but looking at Exorcist II independently and evaluating it just as The Heretic for a moment, it doesn’t have an angry or finger-wagging aesthetic. It’s wild, feverish and silly. While the narrative is muddled, and the characters are not particularly interesting, the sound and visuals, like those of Dune, have a pleasantly hypnotic pull. The insect sound and imagery is particularly effective, especially the locusts in flight. The cinematography by William A. Fraker features a lot of dreamlike auras around people and objects without drowning you in dreaminess, and the scenes in faraway lands look like scenes on faraway worlds. If The Heretic were just an angry movie, it probably wouldn’t be so lovingly goofy. (Not to suggest there’s anything wrong with angry movies.)
Unlike Dune, Exorcist II: The Heretic has never enjoyed a large-scale belated appreciation. The general consensus remains that the film is nothing short of abysmal. If essentially the same movie came out but with Regan McNeil and some of the other leftover characters replaced and the title simply The Heretic, the film may have done a little better both in 1977 and in the years since. It could very well have been a cult hit. While I am sure sometimes, somewhere indie theaters have midnight showings of it where people have a good time, it has more of a reputation of so-bad-it’s-bad rather than so-bad-it’s-good.
John Boorman does not have the star status that David Lynch has. Boorman is a well-known and respected filmmaker among critics and those generally interested in film. Even when they snicker at the excesses in his work, they show some respect for his talent. (This is especially true of Excalibur, a glorious romp through Arthuriana and surely in the record books for the most epic yelling in movie history.) Boorman does not, however, have a devoted following the way Lynch does. This is no reflection on Boorman or the quality of his work but just the way it is. (He may even like it that way. I think he’s pretty reclusive.) Still, if he did have such a following, Exorcist II might have had a different fate, maybe not when it was released but in the years since.
Looking back, some of the most influential and interesting films have been cinematic disasters. Why? In part, these films fascinate us because stories about ambitious projects falling apart or nearly falling apart have always been entertaining. Another reason is that many people see the misfortunes of the highly ambitious as the just deserts of the swell-headed. Sometimes filmmakers and others with a specific interest in the movies look at the industry’s disasters and wonder what they would have done differently to realize the projects better and also try to emulate what those films got “right.”
One of the most emulated is the ur-giant-cinematic-disaster: D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, with its four interweaving stories set in different times and places. This film is perhaps the most prestigious example of a cinematic failure. Its complex structure, which jumps back and forth among ancient Babylon, Christ’s passion, the St. Bartholomew Day Massacre, and a contemporary (as of 1916) American city slum, caused confusion and anger in many moviegoers and critics when it was released. It also ruined Griffith financially. But its achievements in “film grammar” (a term I don’t like, but I guess it works) inspired other filmmakers to use what they thought worked well in the film for their own purposes. One eminent example of a filmmaker inspired by Intolerance was the Soviet propagandist Sergei Eisenstein. Intolerance has enough fantastic examples of parallel editing, thematic color scheming (one tint per story), montage, tracking shots, dolly shots and pretty much everything else you can imagine to function as a textbook for anyone interested in the movies. This may be a bit of a stretch, but you can see its influence in movies such as Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, with its different color schemes for each story thread; The Lord of the Rings films, especially the Battle of Pelennor in The Return of the King with its elephants (okay, oliphaunts) and siege towers; and Babel, with its interconnected stories on a common abstract theme.
Noble failures like Intolerance, Dune, Exorcist II: The Heretic, and many othersinspire creative experimentation with the tools of filmmaking because they are so full of interesting tricks of the trade, however disconnected these may be in an individual film. They inspire wonder in critics and enthusiasts not simply because of stories of financial ruin and dashed egos but because their brilliant moments make us more alive to the possibilities of the medium. The cinematic disasters I’ve been calling noble failures serve as challenging technical and artistic reference sources for filmmakers and cinemaphiles. I say challenging not only because some of these films may be hard to watch but because others in the business may look at them and wonder how they can use some of the same techniques with a more successful overall result. These disasters are like science experiments gone wrong, and certain enterprising types borrow some of the equipment and conduct daring tests of their own. Some of these tests also fail, and some lead to greatness.
What of the future of cinematic disasters? With the ever-increasing popularity of high-prestige television and online series such as Game of Thrones and House of Cards, movies are not the hottest thing right now. Most pop cultural conversations I overhear are about what people are watching on the small screen or on devices such as smartphones and iPads. Maybe these series are changing cinema in profound and even wonderful ways. But in the meantime, the latest movie I can think of that critics and other movie aficionados have been describing as a grand and misunderstood cinematic failure is Darren Aronofsky’s Noah. I have not yet seen Noah, so I cannot speak as to its merits or demerits, but it seems almost quaint when critics and movie aficionados talk about it as a glorious big screen folly.
But, as in any other medium, technology and pop cultural interests change, and the rules of the business change with it (and vice versa). The advent of the studio system was certainly a big change from the nickelodeon days, and talkies made many wonder if the whole system would collapse (as depicted hilariously in Singin’ in the Rain, the greatest movie musical ever made). Advances in color such as Technicolor drastically changed the industry and audience expectations as well. Major historical developments such as the 1948 antitrust decision by the U.S. Supreme Court separating studios from theater chains and the rise of television worldwide in the 1950s and 60s caused many to wonder if cinema would die. But then came CinemaScope, VistaVision and other widescreen technologies to tempt television viewers back to the movie theaters. After World War II and especially in the late 1950s were the various New Waves: French, Japanese, Italian and so on. These in turn inspired the American New Wave, or New Hollywood, populated largely by film school graduates and—yes—people who got started or at least got successful in television (such as Robert Altman). In more recent years, there have been revolutionary developments in computer generated imagery, home viewing, and the widespread availability of all kinds of rare and exotic cinema from around the world through the internet.
I mention all this not to be pedantic or to oversimplify movie history. I just wanted to avoid giving the impression that “Cinema Is Dead” or that we will never see any more fascinating disasters. Cinema continues to change, and what constitutes a noble failure changes along with it. Intolerance was a disaster in part because it represents a significant break from older, more linear forms of storytelling in a medium that at the time was not even forty years old (that is, if you go all the way back to the work of Eadweard Muybridge and others in the late 1870s). Exorcist II: The Heretic failed because it was an artistically ambitious sequel that bore no real relation to its hugely popular predecessor. Dune was a commercial and critical flop because it was a dark, creepy post-Star Wars space opera tortured into a running length far too short for its scope. But if in 1916 four interweaving stories was “too much” for a large audience, narrative structures like this are common now and have been for decades (The Godfather: Part II, Pulp Fiction). If in 1977 it would alienate a large audience by creating a sequel that differs a great deal from the original, I would be less than honest if I said this is radically different now. I believe, however, that with the contemporary interest in reboots (such as the new Star Trek films), it is not too far-fetched to believe this can change. If in 1984 you had to squeeze a huge epic into two hours and twenty minutes, you can now split giant speculative fiction novels into multiple parts (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the upcoming Allegiant). Somewhere among the cinematic disasters of today is a break from an aesthetic, narrative, technical and/or business “rule” established perhaps ten or twenty years ago, and that transgression will capture someone’s imagination and lead to further experimentation and innovation. So we should look for those noble failures, watch and learn from them. As in life, some of cinema’s most painful lessons are the most enlightening.